To Market, To Market, To Get Your Listings!

What Are You Doing To Get Listings In Your Market Now?

As Real Estate agents you must always be marketing yourself. I do not mean the show offy type of image marketing that most agents and coaches tell you to do.

Image marketing is very time consuming, expensive and unless your are Coca Cola you do not have the kind of money it takes and the time it takes to make image marketing work.

You do need to be visable, approachable and people need to know you. You do that through relationship marketing. The kind of marketing you need to do to become famous in your area is a lot of giving of information. Solve a problem. Be there when someone needs to ask you a question. Be empathetic to your market's problems.

My Step Approach To Becoming Visible So You Will Get The Listings:

• Start Blogging. If you do not have a blog start one about your area and about you. I have had great success with Active Rain. This is a great community of real estate related people, you get to network and have a free blog.
• Become the expert in your area. Interview businesses and places of interest like the library and write articles about them. Find out if you can be the Real Estate columnist for your newspaper.
• Whenever you go to a function, take photos and have photos taken of you with prominant people and then do a press release about it and send it to all the local papers.
• Always speak from the point of reference of the person you are speaking to and not about yourself. No one cares about how much you know until they know how much you care.
• Get testimonials from every client. Have the testimonials be about exactly what you did for them not about what a great agent you are. Again, this is not about you!
• Have a direct response website with reports that the consumer can get to solve their problem.
• Join online forums to learn more about your Real Estate industry and also so you can network with other agents and cultivate referral relationships.
• Meet your neighbors! Right in your own backyard you have prospects. Make sure your neighbors know what you do and ask them if they know anyone moving to the area.
• Send out an email newsletter and a physical newsletter to your sphere of influence. Ask for Referrals. We have heart stickers that say," I love referrals."
• Work your expired listing market. This is a great niche and I coach agents to become successful in this niche. This is the main focus of our business. We get all our listings through working expireds and through getting referrals.
• Get involved helping in your church, place of worship, schools and the community. This is a great way to get visibility in the venue of helping others.

You can email me at Katerinag(at)bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate Agents. I am a Realtor and a Business, Career, Health and Personal Coach, Real Estate Business Consultant, trainer and speaker. Yours In Real Estate, Katerina

Active Rain Is a Great Real Estate Agent Tool

I found a great online community for you to join if you are a Real Estate Agent, Home Stager, Mortgage Broker or Home Inspector. The best part is that it is FREE. Just click on the box below and get started!

You can find great local Florida real estate information on Localism.com Nestor and Katerina Gasset is a proud member of the ActiveRain Real Estate Network, a free online community to help real estate professionals grow their business.

Be A Servant First, Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Be A Servant First

As a Real Estate Agent your objective is to be a servant first. Put the needs of your client first. Let them know by your actions that you are happy to serve them. This is what you get paid to do.

You get paid in direct proportion to how well you serve your clients. Finding out what their needs are and then filling those needs will result in higher pay and more referrals for you.

Zig Ziglar said, “If you help enough people get what they want you will always get what you want.” That is one of my favorite quotes ever. It is reality. It is truth. Apply this to your business and watch your business grow.

When you are focused on the sale, on how much you need the sale, on how you need to pay your bills, how much you ‘need’ this person to list their house with you, and other self thoughts this is projected onto the other person and actually makes them move away from you. I know I wrote about this subject in a previous post but this is so important it bears repeating.

I know from experience so much about this. When I was going through a really ugly divorce Real Estate income was my only source of income and it was tough times because all my focus was on the next court hearing and a mean custody battle over my children. It was really a bad time in my life. But I was also so happy to get out of an abusive and nightmare of a marriage. Still, I had to depend only on me to take care of 5 children physically, emotionally and financially.

When I was working with buyers and sellers inside of my head and heart I was begging for them to buy a house from me or list their house with me. And then I wondered why each deal was a fiasco or the home inspection went bad or the seller and buyer could not come to terms on a price and the deal would die. One thing after another happened that was negative. I did manage to just get by however the results were less than desirable. This is after I had been working in Real Estate for 15 years and I could not understand why this was happening to me. Even on the deals that did close, the sellers and buyers ending up complaining about one thing or another. Not a good way to get referrals and testimonials!

