In This Issue...

• Word From a Champion - A Gift For You!
• Successful Approach to Converting FSBO's - Like Crazy!
• Developing Your Referral Strategy - To Win!
• Controlling the Risk Versus Reward of Hiring - Like A Champion!

Words From a Champion - A Gift For You!

The change in the marketplace has been weighing on my heart and my mind for most of the year. As I travel and work with agents and companies in live events, I hear from an ever increasing number of agents of how hard it is and their frustration level.

Because I really care about the real estate agents, the companies, and the real estate industry, it saddens me to see so many agents who are clearly on their way out of the business. Many who could be successful in the industry, but most have not gotten the right education, training, and coaching. In short, the vast majority of agents don’t have the skills to compete successfully in a changed marketplace.

Looking at my own coaching clients, I see that over 80% of them are currently having their best year ever. They have all been challenged by the marketplace shift this year but have seized it as an opportunity to increase their market share to do more transactions than ever before. When I look at the difference between them and other agents, one thing leaps out at me - the skills to compete in the new marketplace are missing.

For example, I have one client on the west coast where his marketplace is down 44% in production. The other top ten agents in his marketplace are down an average of 14%, while his production is up 52%! The secret is contained in his skills and regular usage of his sales, prospecting, lead follow up, presentation, and closing skills to name a few.

I have been thinking for weeks on what I can do to help struggling agents. How can I help them survive and even thrive in this changing landscape? The truth is, at Real Estate Champions, we are having our best year in the history of the company. More agents and companies are seeking our help because they know what we teach and coach really works in any marketplace. Because of that success and desire to help you and others, I am doing something that I'd never thought I would do. When I approached my team about this idea, they wanted me to see a doctor to make sure I had not lost my mind. My goal and desire is to support you & your team's attainment of success.

To your achievement of success in life also,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

P.S. Click here to take advantage of my one time only "No-Brainer" offer.

"What Would Owning a Master Coach's Blueprint Help Your Team Become?"

The Champion Real Estate Team™

Sequels to movies usually stink! Don't you agree?

They hardly ever live up to the original in the series. Book sequels however, are often better than the original. It seems that authors tend to evolve in their ability to convey their strategies, ideas, and concepts such that the reader tends to benefit more from each book in a series.

"This Book Takes You to the
Next Level of Success"

Well, today I'm proud to announce The Champion Real Estate Team™. It's the follow-up sequel to my greatest work to-date, The Champion Real Estate Agent™.

The first in the Champion Book Series™ laid the ground work of the advanced real estate agent tactics that 20+ years of blood, sweat, and tears produced.

"Packed with How-to's, Systems, Strategies...
That Will Transform Your Business"

The Champion Real Estate Team™ takes you to the next level in Real Estate Success - the one I believe (as well as many other Real Estate Experts) is the key to a successful future if you're in Real Estate Sales... the Real Estate Team!

This book is really a step-by-step blueprint of how to establish a well run team. It is packed with how-to's, systems, strategies, processes, and ideas for implementation that will transform your business. Having personally established one of the first multi-assistant teams in my region, I have seen the evolution of real estate teams for over fifteen years. My experience in applying these strategies in the initial stages of my business, along with the hundreds of other agents' team practices I have coached in the last nearly ten years, has created this book.

Come Join Me for a
Personal Book Tour Here

 

To your achievement of the next level of success in life,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

P.S. The book will be in-stock and shipping next week!

Successful Approach to Converting FSBO's - Like Crazy!

Plan to take a patient approach to FSBOs. Realize that there is nothing you can do or say – short of offering to give your services away – that will rush the owners’ decision to abandon the idea of selling their own home. Basically, you’re playing a waiting game that you can’t win in a hurry, but that you can loose, quickly, if you’re pushy or confrontational.

Agents who are filled with hyperbole about themselves and their service, or who try to tell owners that FSBOs fail to sell themselves, take the wrong tack. Owners don’t want someone to make them feel like idiots for trying to sell on their own – even if they may be!

The best approach is to dial back your sales pitch and enhance your emphasis on service. Focus on helping the owners in their effort, always encouraging them and wishing their success.

If you work a large geographic area, expect to encounter a great many FSBOs. The easiest way to organize the opportunities is to track each home by the owners’ phone number. Owners will change their ads and their asking prices, but they’ll rarely change their phone numbers and so by filing each home under its phone number you’ll eliminate the risk of duplications.

