In This Issue...
Words of a Champion
Dirk Zeller
CEO
For most of us, success is dictated in the final stages of any endeavor. The victory is not complete until the final second ticks off the clock, or the last sale is made to achieve the goal.
Polybius, a historian in 200BC, said, “Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the contrary, obtain victory by exerting at the last moment more vigorous efforts than before.”
The question is which category do you fall in? Are you going to exert more effort than before or accept a good production year and not play all out the rest of the year? In life you have to let go of the good to achieve greatness. For true Champion Performers good is merely the enemy of great.
Whatever you had planned or designed for this year, don’t stop short! Whatever your goal is for the year, finish strong. Don’t pull up or ease up with the finish line in sight.
To Your Achievement of Greater Success in 2009,
Dirk Zeller, CEO
RealEstateChampions.com
P.S. If you want to learn ALL of the scripts, tactics, and techniques for essentially everything you'll need to know and implement to take advantage of today's changing marketplaces, please join me by clicking here.
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Dear Champion Agent,
A few months ago I received a call from a close friend of mine we affectionately call “John G” here at my office. We have a long real estate history together which includes him as a client, him as one of our Master Real Estate Coaches, and as a co-author of The REALTOR®'s Ultimate Business Planning Kit™.
John and I spoke about how tough the markets are now and how bad a time Agents are having trying to not only survive, but dominate in this new marketplace.
He told me, “Dirk we’ve got to put together something for our customers & clients. Maybe we could put together a couple of CDs of everything they need to do to survive through 2008 and 2009 until things turn around. Some kind of Real Estate Survival Kit or First Aid Kit or something!”
I wholeheartedly agreed with him that something had to be done. Read More by Clicking Below...
Learn How to Dominate
Your Real Estate Market...
Acquiring Knowledge about Your Marketplace
Think of your marketplace as your playing field, not unlike an athlete views a football field, basketball court, or hockey rink. The better you know every inch of that playing field, the more you can exploit it to your advantage.
Before I became a REALTOR®, in my early twenties, I was a racquetball professional. I played hundreds of tournaments over my sports career, and my best games were always at my home club. There, we had a court with floor-to-ceiling glass on the right side and back wall, making it particularly difficult to see in the back right–hand corner where the two walls of glass converged.
When players came for tournaments at my club, they struggled to pick up the ball in that corner – giving me what you might call a significant home field advantage. I rarely lost a match on that court.
Real estate is like any other competitive endeavor. If you learn all there is to know about your playing field, you’ll acquire a competitive advantage that will distance you from the competition and build the basis of your success.
The most challenging aspect of gaining market knowledge is determining what facts to collect and where to find the information you need. Fortunately, a number of readily accessible resources are available to REALTORS®. All you have to do is contact the right people and ask the right questions. The following sections will help you on your data quest.
Your Local Board of REALTORS®
All professional agents belong to REALTOR® associations that compile and make available a wealth of statistical information. The facts you can obtain from your local board include:
- The number of agents working in your marketplace. This information helps you understand your competitive arena. It also allows you to track whether your competition has expanded or receded over recent years.
- The production of the average agent in terms of units and volume sold. By obtaining this information and comparing it with your own production units and volume, you will be able to contrast your performance against the other agents on your local board. This information will be useful in your effort to calculate your share of the market. It also helps you understand how you stack up against the other agents your prospective customer might be considering.
- Experience levels of agents in your field. Most Boards of REALTORS® keep information regarding the percentage of agents recently licensed and those with three, five, and ten years in the business. This information provides you with another factor against which to measure your competitive position.
Meet with the executive director of your local Board of REALTORS® to learn the extent of information that is available to you, how frequently new research is released, and how you can obtain copies for your ongoing review.
Your Local Multiple Listing Service
The Multiple Listing Service, commonly called the MLS, keeps statistics of all the listings and sales in your area that are processed through the MLS.
The MLS does not cover every sale due to the fact that some sales bypass the system. Often, new construction builders, particularly in very robust markets, don’t submit their inventory into MLS. Agents also sometimes sell properties themselves or in-house, and those sales are not submitted to MLS. However, the MLS, in most markets, covers more than 95% of all marketplace sales, and it represents the surest indicator of real estate activity in your region.
