Paraphrasing Ben, he says that if you aren’t successful as a real estate agent ..

You -

• Aren’t Saying the Right Things … or
• You Aren’t Saying Them Enough … or
• You Don’t Have Enough People to Say Them To

I was really struck by the simplicity of this idea and agree that if you are talking about lead generation or creating sales from buyers, it really does boil down to these ideas.

But is there more to this business of real estate? (And I’m open to the possibility that there might not be.)

In my opinion, there are three ways to fail in the real estate business. The corollary of course, is that these are the three keys to success as well. For vendors serving real estate agents, these are our pain points, help us solve these problems and we’ll both get wealthy together.

Fail to Keep in Touch with Past Clients / Sphere

You’ve probably seen the numbers before. 87% of real estate consumers like their agent and would use them again, but in reality only 14 % actually do.

I have seen a bunch of variations on these numbers so it doesn’t matter what the percentages are as long as you learn the lesson.

Staying in touch, staying at “top of mind awareness”, is the key for referral and repeat business. It is the advantage than incumbent agents have over rookies and it is the foundation for most, if not all, of the real estate programs out there. (Millionaire Real Estate Agent, Ninja, Buffini, ad nauseum)

Facebook pages, recipe postcards, Home By Design magazine, monthly newsletters, email newsletters, annual calenders, fridge magnets…  these are the widgets we try and use to automate staying in touch with our sphere.

Most of them fail horribly. They tend to be boilerplate and impersonal. They fail to connect.

The agent who can nail down this problem will succeed and so will any vendor who can help them.

Fail To Successfully Nurture Your Leads

Ben Kinney instructs his team to use the phone to help get appointments.  New leads are given an amazing amount of attention “until they buy or they die.”

Most of us probably have a system of some sort for our incoming leads, but the yield is probably really low.

Is it because most of the inquiries “aren’t really that serious”?  I doubt it. It’s because we give up too easily. We call them once or twice and maybe sign them up for automatic emails.

The agent who wants to succeed needs to have a system in place to nurture incoming leads.  It needs to be adhered to religiously and it needs to be adapted for the long nurturing process that many real estate consumers need.  The more customized and personal it can be for the consumer while remaining unobtrusive, the better.

Fail to Actively Communicate with Your Seller Clients

In a booming market it was easy. Sign a listing, put a sign in the ground, take some pictures, and wait for the offers to appear. (Not really..)

In a slow market, successful agents are pulling out all the stops trying to market a home. Over a period of months this means repeating the same tasks, tweaking the messaging, tweaking the price, trying new things to get the desired result.

No matter how hard we work, this work doesn’t count if..

• The house doesn’t sell
• The client doesn’t know we are doing the work

I often get phone calls from frustrated sellers who are firing their agent and looking to hire another agent to help them. Their biggest complaint is not that the house hasn’t sold, it’s that they never get any updates from their agent.

• Is the marketing working?
• Is anyone calling or emailing about the house?
• Why aren’t other agents showing the house?
• Are other houses selling?
• What did the buyers who looked at it think?
• Is the price too high?
• What can we do to entice more buyers?
• Why aren’t you advertising more?

Do you have a system for updating your listing clients? How often do they get updated? Is this enough?

Fail to update your listing clients and they will replace you. Succeed and they will sing your praises, even if you can’t sell their home!

In my mind, these are the keys to a thriving real estate practice. This what separates successful agents from those going back to work a second job. These are the opportunities for vendors to help out agents with new tools and products.

What did I miss?

This isn’t nearly as many as some of the vendors like our friends at Zillow or Altos have attended, but I feel like I have a feel for what a Real Estate Bar Camp can be.

I love the ad-hoc nature of the REBC movement, I love that it is introducing so many folks to new ideas, I love the price.

But honestly…. I’m bored.

Photo By clhill88

I was bored at the first one and not much has changed since. Sure there have been a couple of interesting sessions, but for the most part I went away disappointed.

I’m not the only one. Another attendee put it this way “When I come to an event like this, I would pay money to be the stupidest guy in the room. I want my head to explode with all sorts of new ideas.”

For anyone planning a Real Estate Bar Camp in the future here’s some titles of sessions I’d love to attend:

• A+B Tests for Landing Pages
• Require IDX registration – or not?
• I’ve been blogging for three years- now what?
• Lower My Bounce Rate
• Analytics For English Majors
• Listing Syndication for Market Domination
• Social Media is a Waste of Time
• Email Marketing is Not Just for Drips

What do you think? What’s been missing from your Real Estate Barcamp experience?

I’m not sure we came up with any hard and fast rules or even best practices.

My takeaways?