I kept a lead sheet for each FSBO prospect to which I attached clippings of all ads the owner had run. Whenever possible, I called the sellers and talked with them about their ads, making suggestions regarding how they might improve effectiveness. Then I’d watch for revisions. When they implemented changes I’d suggested, the update indicated that I had built a level of trust with the prospect and that the likelihood of an interview was beginning to skyrocket.

In targeting FSBOs for conversion, use the following selection criteria:

• Clear motivation to sell
• A short selling time frame
• A specific place they need to be by a certain date
• The capacity to sell at fair market value with a commission
• A high-demand home in a high-demand neighborhood
• Owners who don’t have a best friend, or relative that is a real estate agent

The best approach is to create a Top 10, Top 20, or even Top 30 list. If you try to work much beyond 30 FSBOs service becomes a very difficult proposition. If you pursue the best 30 FSBOS, knowing that 80% – or 24 of the 30 ­– are likely to list in the next 60 days, then you have 24 solid prospects, or about 12 a month.

If you provide solid advice, counsel, service, and care, you can get half of those 12 to interview with you. Depending on your skill in the interview, you could convert anywhere from two to five into listings each month. Think about it: A business source that generates five listings a month is a great solid source of business. And even if it delivers only two a month it leads to 24 listings a year. Not bad!

Defining your territory

Confine your efforts to a concise geographic area that allows you to stop by the FSBOs and see the owners as regularly as once every two weeks if appropriate. When it comes time for them to convert to an agent listing, they’ll find it harder to reject you or choose not to interview you if they have met and know you personally.

Remember, all you’re trying to do is gain a commitment that if and when the owners decide to turn the job of selling their home over to an agent, that they will interview you for the job. That’s it!

Making initial contact with owners of FSBO homes is the toughest step for most agents, so I recommend that you make calls just as soon as you see a FSBO come onto the market. I’ve had coaching clients who would buy the Sunday paper on Saturday afternoon just to get the FSBO classifieds so they could call owners of new listings to have a professional conversation before the onslaught of calls from other agents began to come through.

By being the first to place a call over the weekend, before other agents made their calls on the next workday, my clients found owners more open to dialogue. They also found it easier to distinguish themselves when they were the first to get through, rather than after 50 other agents had placed calls.

Another benefit to calling FSBO owners early on Saturday or Sunday is that you leave your afternoons free to drop into some FSBO open houses. Meeting owners face-to-face in their own homes presents an effective way to establish contact. The owners sure to be home, they’re expecting visitors, and they’re ready to make contact and discuss the sale of their home.

Due to the four to five week sales cycle involved in converting a FSBO to a listing, you can use mailers more effectively with FSBOS than you can when dealing with expired listings. By mailing helpful items once or twice a week, you give yourself a reason to make follow-up phone calls on a regular basis.

Then, after every face-to-face or phone contact, follow up with a hand-written thank you note. Remember, the owners are getting mail from many other real estate agents. One way to avoid the round file is to personalize your notes with hand-written exterior addresses.

Also, use your mailers to send useful information that the sellers might need.  Too often, agents act like adversaries of FSBO sellers. Take a different and better approach by helping them out.  Most have no idea what they really need to do in order to complete the sale. If they receive helpful advice from you every five days, for example, when it comes time to sign their home over to a listing agent they are more likely to think favorably of your interview invitation.

For example:

1. Send the owners a property disclosure form and information on disclosure laws, including how the law affects the value and sale of their home. Buyers can back out even at the last minute if they don’t handle this detail properly.

2. Send a sample purchase and sale contract and maybe a counter offer form, along with the explanation that nothing ever gets agreed upon in the first contract.

3. Send owners of older homes a lead-based paint disclosure form to give to the buyer if the home if appropriate.

4. Get your lender to prepare a financing sheet for the owners to give to the buyer.

5. Send numerous other items to service FSBO sellers and create a connection, including:

• Sample net revenue sheet
• Sample of a walk through form
• Updated market analysis of comparable properties
• Sample brochure or photos of the owners’ home
• Guest register for use at showings
• Lead tracking form to log information on people who call about the home
• A list of homes that would meet the owners’ needs if they are looking to purchase a new home in the area.
• Free report about selling their home.

Free reports are an effective device because they enable owners to educate themselves and increase their likelihood of success while simultaneously positioning you as the expert. By sending these reports you establish yourself as a strong resource that is there to help them succeed. Then, when they don’t, you’ll be there to pick up the pieces and list and sell their home.

