Reality Check of a Champion

We are closing in on the end of the first half of the year.  It seems like only yesterday we were looking with anticipation to the unfolding of the year 2008.

Now is the time to review how you have done so far.  Block out some time in the next week to check your numbers. 

How many listings did you need to take in 2008?  Are you halfway to your goal? 

How many buyers do you need to put into pending in 2008?  Are you halfway to your goal? 

What do you need to do in the next 90 days to catch up if you are behind on your production goals?

Focus on success today,

Dirk Zeller
CEO
Real Estate Champions, Inc

Become a Champion Performer

Do you have the desire to receive recognition from your peers; to be recognized as one of the top Agents in the country?  If you do, you need to start by taking dead aim daily.  It is the disciplines we do each day that mean the difference between being on top or being part of the crowd. 

Start each day focused on the success of your business.  You want to begin each day by reviewing your business plan.  Focus in on the activities that will lead you to the successful result you have set forth in your plan. Long-term success is built on top of achieving daily performance standards for weeks and months at a time.  If your business plan is not broken down to the daily activities or daily performance standard, you should take the time to do so now.  I call these daily activities “The Disciplines of a Champion”.  We each have activities that, if left undone daily, will cause our business to suffer.

Some of the “Disciplines of a Champion” could be:

• Prospecting for a specific time period
• Doing lead follow-up
• Contacting a certain number of past clients
• Spending time in personal development
• Practicing scripts and dialogs

The “Disciplines of a Champion” are quantifiable and trackable.  They consist of a specific amount of time or a specific number that must be achieved.  To have power, the disciplines must set the time frame or the quantity.  It is too easy for us to opt out and not accomplish our goals when we don’t have concrete parameters.

Next, you need to evaluate whether you are ahead or behind for this week.  Then create the strategy to catch up if you are behind, or focus on maintaining the current strategy and direction that has kept you on plan or ahead even ahead of schedule.  Too often, we know we are behind and let it go for too long without a change.  You must react and change quickly to catch up.  We often do not raise the level of our intensity or increase our work output until it is too late.  If you get too far behind and are spending tremendous amounts of time inflicting wounds on yourself, change the plan.

Always have a Plan B.  There is no embarrassment in working a Plan B. Often, Plan B is the better plan because you can invest the mistakes you made in Plan A in Plan B.  Edison tried over 10,000 different elements in his light bulb before one worked.  What would have happened had he stopped after Plan A?

Zero in on your area of success.  People are paid very well for the few things they do very well.  That is one of the best things about the field of selling real estate.  There are so many ways to earn an outstanding income.  Do what you do very well.  We coach our clients to develop three to four areas of specialization in the real estate field and work to project their skills in these areas.  Do not be a generalist in a specialized world.  The “jack of all trades” is also the master of none.  You are highly skilled in a few specific areas of real estate sales.  If you have only one or two areas, you need to begin to learn and add another area or two to give yourself balance.  The possibilities are truly endless when you become a specialist.  Here are some ideas of specialization:

• Expired Listings
• Out of Area Owners
• FSBOs
• Relocation
• Tenant Occupied Properties
• REO Bank Owned
• Multiplexes
• New Construction
• Investment Property
• Empty Nesters
• 1st Time Home Buyers
• Divorce Situations (Prospect Divorce Attorneys)

There is an endless supply of opportunities to let your ability lead you to become the recognized expert in your area in a few categories.  I could list three pages of categories, but you get the idea.

If you'd like help with generating new business in today's tougher markets check out my latest program "Tough Market Domination™ - CD Audio Series" here.

Passing The Curb Appeal Test

As a Listing Agent, one of the first rules of real estate is that you have to get prospective buyers and other Agents into the house. They won’t buy – or advise others to buy – it if they don’t step inside to see it. Real Estate Investors provide the only exception to this rule. They’ll buy sight-unseen, but most sellers don’t want to settle for the price a shrewd investor wants to pay. To get top dollar, you must win the curb appeal game.

