In This Issue...

• Exciting News From a Champion
• Three Steps to Setting Open House Objectives - To Win!
• Five Clear Rules to Open House - Success!
• Establishing the Correct Order in Team Building - For Success!

Exciting News From a Champion

I’ve just finished thumbing through the very first copy of The Champion Real Estate Team™ book.  That’s right, we’ve just received our first shipment of the books from the publisher. It’s just a few weeks away from being in your local bookstore and we’ll have a whole pallet of them here at my office any day now.

What’s so exciting to me is that this book is truly my very best work so far.  Don’t get me wrong, I am still extremely pleased with The Champion Real Estate Agent™, Success as a Real Estate Agent for Dummies®, and Your First Year in Real Estate™ - all of which have become Best Sellers.

The Champion Real Estate Team™ takes it to another level, however. With so many agents today wanting to build teams or be part of a team more than ever before, there is really nowhere to turn on how to do it successfully. There’s never been a resource available (until now) for agents besides individual trial and error. The Trial-and-Error-Pathway, which I treaded myself, is far too costly. Lost productivity, lost revenue, higher cost and higher frustration are all casualties of this means to an end.

In my new book, I reveal in an organized, straight-forward-fashion the systems, strategies, tactics, tools, forms, checklists, and training processes you’ll need to maximize the performance of your team.

If you are beginning the journey or even evaluating whether you should have a team, you’ll gain a system you can use for evaluation, structure, and the strategy to implement them all.

In the book, I also take you through the hiring and evaluation processes so you don’t hire the wrong people as most agents do. With so much value contained in it, it’s almost embarrassing that the cost is only $24.95. I guess that’s why books truly are the greatest investment any agent can make in their career.

If you order the book through our website instead of the online retailers (to save a couple of bucks), I will also include a CD titled “10 Keys to Building Your Own Marketplace Dominating Team”. In it you’ll learn more about teams and how to make them more effective. That’s an additional $47 value, absolutely free.

This book is truly a must-have for every real estate agent in the business. It’s a small investment to gain this hard-earned knowledge, systems, checklists, tools, and strategies.

I challenge you to skip one lunch out this week and brown bag it to pay for the book. I guarantee that you’ll receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in value all for one brown bag lunch.

> > Take Your Personal Tour through the Book & Grab a Copy Today < <

To your achievement of success in life,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

P.S. The "No-Brainer" offer expires at midnight tomorrow night. This is your last chance to take advantage of this one time only offer. Click here

"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 is now in stock!!!

Three Steps to Setting Open House Objectives - To Win!

Regardless of the nature of your business or the frequency of your open houses, don’t proceed with another open house before establishing your objectives and expectations for each open house event.

The main purpose of an open house is to attract solid buyer and seller prospects, so when setting your objectives for each open house, you need to shift your focus away from selling the featured home and toward acquiring prospects.

Before each open house, set your prospecting objectives, including the following:

1. Number of visitors you hope to meet and greet. Your answer will depend on the size of your market area and the appeal of the home. Once you establish an objective for the number of visitors you expect to host, set the percentage of guests you intend to personally meet. By the way, the closer that percentage is to 100, the more effective you’ll be in using the open house as a prospecting tool.

2. Number of contacts from whom you hope to collect information for use in future mailings and other forms of follow up. Not everyone will be willing to share personal contact information, but with skill and effort you can expect to gather lead information from at least 50% percent of guests. For success, follow these tips:

• Have a sign in sheet, tell guests that you have been asked by the seller to track the attendees from the open house, and ask if they would they please help you keep that commitment to the seller.

• At the bottom of the sign in sheet, be sure to state that by signing in on this sheet they are agreeing to allow you to contact them in the future with real estate information. This helps you keep legal with the No-Call laws that are in effect.

• Have you business card in your hand ready to hand to people that walk in. Then hand it to them and ask for theirs at the same time. Often without thinking they will dig into their purse or wallet and automatically hand you their contact information.

3. Number of buyer interviews you hope to schedule. Again, there’s no single magic figure, but my recommendation is that you aim to achieve interviews from at least 25% percent of the guests who provide you with follow-up contact information. To achieve interviews, consider these steps:
   
   
• Ask for the opportunity to meet. You could use a script like this:

“Bob and Mary, in order for you to maximize you initial equity position and minimize your upfront costs in securing a new home for your family, we simply need to meet. Would ________ or__________ be better for you this week?”

• Most people at open houses also are sellers. They need to sell their current homes in order to make a new home purchase possible. Ask to come by and take a look at their home. Use script such as:

“Bob and Mary, would you be offended if I came by to take a look at your home? Would _______ or ___________be better for you this week?”