As you prepare to send free reports, consider such titles as: “Selling your home yourself for the highest possible price” or “The seven mistakes most For Sale By Owners make that cost them thousands in their sales price.” 

As you work your high-priority FSBO homeowners, make phone or in-person contact at least twice a week. Use these communications to see how sales activity has been, whether a weekend open house is scheduled, whether they received your latest mailing, and whether they got the home sold.

For more information on how our coaching programs can help you grow your Real Estate Business, click here now.

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Developing Your Referral Strategy - To Win!

To develop referrals, start with a referral mindset.

* A referral mindset exists when every prospecting, marketing, and customer service action is accompanied by the realization that the contact could lead not only to new business, but also to positive word-of-mouth and the recommendation of your service to others.

* A referral mindset exists when you create, believe in, and implement strategies that purposefully generate referrals as a regular part of your business development activities.

* When you have a referral mindset, you know that prospecting is a key route to referral success. In the same way (and often at the same time) that you prospect for client leads you need to prospect for referrals.

Generating referrals is among the easiest, most cost-effective ways to gain new business leads, but success doesn’t happen overnight. Even your platinum-level referral sources need to be constantly contacted and reminded to send business your direction.

Defining the type of referrals you seek

Before you launch a referral-generating effort, know what you’re looking for. In a sentence, you need to be able to focus your referral sources on an idea of what your ideal real estate prospect looks like. Include the following information:

* Moments that people become great prospects. Help your referral sources notice the signs that indicate friends are in the “thinking about moving” stage. This is the point at which you most want to enter the game, before the transaction is already underway. Universal signs to watch for include:  Pregnancy, recent adoption, promotion, transfer, trouble with aging parents, a recent empty nest, or trouble in a marriage or relationship.

Left to their own good intentions, people will call to tip you off about people they’ve just learned are in the buying or selling process. By the time that a mutual friend hears that people are actively looking to buy or in the mindst of selling, it’s too late. By then, the prospects probably already have an agent relationship.

* Your interest in helping people to sell their homes. The standard consumer view of real estate agents is that they put people into their cars, drive them around, and sell them houses. If you don’t expand this initial impression, most of your referrals will be for people seeking to buy rather than sell homes. Buyers are great clients and important sources of revenue, but the best agents build their businesses through listings. By cultivating referrals for those thinking about selling their homes you’ll put your business on a faster growth track.

* Your real estate niche. If you’re particularly effective serving a specific niche of real estate clients like investors, seniors, younger-generation buyers, or first-time buyers, let people know. Likewise, if you want to gain more of a certain kind of buyer, you need to inform your referral sources about your expertise in the desired segment and what prospects in that area look like.

When communicating your market niche interests, start by sharing your overall competitive market advantage and inviting all referrals. Then explain how you’ve developed a particular niche market expertise that you want them to know about so that they’ll think of you when they learn that their contacts have interest in your specialty area.

Your point isn’t to get referral sources to screen leads for you. You still want them to recommend the name of anyone with interest to buy or sell property; the more the better.

In a really effective referral-development program, you might aim to achieve two referrals a year, on average, from each of your platinum-level sources, one a year from those in your gold group, and one every other year from those in the silver category. Referrals from sources at the bronze-level are too hard to project, but for all other categories, you need to give yourself an annual goal to aim at. In the beginning, you might just pluck your goal from thin air, but once you establish your first year expectations (or hopes), you’ll have a good benchmark against which to measure progress and set your aim in future years.

As you set goals and track progress, consider these tips:

*The number of referrals you aim to generate from platinum level sources should be double what you expect from gold-level sources, and your expectations from gold-level sources should be double what you expect from silver-level sources.

*Whenever you receive a referral, note whether the source is listed in your platinum, gold, silver, or bronze categories. This will help you track whether those in each category are performing at the projected levels. If not, you’ll know to enhance communications and referral-general efforts accordingly.

*As you qualify and work with referrals, note which of your database groups – platinum, gold, silver, and bronze – are delivering referrals that lead to business. If you notice that some categories are generating referrals that are dramatically more or less qualified than other categories, study your own communications to see how your messages to those in various groups may be contributing to good or weak leads.

For more help with referral strategies check out my book The Champion Real Estate Agent Book.

Controlling the Risk Versus Reward of Hiring - Like A Champion!