The MLS can give you key market statistics including:
- Days on the market averages
- Listing price to sale price ratios
- Listings taken versus listings sold ratios
- Geographically active markets inside your service area
Nearly all REALTORS® recognize the MLS for its significant role in increasing communication and exposure of real estate properties. Fewer REALTORS® recognize the MLS for its powerful but under-utilized role in reporting trends and performance of agents, companies, and subsets of the marketplace. Access and put this information to work to your advantage.
The National Association of REALTORS®
There are a number of national resources that you can access to obtain a wealth of knowledge and statistical trends. The best is the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), which produces some wonderful studies, reports, and market statistics that most agents never use. The truth is most agents don’t even know they are available.
Their monthly “Real Estate Outlook” publication provides a national view of real estate sales: What has happened in terms of sales, days on the market, what people are purchasing, what financing they are using, emerging trends, and predictions for the future. This is a powerful tool in the hands of a successful agent. If you aren’t currently receiving and reading it, put it into your information arsenal immediately.
They also conduct annual surveys and studies of home sellers and homebuyers. They delve into why consumers selected particular agents, what services they sought from agents, and what geographic areas, home amenities, and features caused them to buy. This type of knowledge will enable you to provide the highest level of counsel and value to your clients.
NAR also issues reports on second home markets, investment properties, financing options, and many other topics. It’s one of the best services that NAR provides, but it’s the service that agents use the least. Make yourself an exception and dive into this deep pool of information.
Visit the NAR website at www.REALTOR.org to obtain an overview of the association, to access quick links to useful sites including REALTOR® Magazine Online, and to subscribe to receive e-mail updates on real estate topics and statistics.
Other Sources of Marketplace Information
Consult your broker about company-compiled statistics on regional trends and also on your firm’s market share and market penetration. Especially if you work for a regional or national real estate company or franchise, your organization has likely commissioned studies that will be useful to your fact-gathering efforts.
Also, if you live in a state where sellers provide title insurance to buyers, the title companies often conduct market trend reports that allow agents to better understand the marketplace they are working in.
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Know the Purpose of Your Presentation
A quality listing presentation involves considerable advance planning, careful research and analysis, and highly developed presentation and sales skills. This allows you to derive maximum impact from the minimal time you have to present yourself and your recommendations, close the deal, and obtain signatures on a listing agreement.
Your advance planning takes two forms. First you need to qualify your prospects – determining not only their desires and expectations but also their ability to make the buying or selling decision and complete the purchase transaction.
The other essential ingredient in a listing presentation is a competitive market analysis (CMA) along with a presentation that displays the full complement of your sales skills and abilities and helps you win your prospect’s confidence and secure their listing.
Knowing the purpose of your presentation
Be crystal-clear on this point. The objective of a listing presentation is to secure a signed listing agreement before the meeting ends. It’s not to pave the way for a “be-back” listing, where you plan to return at a later date to handle paperwork and secure final prospect approval. Your purpose is to make your case, close the deal, and get ink on the paper right then and there while you’re face-to-face with your prospects. If you don’t, I guarantee the odds of securing the listing start to swing away from you.
If you let even a few days or a week slip by, your prospects will have a hard time separating your presentation from other agents who they met in the meantime. And the moment they lose sight of your distinguishing attributes, they’ll revert to a commodity mindset by focusing on price and selecting an agent based on who offered the lowest commission or the highest list price.
I’ve personally made over a thousand listing presentations, and I’ve coached and listened to the presentations of hundreds of other agents. I am totally convinced that a quality listing presentation can and must result in a signed contract at the presentation.
These are two reasons you need to get the listing signed during the presentation:
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The moment you leave the appointment, anything can happen. A buyer could appear out of nowhere, knocking on your prospect’s door with a direct offer. An agent who interviewed your prospect a few days ago could be desperate enough to call with an offer to cut their fee by another percent. At Rotary or church or a chamber of commerce meeting, your prospect could meet another agent. Or, after-the-fact, they could begin to confuse you for a different agent whose presentation they didn’t like at all. The list of “coulds” goes on and on. The only thing you know for sure is that if you don’t get the signed listing at the appointment, you leave it up for grabs and vulnerable.