It would take years before I would discover what really happened during that time in my business.

I started dating my present husband and my business started to take off again. I was happy, less stressed and more focused on my clients.

I began to implement Zig Ziglar’s quote again in my business and we started attracting good clients, listings that sold quickly and for top dollar, good buyers who closed on their transactions. We began attracting developers and investors and the luxury home market.

For 15 years I owned and ran Tae Kwon Do schools. In that marketplace you really had to show genuine love and concern for the needs of your students or else they would go elsewhere. We had some of the highest retention rates in the country due to the fact that we put our students before ourselves and we served our students and their parents who were paying their tuition payments.

Real Estate Agents can very well use this principle to multiply their results in their businesses.

In November of 2006; when our Real Estate Market here became quite slow here, I met a a Realtor who happened to have more business than she could handle. She had a great attitude. While Real Estate Agents all around here starting dropping out of the business like flies she was looking for people to refer business to.

I asked her what she was doing that was different. She said the only thing that was different is that she had watched a DVD movie called ‘The Secret’.

Well, of course I went home that day, went online and ordered the DVD of The Secret.

My husband and I watched it each night for 30 nights in a row. Each time we watched we learned something we had not heard the other times. It really has changed our lives…

Stay tuned….

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Online Marketing For Real Estate Agents

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Online Marketing For Real Estate Agents

One of my online colleagues, Jinger Jarret made a comment to me that Real Estate Agents lack behind in making use of good online marketing.

This is an understatement. With Real Estate being one of the most searched keywords in all the major search engines and with over 80% of all buyers starting their home search online it is amazing to see how few Real Estate Agents are making the most of this unlimited stream of income.

I have some tips throughout my blog to help you in this area.

If you would like to see how a direct response website looks like you can visit our website at;

http://www.NestorGasset.com

This is our main home page. You will see our listings on the right with featured listings there. We have affiliate pages for home loans and house staging. The most important feature is the newsletter and the opt in forms on all the direct response pages.

We are very well known in our area so therefore we have my husband’s name as our domain name but for advertising to people who do not know us we use other domain names that we own. For instance when we market sellers we use the domain name;

http://www.27-Home-Seller-Tips.com

This of course is for people who do not know us yet. The prospect who does not know us does not care about our name or who we are at first. It is all about what is in it for them. So we have domain names that have benefits to the prospect in them.

Now there are things that I like and I don’t like about our site. I am constantly working on improving our site and starting new sites with new themes and keyword related pages.

There also may be free websites that your MLS or Realtor Board offers. Check into all of those. Every little bit that you do will help in the long run.

Remember getting results from your online marketing takes longer than offline marketing and you need to develop patience for it, but let me tell you it is so worth the wait.

What you will see happening in the future is that you will get your leads online and transform those leads into clients resulting in much less time spent in getting leads than from the traditional methods. Online marketing does not replace your offline marketing. It is just an additional form of developing income.

We will talk more about what all goes into your online marketing programs and strategies in future posts on this blog.

There is a lot more to it than just putting up a website.

You can email me at Katerinag@bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate Agents. I am a Realtor and a Business, Career, Health and Personal Coach, Real Estate Business Consultant, trainer and speaker. Yours In Real Estate, Katerina

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Voice Mail Tips For Real Estate Agents

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Voice Mail Tips For Real Estate Agents

Do you know what your voice mail sounds like?

As a Real Estate Agent I hope you have a great professional voice mail message.

Is your message boring and meaningless or is it exciting and compelling?

Call your voice mail and listen to the tone of your message, the message itself and the content of your message.

What is the goal of your voice message? It should be to have the caller want to leave you a message.

Do not say; “Your call is important to me” . That sounds so condescending to me. If your call was so important to you why aren’t you answering the phone personally when I call you?

Some other things you should not say in your message are things like, “I am not at my desk right now.” Or “I’m sorry I missed Your Call.” These statements are overused and are a waste of your precious few seconds to get your message across.

Avoid using the same boring statements that everyone else says on their messages.

Make yourself stand out in the voice mail crowd.

I suggest to my coaching clients to always have a big smile on their face when they are recording their message. For some people standing in looking into a mirror helps them to use their best voice.

