RISMEDIA, February 9, 2010—It has become an all-too-familiar obstacle to writing about successful agents: “My partner doesn’t want anyone to know who we are. We’re number one in our 50-agent company and everyone copies everything we do. My partner’s afraid that if they know how we get so much business from the Internet, they’ll steal that from us. Feel free to have anyone outside our market area call me for a recommendation, but I’m afraid you can’t use my name—we just can’t risk it.”
What is it that “they can’t risk?”
These particular agents are from a small New England marketplace where they describe competition as ‘brutal.’ In 2009, they had about 40 sides, of which 20 came from their Internet marketing. A large part of their business remains referrals. They utilize a close relationship with a mortgage broker, who is right there with them helping their clients. Homes in their market sell anywhere from $150,000 to about $800,000, and they sell all price ranges. They report that their referrals come from local people and their outside-the-area leads come from the Internet (in fact, the day they sent back their questionnaire they received a solid $500,000 lead from their Internet marketing).
In summary—these good folks—except for their Internet marketing success—sound like a majority of top agents anywhere in North America. I wondered: What’s the big secret? Why the fear of sharing success?
Many agents have been burned
Fear of disclosing success is a lot like fear of the dark; we may not know exactly why we fear the dark, but we know there are lots of bad things that can happen in the dark. Likewise, when a successful agent goes out front, jealousy and envy can rear their ugly heads, creating a kind of negative aura from other agents in the office, especially in a part of the world where ostentatiousness is reviled.
In New England, wealthy people are as likely to be driving around in a 20-year-old beat-up car as in some handsome new cruiser; in many towns, it is considered a sign of poor upbringing to promote oneself or to display one’s financial success. A lot of bad things can happen to agents who make the mistake of acting too successful: clients might ‘think they are getting too big for their britches,’ for example. In general, however, most prospective clients want to deal with successful agents, so it’s really just a delicate balance of looking successful without being flashy. This reality might be a factor in the agents’ fear of promoting themselves and their success.
That reluctance might also be motivated by the experiences shared by many agents who have been exploited by some vendors. For example, an agent in Virginia recently reported that her previous experience with Internet marketing involved entering into an agreement with a company who assured her they would not oversell her marketplace. In time, the Virginia agent actually did sell a home from leads provided by that vendor, only to have them use her success to mount a sales offensive on her own office. Her success was used to entice 30 other agents in that office to sign on. Of course, once that market was over saturated, there were not enough valid prospects to go around. That agents leads also declined precipitously. The vendor sold 31 folks in her office, but did none of them any favors. The vendor also did themselves no favor, as now they have 30 unhappy clients in one market—clients who blast the greed of the vendor when asked for a reference.
Could it be that succeeding with Internet buyers is viewed as a trade secret?
Even NAR tells us that 90+% of agents are unhappy with the returns from their Internet marketing. It’s a fact that more agents fail at it than succeed. We think that’s partially because almost no one trains agents how to succeed at selling houses to Internet buyers, so is this fear a fear of telling the world something that no one could otherwise know? It absolutely should not be. Succeeding on the Internet is a simple four step process that any agent can master if they are willing to employ a little technology and a lot of common sense.
There are four basic steps to attracting Internet buyers to your business:
Maintain a good marketing platform with information available to the consumer upon request; get them to tell you what they want and give it to them; make certain that people searching the Web for homes can find your site; build traffic and convert visitors to your site into registrations; learn the proper way to follow up these leads; the timing, the methods and the follow-up techniques.
Should you do all that yourself or should you hire it done?
There are so many different factors affecting Internet success that we have determined that the average agent is better off hiring a firm to do their Internet prospecting. That may sound self serving–and it probably is–but it is also the truth. We know this from our own experience and that of our clients. For example:
We have two major Internet marketing products: CompassSearch™ (in which we work with the client’s existing website to meet the four goals listed above) and Compass PROLeadS™ (in which we do everything and the client has no responsibility other than following up the leads).
After working with more than a thousand clients with CompassSearch™, we realized that the reality was that great success was hard to achieve with the virtually unlimited variables and our lack of ability to control what people did or didn’t do to make their sites effective: a good example of this is the large number of clients who would not allow the installation of a strong lead capture system on their sites; not surprisingly, those who would not allow us to install that had less than 20% of the leads that those who did let us install it.
Simply being found is no guarantee of success; all four success factors above must be present. When we first started years ago, we truly believed that good SEO was enough: if you got to the first page of Google, you’d succeed online. Not only do many websites available today have design features that inhibit that ability to be found, even those that don’t may still not produce once we get them to page one. Our own ability to get sites on the first pages has increased exponentially, but we know, now, that it doesn’t matter if the other components aren’t there.
More importantly, however, was the unwillingness of webmasters or clients to understand that Internet success does not come from a scattergun approach to targeting: i.e., trying to have a strong Internet presence in four or five market areas dilutes the ability to dominate in any one. Think of putting out one house fire using one hydrant: there’s plenty of water, plenty of power, and it is possible to get the job done. Now try putting out two fires from one hydrant; it’s a closer run thing, but it can probably still be done. Try to fight four fires with the water and pressure from one hydrant pushed down four fire hoses and guess what? There isn’t enough water flow or power to put out any one of the four fires anymore. It’s the same with trying to spread your promotion too widely; you end up with no power to dominate anything. The same principle applies in online marketing. Focus is required and the discipline to adhere to that focus.
There are things no one can steal, like ability
The clients we’re writing about here utilize both types of our products. So far, they have received four times the leads in one third the time from Compass PROLeadS™ than they did last year with CompassSearch™. That’s partially because they would not follow our direction on their older site. They wouldn’t put lead capture on their most popular pages and they had a site that gave out way too much information without collecting any. Now they do, and they actually said: “And why didn’t we listen to you before?”
We are happy for their success and we’ll continue to do everything we can to continue to add to it. However, we know that it is counterproductive to oversell an effective Internet prospecting tool in any market; especially when that product comes with a money-back guarantee that the vendor must provide if performance promises aren’t met. We’ve learned that Internet success is attainable by following a formula. It took us years and millions of dollars to dial that in.
With respect, the average real estate professional has neither the time nor money to learn those lessons. For that reason, we sincerely recommend hiring your Internet prospecting to be done for you. Chances are good that your time is worth considerably more than the $235* a month (after down payment) a comprehensive program would cost you. Get the protections you feel that you need and utilize the technology that works best—before your competition stakes out your territory—but please don’t fear your competition. Your ability is what protects you and no one can steal that from you.
Your competition might think that they know what you do, but they aren’t you and it is your ability and experience that ultimately determines success. Technology can only bring opportunity: it is up to the individual agent to convert that opportunity to success. (*there are multiple payment options available).
Mike Parker (mparker@theblackwatercg.com) is a well known author on the subject of online marketing services for Realtors® and other real estate professionals. If you’d like information about how you can have strong internet prospecting done for you more cheaply and more effectively than you can do it yourself, click here and we’ll be happy to provide more information for you at no cost or obligation.
RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.
For more top headlines on RISMedia.com, be sure to see:
Tags: Finance, Real Estate