As an Agent, nothing is more discouraging than giving up your Saturday or Sunday afternoon to host an open house, only to watch cars drive by without stopping all afternoon. The culprit is almost always a lack of curb appeal – a lack of first-glance pizzazz. 

Few people have the gift to see what a home could look like. My wife, Joan, has that gift. She can look at a listing that I know isn’t quite right and tell me in short order exactly what to suggest to the seller. The following provides similar advice for you to follow.

Landscaping recommendations depend largely on the age of the home you’re getting ready to show. Newer homes are frequently so under-landscaped that they look remarkably like the surface of the moon. Meanwhile, older homes are surrounded by such overgrown yards that they look like the Amazonian jungles in Brazil. Know the age of the home you’re listing and, more often than not, you’ll know what kind of tool your sellers need to use to ready their property for showing: A machete or a shovel.

The most frequent curb-appeal obstacle comes from too much landscaping, which needs to be attacked with the following steps:

• Trim and limb trees to create openness in the yard area. Large fir or evergreen trees can make a yard look smaller than its actual size, particularly if expansive branches hang close to the ground. Advise the seller to limb large trees up 12 to 15 feet.

• Use the space opened by tree trimming to plant colorful annuals to brighten up the yard. 

• If the seller’s yard features grass, make sure it’s healthy and green. Recommend a little over-seeding or sod replacement in troubled spots if necessary to achieve a look that’s more like a golf course than a motocross course. There is nothing more inviting to kids than a nice patch of grass where they can run and play, and when kids are happy, parents are usually happy, too.

• Add landscape dimension to otherwise flat lots with plants, berms, or rocks. Don’t overdo it, but do add a little height and depth to break what otherwise might look like a dull lot.

• Also create dimension through color. Especially if you are presenting a home in a season other than spring, the landscaping can look pretty monochromatic. Colorful plants go a long way toward adding visual interest and strengthening curb appeal.

In a split-second, the color and condition of a home’s exterior paint can either attract or repel a prospective buyer.

• Color: Recommend that sellers think long and hard about pastel colors like robin’s egg blue or pink, or color schemes that resemble the uniforms of their college or university team. Just as with hard surfaces on the inside, the exterior of a home for sale should be painted in classic, muted tones.

  The architecture of the home can contribute to the decision regarding what colors are appropriate for the home. For example, white paint on a colonial-style home can enhance the property’s visual impression from the curb, evoking the image of great, stately homes such as the White House or President Washington’s Mt. Vernon home.  The same white paint on a 1950’s or 1960’s ranch home might result in a house that looks like a plain little box with no character. The more a home looks like thousands of other personality-free homes, the lower the chance that buyers will make a strong offer in hopes of calling it their own.

• Paint Condition: It doesn’t take long for sellers to cross off homes in need of new paint from their lists, whether the chipped paint is on the body or trim of the home or on fences or railings.

  The worst outcome is a non-stop drive by, but even if a prospective buyer stops more trouble likely lurks. If the exterior paint condition is poor and buyers consider the home anyway, you might wish they hadn’t, and here’s why.

  Once buyers notice that paint is peeling, cracking, chipping, or stripped down to bare wood, they go into high-scrutiny mode and begin to pick the home apart.  Rather than looking for wonderful things about the home, they fixate on what they think is wrong. They assume that if something as obvious as the paint is in poor condition, there must be worse things to discover.
                         
  A buyer determined to find faults will succeed. No home can withstand a microscopic faultfinding inspection. 

  Even if the home passes the inaugural buyer examination, the sellers aren’t out of the woods. If the buyer decides to make an offer, almost certainly it will be accompanied by an extensive repair list and the request that every minor offense be rectified before the closing. Then a home inspector will enter the picture, providing a more extensive report and the chance for the buyer to hit the seller up all over again. All this from a little chipping paint that could, and should, have been fixed before buyers ever drove by to view the home in the first place.

If you'd like more help with developing your home showing skills, check out my program "The Champion Real Estate Agent™ - Audio Series" here.