Write down what you are going to say so that you can follow your script. That will help you avoid using “uhm” and “ah”, etc.

Remember that you can re-record over and over again until you get it right so don’t worry about it when you goof up.

I always leave my email address on my voice mail and my website address. I also leave my tagline to get them to my website.

At the end of the message I like to say, “Make it a great day.” You can leave another call to action at the end of your message, make it memorable.

People always compliment me on my voice mail messages but more importantly they leave a message or email me.

You can email me at Katerinag@bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate Agents. I am a Realtor and a Business, Career, Health and Personal Coach, Real Estate Business Consultant, trainer and speaker. Yours In Real Estate, Katerina

Coaching For Real Estate Agent

3 Biggest Mistakes Real Estate Agents Make

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

3 Biggest Mistakes Real Estate Agents Make

We finally started to get some rain. It started with Tropical Storm Barry and has continued. The drought has put a large strain on South Florida’s water system. So we are very thankful that it is raining.

The rain made me think of that old adage Realtors use to explain our business. It is either feast of famine in our business.

But it does not have to be that way.

The first mistake I think many Real Estate Agents make is that when they get a house sold they spend the next month doing all the things that need to get done to make sure the closing happens and lose sight of going on to the next deal.

You need to work on the contract that is closing as well as marketing for new listings.

The second mistake is forgetting about your clients after closing. This is by far the most common mistake I see happening in my Real Estate Agent coaching program.

Most Real Estate Agents send a thank you card, give a closing gift and then go on to finding the next customer.

Do you ask for a referral and a testimony right there at the closing when most clients are the happiest with your services? That is the time to really get your next customer without spending a ton of money advertising for the next customer.

Keep in contact once a month for at least 2 years. See my post about building relationships that I posted yesterday.

The third mistake that I see most Real Estate Agents make is that they spend a lot of money on programs, books, audios, trainings without working on themselves first.

All of that motivational stuff only works for a few days after the event and then people return to what they are used to doing, back to habits.

Motivation wears off because it comes from the outside. The only self development that works is that which comes from the inside. Work more on yourself than you do on your business and you will attract the people that will help your business to grow.

If you are looking for someone to keep you on the right path, whatever path that it is you choose to take, think about enlisting in the services of a coach.

You can email me at Katerinag@bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate You can also email me at Katerinag@bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate Agents. I am a Realtor and a Business, Career, Health and Personal Coach, Real Estate Business Consultant, trainer and speaker. Yours In Real Estate, Katerina

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Are Referrals In Your Real Estate Business?

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Are Referrals In Your Business?

The NAR just came out with a report that says that 93% of the business being done in Real Estate is being done by only 7% of the Real Estate Agents.

That is pretty shocking taking into consideration that there are over a million members in the NAR.

So much for the 80/20 rule!

As a consultant and coach, I ask you;

Are you in the 7%?

Do you want to be in the 7%?

What type of marketing is the 7% doing that other agents are not doing?

Well, it is networking.

Most of the business these Real Estate Agents get is from referrals.

That should not surprise you.

When buyers and sellers are asked how they chose their Real Estate Agent between 70-80% of them responded that they knew their Real Estate Agent or one was referred to them by someone they knew.

People do business with those they know, like and trust. Pure and simple.

Yes, you can get to build relationships through door knocking and cold calling but that is definitely taking the most difficult approach. I do not like to door knock or cold call. And I find that we as people will find a reason not to do the things we don’t like to do. So then excuses take form and we get stagnant and do not produce thus placing us in that 93% of the Real Estate Agents not getting the results they had hoped to achieve.

So are you doing business by aiming at the wrong target?

Networking is the way to go in boosting your business and creating the loyal following up clients who will refer to those they know need your services.

Target your sphere of influence. That is the key to effective marketing.

Real Estate Agents I coach start out by telling me that they don’t know anyone, that they don’t have a sphere of influence.

If you are in that situation I can show you how you DO have a sphere of influence and no matter how small it is I will teach how you can make that small influence become a large influence very quickly.

The key to building your referral market is by building relationships and then maintaining those relationships over a lifetime.

How do you develop a relationship?

