Over 120 agents and managers attended a HUD Training Course held in Lake Mary Florida earlier this month.  The course offered 4 hours CE Credit along with teaching agents how to increase their personal business through the selling of HUD Homes. 

The initial training was so successful Watson Realty will be offering agents a chance to attend a second training scheduled for January 12, 2012.

Ongoing training is essential for real estate agents who take their career seriously and seek to to increase their bottom line.

New agents often ask when they first start with our Company; “Where can I find buyers?” As a new agent you are have probably asked or thought the same thing as you begin you new career as a real estate sales person.

The simple answer is that buyers can be found everywhere.

Potential home buyers can be found all along your daily schedule. The clerk at the local convenience gasoline store could be a buyer or know of a potential home buyer. The person busy making you your morning bagel may be thinking of buying a home. The teller at your local bank taking your deposit or cashing your check may have thought about purchasing a house. How about the waiter or waitress at lunch? It is possible that they are now ready to buy. As you pull back into your drive way at the end of the work day, the neighbor you wave to as you enter your home might have a name of a relative looking to purchase a home.

Home buyers are scattered all through your busy day. The question you should be asking yourself instead of where can I find buyers, is do the buyers I encounter daily know I can sell them a home?

Did you hand your card to any of those potential buyers mentioned above? Did you invite them to check out you business Facebook page? Do they receive your monthly email newsletter?

My answer to new agents is that they already know hundreds of buyers; they just need to know you.

I am not on American Lifestyle Magazine’s payroll, ok there is the disclaimer, now I can go on and say something good about a product that several of my agents have used with good success.

In my opinion the American Lifestyle Magazine looks good, has interesting articles and is a great reminder marketing piece for agents to send to their past customers and for use as a marketing/branding/prospecting piece.

I have numerous agents from 2 different branch offices say that their past clients appreciate the professional, upscale look and quality of the magazine and that referrals and new business have resulted from the agent’s direct placement of the magazine.

If you are looking for a unique marketing piece that will get noticed, check out the American Lifestyle Magazine.

Real estate agents are not typically “best selling” authors so trying to write a blog post on a regular basis can be challenging. We all know the ins and outs of working a short sale transaction, but typing what we know in a blog post so that it would be easy to understand and useful to someone in our community is a daunting task.

You may want to try writing about something else. People go to the internet to find things, places, or events in their community. These are the same things, places or events that you already go to or have found.

• Where can you get take out Chinese?
• Where can I find a cheap used car?
• Where can I find a clothing donation drop off box?

Those are 3 examples that showed at the top of my Google search when I typed in; “Where can I find Kissimmee”. It just so happens I know where there is good Chinese take out in the area, I know a couple of honest reliable used car salesmen in the area and I can point you to 2 or 3 different drop off locations for your donations.

With this local information, I can write a short, informative blog post that others will find useful. I’ll provide directions, perhaps post a picture or two, offer a review and anything else that matters to me, because there is a good chance it will matter to the reader of my post as well.

“Helping people find things” blog posts are a good way to brand you as a real estate agent who knows the local community. Over time people who visit your blog will see you as a great source of information, not only about where to find things, but about the community in general, including the real estate market. The next time you are stuck on what to write, give this a try. I think you will find that sharing of this type of information is much easier to put on paper.

If the early bird can get a worm, surely a real estate professional could get a buyer or seller using the bird’s method of starting early.  Common sense tells us that calling someone in the wee hours of the morning asking for business, especially if that person is in your time zone, could have disastrous results  So if dialing for dollars is out of the question what are some of the best methods for prospecting between the hours of 5-7 a.m.?

•  How about spending the morning uploading your most recent contacts to your contact management system and then create a new drip email campaign or newsletter? 
• The early hours are a perfect time to add something new and interesting to your Facebook business page. 
• Blogging in the a.m. is a perfect time to let people starting their day know how the market is or where the best coffee can be found in town. 
• Thank you cards can be written while the sun is rising, just remember to ask for the referral. 
• Visit Twitter or local community forums and see if there are area specific questions from the night before left unanswered. 
• Finish up your neighborhood newsletter while eating your bagel.

Any of these task could result in a new buyer or seller for you and can be accomplished at the crack of dawn.  It is a great way to get a head start on  your competition and will set the course for a productive day!

What are some of your suggestions for prospecting at the crack of dawn?

For the real estate professional new and experienced, Monday is a pivotal day for their business.  Usually the day will include follow up from the busy weekend, but even more importantly, the day is about setting the agenda for the new week.  The successful or soon to be successful agent understands the most important component of the agenda is finding new business.