If you cannot secure a face-to-face appointment, aim to at least set a specific time that you can contact attendees by phone. Then you can work to at least acquire an over-the-phone appointment for a specific day and specific time to speak next. It is not good enough to agree that you will call them later in the week.

For more information on how you can turn Open Houses into a lead generation source and grow your Real Estate Business, click here now.

If you're tired of wasting your time with wishy-washy buyers, and would rather have a system that takes you completely through the entire Buyer Conversion Process so that you maximize your effort and time, you've got to check out...

Convert and Commit the Buyer...
...Every Time!™

With the vast majority of agents in North American doing more transactions on the buyer side than the seller side, we need to now make sure that we are converting on every possibility we have in the marketplace. Every viable lead that is created must be converted to íncome producing closed transactions. This program is conservatively worth an extra $100,000 in gross commission income for you! Don’t miss your chance at mastering control and commitment of your buyer’s prospects.

The 'Convert and Commit the Buyer... Every Time!™' Series will teach you how to:
	• Get Control of the Buyer Appointment from the Start • Only Work With the "A" Leads – Use a Buyer Qualification System • Qualify Like a Master Buyer's Agent (Save Tons of Time) • Champion Agent's Buyer Interview - 41 Questions that Will Save You at Least 41 Lost Transactions Wasted With Lookie-Lou Buyers • Use a Master Coach's "Exchange of Commitments" Conversion Tactic • Master the Art of Dealing With Non-Qualified Prospects • Handle Objections to Getting the Appointment (BUYER SCRIPTS) • Explain Agency to a Buyer (SCRIPTS) • Handle if the Buyer Wants Representation (DIALOGUES) • Explain the Exclusive Retainer Agreement - Lock Them In (SCRIPTS) • Handle Objections to Signing a Contract - 10 Scenarios (SCRIPTS) • Find the REAL Reason Behind a Buyer's Objection • Plus much more, including 62 pages of tools, handouts (the same ones Dirk uses), scripts, and dialogues you can use as your own.
You'll receive:
	• Dozens of Buyer Worksheets/Forms for Buyer Conversion • Complete Buyer Counseling Interview • Dozens of Scripts to Increase Buyer Conversion • Prospect Interview Worksheets • 4 CDs - Audio Training • 1 CD-ROM Workbook

I Want to Learn How to Get The Listing on the First Appointment Every Time!

Five Clear Rules to Open House - Success!

Featuring a high-appeal home

Here’s a hard truth to swallow: No one comes to an open house to meet the agent. They come to see an appealing home, and your role as the hosting agent is to make that house shine. Your reward is the list of prospects you amass, and, one out of 20 times, a home sale to boot.

So as you prepare for an open house, think of the home you’re featuring as the headliner of the show. Choose a home with star power by following these points:

• Select a home in a high-demand, low-inventory area. Scarcity is a well-proven marketing strategy. People line up to get into crowded restaurants. They respond enthusiastically when told they are limited to “one-per-customer.” And they will show up at your open house in greater numbers if the home you’re showing is one of only a few for sale in a well-regarded neighborhood.

• Do your homework before making your selection final. Study the inventory levels in the neighborhood you’re considering for your open house. Obtain the prices of recent sales to be sure that your home is within the acceptable range. Research the number of days that recent sales and current listings have been on the market. Then compare your findings with research on nearby neighborhoods to be sure that the home you’re considering competes well.

The statistics you compile provide you with information you should be tracking anyway, so even if you rule out the home you’re studying the time you spend on the effort will be worthwhile.

Open house selection isn’t a time for guesswork. Use your market knowledge to choose a home with high appeal and demand. Rely on gut instinct only when you’re deciding between two homes with equal market appeal.

Leveraging the power of curb appeal

We’ve all seen it. A prospect pulls up alongside an open house, touches the brakes, takes a careful look, and then drives off without ever going inside. Nine times out of ten, the house lost the drive-by test. It lacked curb appeal.
It’s your job as an agent to counsel the home sellers to turn the house exterior into a “10.”

In preparation for an open house, minimally you will want to work with the owners on the two areas that most significantly affect the home shopper’s first impression. These include landscaping and paint color and quality.

• Landscaping

  Typical landscaping reaches maturity after about six to eight years, and after that it needs to be thinned and reshaped.

  If the home you’re showing is in a mature neighborhood and the landscaping is overgrown, convince the owner to enhance curb appeal by following these steps:

• Spend a day trimming and removing overgrown and excessive plants. Hosting an open house in a home blocked from the street by a “jungle” is a formula for disappointment. Your drive-by prospect will see only untended bushes and trees – hardly a great first impression.