*Stay in touch on a consistent basis through a variety of mediums.

*Give something of value each time you communicate.

* Nurture your relationship.

* Call them on their birthday to wish them a happy birthday.

* Monthly contact is just right.

* Go beyond the regular real estate info and assist with day to day needs.

* Ask what you can do to help them.

* Give important tips in a postcard like reminding them to change their clock back.

You can also email me at Katerinag@bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate Agents. I am a Realtor and a Business, Career, Health and Personal Coach, Real Estate Business Consultant, trainer and speaker. Yours In Real Estate, Katerina

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Online Marketing Tips For Real Estate Agents

Online Marketing Tips For Real Estate Agents

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Online Marketing takes some time but it will pay off for you in the long run.

Real Estate Agents tend to work on things that will bring them money right now.

We get into this mode of getting the listing, selling the listing, getting the listing, selling the listing and so on.

You must, as a Real Estate Agent do some work each day towards your future financial security and building your business with income that will come to you in the future.

That is why ‘farming’ is the best method for long term results. Most Real Estate Agents do not have the patience to farm an area. So if you stick it out, planting those seeds and watering them you will benefit for the time you put into it. Your rewards will be financial as well as creating loyal clients who will refer you over and over again. While other agents give it up, you will reap your rewards!

There are many different types of ‘farms’:

• Geo farms
• Social farms
• Niche farms
• Professional group farms
• Online Farms

Today, we will go over online farms.

Having a website presence online today for any Real Estate Agent is a ‘must do, must have’.

However, just putting up any old template site is not going to work anymore.

You need to do some homework.

When we first went on line back in 1998, we made a lot of mistakes. We fell prey to all the different bells and whistles different vendors were selling. A lot of the tools, software and products we bought went on our shelves and were never used or did not fit our market.

We had a website with Realtor.com, Know Your Neighborhood, Advanced Access, Re/Max sites and a few others. We spent literally thousands of dollars on these websites each year and we never got a buyer or seller from all of that!

So naturally we became disillusioned with online marketing and we dumped all of our sites and went back to our direct mail campaigns and personal networking which has always done very well for us.

Now, we are back online again. What changed this time around?

Well, this time I said that I was going to make sure that I understood what I was doing. That began a project of research before building our web sites. Learning how to rank in the search engines was another area that I felt I had to understand before making online decisions regarding how much money and where we are going to be spending it.

Each night for about 3 hours before I went to sleep I studied online marketing from internet resource, books, tapes, etc. When I felt like I had a handle on the knowledge we started to implement the strategies. Lo and behold, it works! And we are no longer throwing arrows in the darks.

One of the websites that I recommend you visit that has lots and lots of Free information on building your business online is Jinger Jarrett’s web site:

http://www.askjingernow.com

Make sure you visit her blog and learn all you can a little at a time to help you make the important decisions of how to market yourself online.

You can also email me at Katerinag@bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate Agents. I am a Realtor and a Business, Career, Health and Personal Coach, Real Estate Business Consultant, trainer and speaker. Yours In Real Estate, Katerina

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Short Sales- Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Coaching For Real Estate Agents- Short Sales

Real Estate Agents need to understand what a short sale is and how to help their seller’s with the process.

In today’s market you are most likely finding sellers who owe more money on their mortgages and home equity loans than what they could get for their house.

It would give you as a Real Estate Agent in your marketplace an edge over agents who do not know how to assist in a short sale. This could be a great niche for you!

Do you know what a short sale is?

When the net proceeds from a sale of a property are less than the mortgage, taxes, real estate commissions and other closing costs and the seller can not or will not come up with the difference you have a short sale.

Just like when people buy cars for zero down and need to trade that car in they find themselves upside down, meaning they owe more on the loan for their car than what the trade in value is.

This same thing happens in the housing market. You may have a seller who is going into foreclosure, a seller who is transferred due to work or someone is getting divorced. These are all reasons that the short sale may be forced to happen.

You can check with a title company even before you take the listing and ask them to do a preliminary HUD closing settlement statement so you can have the numbers correct. The title company can also run a check for you about how much they owe.