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You need to feel the win. The win in the listing game is when the contract is signed. Don’t underestimate the power of that personal victory. Selling involves the risk of rejection. If it didn’t, it would be called order taking, and you wouldn’t be paid so well because it would be so easy. A listing presentation gives you the chance to go for the win, perfect your close, and attain the victory. Give yourself the satisfaction and adrenaline rush of walking out of the home with a signed contract. Your drive home will be the shortest ever known. If you don’t get it signed, it will be the longest few minutes you’ve ever known.
I have an incredible coaching client who sells homes on Long Island. She is a listing machine in her market area. She takes over 125 listings a year. Yet a while back, when we tracked the numbers she was closing on the night of the appointment, we found her close rate was less than 40%.
This finding got her focused on the uncompensated time she was spending on second meetings with listing prospects. It also made her think about how many listings were lost following the first meeting. A month later, her closing figures had changed dramatically. With a new resolve to get the contract closed on the night of the appointment, she skyrocketed her closing rate to over 70%.
Again, be crystal-clear. Know your objective of your listing presentation. It is to secure a signed listing agreement before you walk out that door. Don’t leave your business to chance – take control and watch your closing rate skyrocket!
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Setting And Achieving Prospecting Goals
In setting prospecting goals, focus on three core areas: the number of contacts you should make each day and week, the number of leads you should develop, and the number of personal appointments you should set.
Start with easily attainable numbers, so you can build up your energy, intensity, focus, and discipline slowly and steadily. You wouldn’t decide to run a marathon without working your daily and weekly mileage up over time, and the same premise applies when establishing and meeting your prospecting goals.
A contact is a personal conversation with a decision maker who can make a purchase or sale or who might refer you to someone who could. A contact is not a conversation with the babysitter, a 10-year old neighbor, a friendly teenager, or an answering machine.
When I take on a new coaching client, I almost always start them with a goal of five contacts a day, and I would suggest the same for you. Make a goal of five contacts a day without fail, resulting in the completion of 25 contacts a week. It will take three to four weeks for contact with five prospects a day to become a habit. Once you achieve the goal for three weeks straight without missing a single workday, you can raise your goal to seven or ten.
Leads are contacts that have demonstrated through their dialogues that they possess the basic motivation and desire to make a change in their living arrangements. In prospecting, we assume until we either pre-qualify them ourselves or they secure an appointment with a lender that determines they have the financial capacity to make a purchase.
To advance your business, you should aim to develop at least one lead per day and five leads per week.
An appointment is a face-to-face meeting with prospects, during which you discuss their needs and wants, share how you work, and aim to gain their commitment to work with you in an exclusive relationship to sell their home or find them a home to purchase. An appointment is the launch of the agent-client relationship. It is not a meeting during which you show a property!
Like your lead-generation goal, your appointment goal should be set at a reasonable level: A goal of one appointment a week is a solid start. If you acquire two appointments, terrific, but make sure that you are able to secure at least one.
If about now you are wondering, hmm, five leads and only one appointment a week from all those calls, realize that these are starting goals. It is far better to begin with aims that you can actually achieve rather than ones that overwhelm you from the onset. As you gain consistency and skill in prospecting, both your numbers and your ratios will improve.
Even if you maintained the goals we set and sales ratios of leads and appointments, you would have a good year as a newer or inexperienced Agent. At the end of the year, you would have made 1,250 contacts. You would have created 250 leads. You also would have set and conducted 50 appointments and gotten two weeks off with your family to boot.
Even if only half of the appointments turned into listings or sales, you would have 25 deals in your first year. In most companies, that would make you rookie of the year. You would also earn in excess of $125,000 in gross commission income. I do not know too many people in real estate or in any other profession that make that type of money in their first year.
So set your prospecting goals by focusing in those three core areas: number of contacts made, number of leads established, and number of appointments secured. You will meet your goals if you follow through and be diligent in achieving them.
Dirk Zeller
CEO |
Dear Champion Real Estate Broker,
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