by Irene Dorang, Special to Realty/Builder Connection
Want to add thousands of dollars to your real estate income next year?
And add loyal clients to that bank vault of contacts you need for long term success? Then follow these tips. (After eight years of running a now-thriving real estate business, I honestly think I would have at least $100,000 more in the bank if I had read a list like this earlier on.)
New agents, this goes double for you.
Here they are:
Stay in touch with past clients.
I can’t believe how often I ask people who their real estate agent was when they bought or sold their house, and they can’t remember — even when they liked that person enough to use them again! (Yes, that clinking noise you hear is the sound of money down the toilet.)
Past clients are the foundation of any successful real estate business. Contact your current and past clients at least once a month.
Automate your marketing.
Unless you have an assistant, at some point you’re going to be too busy to get your marketing out the door. Plus, your time is too valuable (or will be too valuable) to spend doing everything it takes to churn out quality marketing consistently.
Be yourself.
The best advice I ever got in my real estate career was, simply, “If you can’t be yourself in this business, hang it up.”
Get your own domain name.
It doesn’t matter if you think you’re not ready for a website, or even if you’re not techie at all. Just do this: Go to Godaddy, search for your first and last name with .com after the end, and buy it if it’s available.
Get your own blog
At least 70 percent of the agents I talk to either don’t have a website, hate their website or are re-doing their website (and spending plenty in the process.) But these days it’s easy to be online, even if you have no web experience. Get your own real estate blog - Active Rain is real estate-focused and is a great place to start for free.
Learn basic copywriting.
Real estate is actually a marketing business but 90 percent of us jump in without ever having learned how to make someone want to buy something!
Here’s a cheat sheet: It’s about them, not you. Talk about benefits, not features. People buy on emotion first, then justify with logic. (Thus, starting a home description with “$2,000 carpet credit”, like I just read yesterday, is a bad idea.)
Ask for a referral at the end of your voice mail greeting.
Just say, “And if you were referred to me by friend or family member, please let me know who that was so that I can tell them ‘thank you’.” This reminds people that you expect and appreciate referrals.
Ask for referrals, period.
No matter how much people love you, sometimes they will forget to refer you unless they’re reminded. And, no matter how badly you botch the asking, they’re more likely to refer you afterwards.
Get the referral spiel down.
If asking for referrals feels awkward, you’ll subconsciously try to avoid it. But by not asking you’re guaranteed to lose out on thousands of dollars in future business.
Beware of time-wasters.
If you work in a social office, this can be a challenge. But the next time someone pauses at your office door in a well-meaning attempt to talk about their Schnauzer’s last toenail operation (or worse, to commiserate with you about how real estate sucks), remember that there are always more of them than there are of you.
Don’t ask “How much can you afford?”
Ask, “What price range would like to stay within?”
Hang in there.
At the end of my fifth year of real estate (and having done pretty well during the third and fourth years), pretty much all it took for me to burst into tears was for someone to say something incredibly poignant along the lines of, for example, ”Hi Irene, how are you?”
I went five straight months without a paycheck — working like a horse the whole time — and by the end I seriously was wondering if the jig was up. Was this going to be, in hindsight, the part in the story when I would say “And that’s when I got out of real estate?”
I went from November through March without a paycheck. But by December I had made twice what I made the year before.
Often we’re tempted to give up when we’re 80 percent of the way to reaching our goal. And nearly always, the last 20 percent of your effort will produce 80% of your results.
So, hang in there.
— Irene Dorang is an author and lecturer on real estate. Her website is /www.toolsforrealestate.com.