Too often, we examine the risk and make it too large.  We view the first hiring of an administrative assistant as a $30,000 per year expenditure.  This is especially true for your very first hire.  Your mind says, “Well, what if I don’t increase sales; what if I have an off year; what if the assistant doesn’t get it?”  These are natural thoughts, but in many cases, they are blown out of proportion.

While you might invest $30,000, or $40,000, or even $50,000 over the course of the year in pay, taxes, and benefits for an assistant, you aren’t taking that level of risk without some safety value.  If, six months after hiring your first or adding another administrative assistant, your production doesn’t increase or show signs of increasing, would you keep the employee?  For most business people, the answer would be NO.  A good business owner will not go much beyond a reasonable period of time to try a new technique, staff member, or lead generation system.  I believe that six months is ample time to know if something is working and producing a result.  With a staff member, it could be closer to ninety days. 

Your financial investment during that time period could be $7,500 to $15,000.  For most agents, the expense is around two commission checks to test the waters.  We invest two commission checks on hair-brained marketing gimmicks almost at will.  We are really trading their $10 to $20 per hour in pay for our potential to earn $300 to $1,000 per hour.  Can you invest greater time in success producing activities, even though you have to invest time in training?

With buyer’s agents, we have to evaluate difficulty.  The question is, if you don’t work with some of these buyer leads, can you invest your time to secure more seller leads?  Can you then convert those seller leads effectively enough to offset the buyer income reduction and turn a profit?  Do you have a choice because you might need to secure more listings to grow your business anyway?

I frequently coach agents to do the “old” Ben Franklin close when evaluating the risk and reward; to draw a line down the middle of the paper and put risk on one side and reward on the other.  Then just brainstorm each side.  I encourage them to write as much as they can as quickly as they can.  When you do this, don’t evaluate, score, or interpret what you put down . . . just write.  The time to evaluate is not at hand yet.  Once you have brainstormed it, then you will need to see the difference in the number of items on each side.  The shear volume is one factor to consider.  The quality of the items must also be evaluated.  Some of the risk items on your list will be small, but others will be more significant. 

I have had times when I personally did this exercise when the reward side presented a tremendous opportunity and upside.  There was a large volume difference of items on the reward side versus the risk side.  The problem is there was one item on the risk side that swayed my thinking.  It killed the option of moving forward.  Do this evaluation with the critical business decision you are facing.

I want to share with you a few benchmarks to evaluate in your business.  These are benchmarks that I have constructed through years of coaching agent to build teams.

The Rule of 30: Most agents reach the point of diminishing return at around thirty units in production.  They have difficulty increasing their production much more than that as a singular agent.  They might be able to squeeze another five or even ten units, but they are bumping up against the ceiling of production for a singular agent.  The mix of your business will also influence this Rule of 30.  If you generate more transactions through buyer representation, rather than listings taken, your maximum will be closer to thirty.

Most agents who surpass the Rule of 30 (as singular agents) by more than ten units pay a high price in terms of their time and quality of life.  They are merely willing to work more hours and often too many hours to grow their production.  This 24/7 model isn’t sustainable for the future, and leads to health problems, children challenges, and relationship issues.  It isn’t the way to live and run a business.

Another clue to pick up on would be survey scores.  I believe that every agent should establish some type of customer survey system.  We need to know how we are doing.  If you survey your clients, you will be able to learn what’s most important to them, what you did well, and what you didn’t do well.  You might find, through surveys, that your staffing levels are too low; that your communication, reporting, feedback, and overall service was less than the client wanted or expected.

In order to achieve a high level of efficiency and a high return on your investment of time, your buyer’s agents need to be doing in excess of thirty units of production a year.  That would be at the bottom of the good scale on an efficiency model.  If you had five buyer’s agents who did thirty units each and you did seventy-five units on the listing side in your personal production, your total units for the year would be 225.  You would have six people, including yourself, for those 225 units or thirty-seven units per person.  That would put you in a solid efficiency category for effort and return on investment.  The goal is to be north of the thirty units, based on the producing members on the team.  You also count in that group.

Using an efficiency model to see if change is needed is a wonderful way to check your progress.  After coaching hundreds of teams personally in almost ten years of coaching, it’s clear to me that we need to understand the average production that should be done per staff member.  By calculating per producing agent production per unit as overall staff member production per unit, we can apply a scale of performance to see if we are efficiently handling business and when to add more staff.

If you'd like more information on how you can build your own real estate team, get your free copy of "The Champion Real Estate Team™ Guide"... here.

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