Sometimes when you ask the seller he or she will give you the amount for their first mortgage but not for their equity lines. I always ask them for all the loans that may be tied to the house.

Have the sellers write a letter to all his/her lenders giving them permission to talk to you. They will not talk to you unless they have express permission from the seller.

Once you get an offer on the property contact the lender’s loss mitigation department. Do not talk to the people at customer service. They are not trained in this area and they will not approve any offer unless they are collecting all the past due payments, etc.

Gather up the seller’s W-2 forms, a letter of explanation if the seller is unemployed, bank statements, two years of tax returns, and other financial documents relating to income, asset and debt obligations.

You should have the seller write up a hardship letter explaining why he/ she is in this situation and why it is impossible for the seller to pay off the loan in full. Most lenders will require true hardship. If the lender sees the seller has stocks and other assets it is likely the short sale will not be approved.

One thing to be especially aware of is what did the seller say when he got the loan initially. For instance, if the seller obtained a stated income loan stating his assets, it may be a trigger for mortgage fraud if he no longer has those assets, unless he can prove the loss somehow. Just be aware of this.

Most lenders use a formula of what losses they are willing to incur. It is suggested that this figure may vary from 8 % to almost 20% .

It is important for the buyers to understand that the lenders will not give away properties.

It takes two weeks to sixty days to get an approval from the lender to do a short sale.

It is very important for the buyer to understand this process and that this may take time.

Please make sure that if you are the Seller’s Real Estate Agent that you put a clause in the contract stating that the seller does not have to close on the property with this buyer if the lender does not approve the short sale. Otherwise, the seller would still be liable to close and come up with money for the difference.

Doing short sales can be very time consuming. However, it may be a good niche for you since not many Real Estate Agents have the patience to do them nor the knowledge.

E-mail me at Katerinag@bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate Agents. I am a Realtor and a Business, Career, Health and Personal Coach, Real Estate Business Consultant, trainer and speaker. Yours In Real Estate, Katerina

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Coaching For Real Estate Agents- Marketing with Post Cards

Coaching For Real Estate Agents

Marketing with Post Cards

If you have a web site, and hopefully you do; drive people to your web site with your Post Card Campaign.

Make sure you have a reason for sending the prospect that receives your post card to your web site.

Always use a tag line with a benefit to encourage prospects to visit you on the web.

With so many web sites out there especially in Real Estate markets; why would a prospect sit down at his or her computer and actually type in your web site address into the address bar?

Give them something to go to your web site for! And I don’t mean to search the MLS or to look at your listings!

They can do that on anyone’s site these days.

Think of things that your prospect is looking for or a need that is not being filled when they go to other Real Estate Agents’ sites. If you get stuck; ask your prospects.

Take a survey of your prospects. Ask them what they would like to see on your web site. What can you provide them with they are not yet getting?

Create direct response guides for your buyers and sellers.

Like: “12 Ways to Improve Your Curb Appeal”.

Send out a postcard to your data base or farm telling them to go to your web site to pick up their own copy of the direct response piece you are doing like the example above.

Post cards work great as direct mail pieces. We use them all the time in our Real Estate business.

Remember to have a call to action on your post card. Always put value on your offer. Make your offer something your prospect really wants and knows he/she needs and is ready to act on it. The more value you place on your offer the better response rate you are going to get.

Testimonials are also great to use on your post cards.

Word of Caution: Do not use the Free Consultation line. Everyone in the U.S. knows that they can get a Free Consultation with any Real Estate Agent. That is worn out, old and should not get recycled.

We ran a post card campaign with a great offer and to go to our website to get it; we had an overwhelming successful response of visitors to our web site. In fact, from one mailing we received 112 unique visitors with 112 separate IP addresses. When we looked at our web stats we saw the direct correlation of when our data base received the post card and the dates of their visits to our web site. It works! Do it!

Submit your ideas here of what Post Card ideas you get great results with. Tell us what you have tried; what works and does not work in your market. It is great to learn from each other. Pay it forward!

You can also email me at Katerinag@bellsouth.net for coaching and consulting information for Real Estate Agents. I am a Realtor and a Business, Career, Health and Personal Coach, Real Estate Business Consultant, trainer and speaker. Yours In Real Estate, Katerina