What is working, what has not produced any results and what have you been meaning to try?  Those are thoughts that should be a part of your Monday.  Will you spend the week calling your center of influence?  Will you be spending the majority of your time this week prospecting for new buyers, new sellers or outgoing referrals?

My suggestion for this Monday is to plan on spending time each day this week contacting 5 new people.  Start a spread sheet that lists the 5 people you talked to, their phone number, email address, and a brief description of the contact made.  Follow up by adding these 5 people to your contact management solution and send them a personal hand written card.  

It’s Monday, you do know where your customers and clients are, go contact them!

For those Brokers who still have weekly or regular sale meetings, I suspect you might agree that the continual challenge is making sure each meeting offers subject matter of interest; issues that would benefit the agent’s business as well.  The safe bet is to have area-builders stop in and talk about their latest development, or perhaps having a lender discuss falling rates or mortgage products.

Safe is for sissies.

The Florida Bar Association has a program that allows you to request attorneys to speak at group meetings.  I took a look at the different topics available and noticed that there were attorneys available to discuss intellectual property rights and laws. To me, that was a perfect topic that would go hand in hand with my goal of getting more of my agent’s marketing and prospecting online.  It could also seriously backfire and I could end up having agents falling asleep and out of their chairs or worse, boycott any future meetings on principal.

I was pleasantly surprised.

Stephen Luther, a Patent Attorney with Allen, Dyer, Doppelt, Milbrath & Gilchrist, P.A. in Orlando was our presenter recently and he did an amazing job!  His presentation lasted a little over an hour.  He kept it easy enough for the agents to understand, encouraged them to ask questions and did a good job relating the material back to what we experience in our day to day real estate business.  Some of the key points for me were:

• As independent contractors, agents own the pictures they take of their listings.
• Agents need to carefully choosing slogans they want to trademark making sure they are not too general.  For instance the “best real estate agent” would not hold up well as a trademark.
• The usefulness of a DNCA takedown letter when someone has posted your real estate pictures or content without permission.
• The difference between a ® (federally registered)  and a ™​  (no registration required)

I would encourage Brokers to have similar speakers at their meetings especially as more agents venture online.  Having a basic understanding of what can and cannot be done as it relates to copyright and trademark laws could prevent bigger problems down the road.

One of the first things a new agent should do when entering the business is to familiarize themselves with the listing and purchase agreement contracts. When a new agent starts, I ask them to put together a listing and sales package and then prepare a mock listing package and purchase package that I can review with them when completed.

I encourage the agent to select a house from one of our many office listings or to use their personal house as the subject property. By doing this “homework” ahead of time, the new agent will become familiar with the contracts and related addendums. This will serve to their advantage when meeting buyers and sellers during the beginning of their career.

I would like some ideas on how to draw attention to my listing?

Some of the best ways to draw attention to a listing are;

• Hold an open house and invite everyone in the neighborhood and surrounding apartment complexes.

• Send information flyers to agents that have sold houses in that neighborhood over the past 12 months.

• Take full advantage of Realtor com. Upload the maximum number of pictures allowed and provide a detailed description of the house.

• Advertise the house on Craigslist Orlando

• Place information flyers in the mailboxes of your office agents.

• Talk with the seller about weekly price adjustment or enhancements.

Pricing is a huge part of why homes sell today. Take a look at sales and new listings within the past month to confirm your price and then make corrections as needed.

Before the start of each sales/business meeting I ask the agents what they would like to talk about during the meeting. This opens the floor to timely questions or thoughts the agents are having about current transactions, current events, office goings on and so forth. One of the newer agents in the office asked that we discuss; what do you do when you don’t know what to do?

He received these responses from the agents in attendance.

1. Call everyone you know and let them know how excited you are to be in the business and inform them of your initial success.

2. Hold an open house everyday that you don’t have anything else to do.

3. Take a top producer to lunch or shadow them.

4. Spend time with your Broker, getting familiar with contracts.

5. Show up at the office and good things will happen, perhaps an agent will have a referral they are too busy to handle or someone will need help on floor.

6. Work on a direct mail campaign to your farm area.

7. Avoid “stinkin’ thinkin’”

All are very good suggestions that do work when applied. I think the best thing learned from this morning is that there is a wealth of knowledge and experience in the real estate office and sometimes when you don’t know what to do, the answer or many answers can be found by asking the agent in the office or cubicle next to yours.