• Plant or place seasonal flowers that add color, warmth, and an inviting first glance. A few hundred dollars of seasonal flowers can dramatically change the appearance of a “plain Jane” track house.

• Paint color

  Exterior paint color and condition is often the first thing about a home that a prospective buyer notices. To make the first impression a good one, urge the homeowner to consider this advice:

• Installing shutters in a complimentary accent color can transform even the most boring 50s ranch house.

• Adding an alternate type of siding in a small, strategic area in the front can improve the look of the home. By adding fish scale siding or a shake siding accent on a wood exterior face or over the garage gable, you can transform the home’s first impression from ordinary to extraordinary.

• Painting the home in a widely acceptable color scheme helps it appeal to the greatest number of prospective buyers. Face it, while there are a few people who will fall in love with a home painted robin’s egg blue with pink trim, most buyers will have a hard time imagining it in any other color and so they’ll drive right on past after the first glance. (Don’t laugh. I once sold a home with exactly those paint colors.

Many agents achieve greater open house results from neighborhood marketing efforts than from general public exposure. As you plan your open house announcement strategy, pay special attention to your nearest prospects by marketing to those who live right around the house you’re showing. Follow these steps:

• Consider a neighborhood “sneak preview.” Invite neighbors into the house an hour before the home opens to the general public.

• Send at least 25 invitations in order to generate an adequate neighborhood response. Better yet, hand-deliver the invitations. Before you allow yourself to assume that door-to-door delivery is too time-consuming, realize that this simple touch will increase your invitation response rate dramatically.

• Use neighborhood events to gain access to prospects in restricted-access neighborhoods. Restricted-access neighborhoods include gated communities or condo complexes that require the public – including real estate agents – to gain permission before entering. This entry barrier makes prospecting in these areas difficult at best. So whenever you achieve a listing in a restricted-access neighborhood, leverage the opportunity to stage an open house neighborhood preview that allows you to meet and establish relationships with surrounding homeowners.

Every marketplace can be broken down into the following real estate price categories: Lower-end, lower-middle, middle, upper-middle, and upper-end.

Build your real estate practice around the upper-middle price point position to allow yourself the greatest sales flexibility and business success. The upper-middle price point provides the following: 

• Risk-reward benefit. All prospects require similar amounts of time and energy, yet those that result in the sale or purchase of an upper-middle or upper-end property deliver far higher commission revenue.

• Positioning flexibility. By positioning yourself to serve the upper-middle price range, you won’t get pigeonholed. You won’t get painted as that snobby agent who sells only the upper-end and you won’t get tagged as the agent who works only the low-end. You can easily move within all five price segments, migrating to wherever the market is most robust at the moment.

• Quality clientele. By specializing in upper-middle properties you’ll attract quality middle-range prospects who aspire to own more exclusive properties even if they can’t quite afford them. Plus you also attract buyers with the financial ability to migrate to the upper-end.

• Quality lead generation. By working the upper-middle price bracket and by holding open houses that serve the upper-middle price category, you set yourself up to collect buyer and seller leads and grow your business within that lucrative price range.

Open house advertising is important, but it pales in comparison to the importance of a well-selected open house site and a signage strategy that leads prospects to your open house front door.

In choosing your open house site, make sure you do the following:

• Select a home near a well-traveled street in order to gain exposure from the traffic volume.

• However, be careful that the home isn’t too close to the traffic or you’ll get traffic by the home but not to the home. Remember that buyers are reluctant to live too close to a thoroughfare or busy street.

• Hold your open house in a home that is no more than three directional signs away from a well-traveled street. Otherwise you’ll lose prospects as they try to navigate what will feel like a maze.

• When running ads, announce the open house using on-the-hour start times. For instance, say that the open house runs from noon to 3:00 or from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., rather than from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. or from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m.

For more information on how you can turn Open Houses into a lead generation source and grow your Real Estate Business, click here now.

Establishing the Correct Order in Team Building - For Success!

If you think success is a one step process . . . think again.  The objective in building a Champion Team is to identify the steps and apply them in the proper order.  You must have both the steps and the order correct.  The right steps in the wrong order will leave you well short of the success you desire.

Stage 1 – You
Stage 2 – You and your first assistant
Stage 3 – You and closing coordinator and listing coordinator
Stage 4 – You and closing coordinator and listing coordinator and buyer’s agent
Stage 5 – You and closing coordinator and listing coordinator and multiple buyer’s agents and field coordinator
Stage 6 – You and closing coordinator and listing coordinator and multiple buyer’s agents and field coordinator and lead manager
Stage 7 – You and closing coordinator and listing coordinator and multiple buyer’s agents and head buyer’s agent and field coordinator and lead manager
Stage 8 – All of the above and Chief Operating Officer

I really believe you can’t deviate from this order until after you pass stage 5.  You can add additional buyer’s agents between stages four and five, but you must not change the structure until you hit stage 5.