Three Key Evaluations When Hiring A Buyers Agent

Champion Lead Agents don’t have unlimited hours to evaluate Buyer’s Agent candidates.  An effective, simple system must be developed to separate the wheat from the chaff in candidates.  It’s also a lot more complex and difficult to bring them in for a few days for a trial run like you might with an Administrative Assistant you are considering hiring.  You can see how an Administrative Assistant will perform in a few days.  It will take you weeks to see results from a Buyer’s Agent.

Since my belief is that Buyer’s Agents must engage in prospecting and lead follow-up consistently, the profit for the team is contained in the segments of business that are created by the Buyer’s Agents from working with your inventory of homes.  It’s from the ad calls, sign calls, open houses, and call capture return calls.  It’s also contained in their prospecting for referrals from their sphere, current clients, and past clients.  Any Buyer’s Agent can convert the leads that are handed to them on a silver platter by the Lead Agent.  The real question that must be answered is what they will do in these other areas?

How much will the Buyer’s Agent prospect and do lead follow-up?

One of the critical evaluations that must be considered of any salesperson before hiring is how much they will prospect.  Numerous studies have created a direct link between prospecting and sales.  The most reliable determining factor of sales performance is consistency of prospecting and lead follow-up activities.  If you accidentally hire Buyer’s Agents or have Buyer’s Agents on your team now who won’t engage in regular prospecting and lead follow-up over the phone, their sales performance will be (I didn’t say might be; I said will be) in the bottom quarter of Buyer’s Agents . . . guaranteed!

Let me share with you the three questions I ask myself before I hire any salesperson.

How much will they sell?
How soon will they do it?
At what cost to me and the company?

How much will they sell?

We need to be able to determine, in advance, what the sales volume will likely be before the hire.  How many units will this person probably sell each month?  What’s the likelihood that they will be able to increase those sales by at least 20% year after year?  What price point will they most likely gravitate to because of current comfort level?  What’s the gross commission income will they probably bring into the company?  What is the company’s profit based on that gross commission income?

How soon will they do it?

For every salesperson, there is a period of time to gain acclimation to the team. There are systems, strategies, marketplace, inventory, sales process, and leads to become a revenue producing member of the team.  A factor that must be considered is how quickly they will make sales.  Will they make sales in the next thirty days?  Is it more likely that it will take longer than that?  Are you turning over any hot, high quality new leads to them?  If you are, your expectation for a sale should be high.

I see team leaders patiently waiting for sixty, ninety, even 120 days for the first sale to happen.  I don’t mean closing, I mean sale under contract.  Even a brand new Agent should make a sale in the first forty-five days . . . maximum.  If you think it will take a Buyer’s Agent that you are considering hiring a lot longer that that, you will have to pause in hiring them.  The risk that you will be taking to bring them in is much higher the longer you think the time line will be to them contributing regular sales to the team.

At what cost to me and the company?

This last question is probably the most subjective of each of the evaluations.  It has to do with determining the actual cost to you and the company.  How much time do you feel you personally will need to invest to train, coach, and monitor them?  What is your hourly value per hour?  Multiply those two numbers together.  How much administrative time will be invested to teach them the systems they must follow?  How much time will you need to track, analyze, and evaluate their numbers and sales ratios?  How much frustration will you feel when they don’t “get it” as quickly as you want, and they blow leads and good opportunities?  How much will that affect you and what you need to do?  How much will it affect you when they give poor customer service to your clients, and the clients aren’t happy with you or your team?  I guarantee this will happen to you at some point in time. 

Honestly, looking at the cost isn’t pretty, but as a business owner, it’s necessary.  My best advice is to double whatever you come up with.  Double the amount of time you expect to invest personally to train them.  Double the amount of leads you feel they will need and ultimately blow to make a few sales.  Double the amount of energy, emotion, and frustration you are expecting to expend.

If you'd like more help with listing agent training check out my book "The Champion Real Estate Team™" here.