The biggest adjustment most agents make is adding buyer’s agents before they have administrative help.  I guarantee you will see significant consequences for that error.  Your service to the clients will be sub-standard.  Your time invested in closing their transactions, even if they are an experienced agent, will be needed.  The relationship with the client will still be with the buyer’s agent, not the team.  When they decide to leave, the clients they have worked with will leave with them.  The reason is there really wasn’t a team at all that serviced them.

If you reduced your production in the short run to help your buyer’s agent and only received a fraction of the gross fee, you didn’t secure the long-term client . . . didn’t get the cart in front of the horse.  A great administrative assistant is the horse of your practice.

I know that first extra mouth to feed is scary.  To have another person or family to be responsible for, who is counting on your production for their livelihood, is an awesome burden.  I understand how scary that position is as an agent and business owner.  In more than twenty years of having an entrepreneurial sales business, I have never had to lay anyone off because of slow sales.  I didn’t want to do that to the people and families that rely on me and my companies.  I have certainly fired people for non-performance, but I haven’t ever had to lay anyone off.

The first time you hire and start paying someone a base salary out of a 100% commission job, it will scare you to death.  When you have to pay them and forgo your paycheck this pay period, you will want to go back to the comfort of no assistant.  The best way to solve this is to increase your time in direct income producing activities.  Increase your time in prospecting and especially in lead follow-up.  When your cash flow is low, you need to respond quickly to this order.

1. Aggressive action on price reductions

   You won’t ever be able to keep a good listing a secret.  Make sure you have good listings – get the price down.  The shortest line between a commission check and you is a price reduction.

2. Sell your committed buyer a home

   Anyone who is committed to you exclusively who hasn’t bought yet and is reasonable in their expectations needs you to find them a house.  Take them out more frequently and get them in a home now.  With either step one or step two, you could be cashing a commission check in thirty days.

3. Go through all of your leads

   Call all of the leads (even older or longer time frame ones) and book appointments with them.  One of the fastest ways to take care of short-term cash flow is to go to your leads.  They are the third closest clients and prospects to a commission check.  Be sure you have left no rock un-turned with your desire to convert, commit, and build a high level of urgency in the leads in your database.  Don’t forget there is a direct link between motivation and time frame.

4. Increase your prospecting

   When you increase your number of contacts, you will increase the volume of leads.  Some of the leads that you create will be now leads, and some will be long-term leads.  The source you select to prospect will have a strong influence on the time line and urgency of the leads.  You will more likely gain long-term leads from prospecting your sphere and past clients.  You will receive short time frame leads with a higher level of urgency when you prospect FSBOs or expires, for example.  This is due to the motivation level difference of these groups.

The most common out of order mistake agents make is adding producing assistants like buyer’s agents before they add support staff.  When this happens, the lead agent is forced to train, manage, and coach someone to a reasonable level of productivity while still trying to do all of the facets of their own production.  When the buyer’s agent makes a sale, it creates even more administration the lead agent must take on, as well.  The problem is their administration tasks are usually worth half the money.  It’s worth the money because the other half is going to the buyer’s agent.  You will end up doing most of the administrative work to close the deal for only half the normal fee.  Their efficiency model is blown up, net profit is demolished, hourly pay is reduced, and prospecting ceases.  All these things add up to disaster in their business.

Champion Team Rule – If you are spending more than 50% of your time in administration, you probably don’t have enough administrative help.

We don’t want too many people because it causes too much in the management arena. 

Based on my years of experience, the tendency for agents is to run too lean on staff rather than too heavy.  Check your allocation of time.  That will tell you if it’s time to add staff.

I meet many agents who have been thinking of adding a staff member for years and have never done it.  It’s as if they are waiting for the perfect situation or perfect person to walk up, bonk them on the head, and say, “Here I am!”  You will never act on your desire or find someone outstanding with that philosophy.

If you have been evaluating building a team or adding to your existing team for more than six months, it’s time to act.  A decision is in order . . . now.  The biggest waste of time in life is from the moment you know that a decision needs to be made to when you actually do it – when you act and move into action with that decision.  The span of time that we waste in knowing and non-action kills too many people’s success – don’t let it kill yours.

Your systems, processes, procedures, checklists, and other support structures for your business will never be perfect.  You will never get it dialed, so there will be zero changes in the future.  If you aren’t changing, you aren’t growing, improving, and staying ahead of the competition. 

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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