Much of the discussion focused on how to convert a lead into a sale once a consumer had filled out a form.

To me, that is the less interesting and less challenging question or problem.

The interesting question in my opinion is how to get website visitors to make contact and stop being a “lurker.” This conversion could be filling out a form, calling an agent, or sending an email.

In late May, @davidgibbons posted about the Inbound Marketing University – a FREE 10 hour online class with some of the  best professors available – David Meerman Scott, Chris Brogan and Rand Fishkin to name a few. The price was right, so I knew I had to try and take the class.

Classes 7 and 8 of the 10 class series really hit me hard. (Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices : CV101 by Jeanne Hopkins of Marketing Experiments  and Inbound Lead Nurturing :CV201  with Brian Carroll of InTouch

What is my unique value proposition as an agent? How do I describe that online?

What are my calls to action on my website? What do I want a visitor to do?

There are three types of folks who visit my site. Buyers, Sellers and Readers.

I want the buyers to click on the Search for Homes feature of my website. If they find something that interests them I want them to call or email. It would be great if they read some of my articles and it would also be nice if they signed up for the RSS feed for articles or to have new listings emailed to them automatically. (That doesn’t seem like a simple conversion process does it?)

I want sellers to read my articles too, but really I’d love for them to fill out the little form and have me come do a market analysis for their house. The outcome seems simpler here, but how do I get them to the form?

Readers are past or future clients or just neighbors looking for news about the real estate market. I want them to keep coming back so signing up for the RSS feeds or having articles delivered to their email is my goal for these folks.

How best to get each of these different users to go where I need them to go? How do I tie a call to action to each post or page and make it meaningful to the user?

I wondered what the “Big Kids” are doing as far as calls to action:

Realtor.com basically has 3 options for listings.

I’m guessing that’s not selling too many houses. No way to actually contact an agent or schedule a viewing.

Windermere.com (The regional group I work for) has those options and a few more.

ReMax.com sends me to a local Re/max office depending on the zipcode, they have the Save/ Send/ Print options as well as:

John L. Scott – This regional player seemed to have the calls to actions as links without any graphics.

Surprisingly, it feels to me like the better calls to action are from IDX providers like Cevado, IdxPro, or Diverse Solutions.

Online retailers like Zappos and Amazon seem to have the sales funnel down to an art. How can it be that no one in the real estate space has this figured out?

What's Your SMM Strategy?

I do believe that social media marketing (SMM) has a place in the modern sales repertoire, but not at the cost of other more efficient programs. It seems to me that an agent would want to start with a decent base (likely a blog) and then build outposts that lead back to that base.  I think Seomoz’s Rand Fishkin tackled the priorities well in his recent post.  Why spend so much time and energy on social media if your SEO is in the toilet?

Like many agents, I get quite a bit of business from referrals – a common argument for involvement in the re.net. The majority of my referrals come from three places.

• Past clients who are happy the services I provided them
• Windermere agents from Western Washington where most of my second-home buying clients live
• CRS agents who prefer to refer to an agent with this designation and the level of experience /expertise it represents.

NAR members should download the NAR Relocation Report for their area. Where are people really moving from when they move to your town?

For Chelan County, WA people mostly move here from Washington state . The first out of state county to provide us inbound migration is Los Angeles County CA – 11th in the list of counties. The total number of families that moved here from L.A. is less than 2% of the total.

On the other hand, Western Washington counties in the Puget Sound region – King, Pierce and Snohomish provided 28% of the total movers.

I rarely get any business from agents who I know or have befriended through my involvement in Activerain or Twitter. I’m sure folks would refer to me if they had clients, but the truth is, they don’t. The numbers in the relocation report back that up. I need to focus on getting referrals from Western Washington.

Do we really need additional networks like Zolve or Broker Agent Social?

Does it really make sense to have a Linkedin account that is just you connected to all your online real estate buddies from across the internet? Does it make sense to push your Facebook Fan page in the race to get 1000 fans if all your fans are really just other agents who hope you reciprocate?

Wanna be my friend on Facebook?

Shouldn’t your Linkedin account be filled with recommendations from clients who were happy with your services and would recommend you to others? Shouldn’t your Facebook Fan Page be a place for actual Fans?

Does it matter if you have 2000 followers on Twitter if half are other agents and the other half are spambots? I don’t Tweet for agents in Vermont or Texas. I expect my local news and chit chat would be boring. I hope they aren’t upset when I don’t follow them either. I tweet for my friends who I have met at Seattle Social Media Club. I tweet for Seattle area agents. I tweet for my new-found friends who work for the local newspaper or other local businesses. I tweet for all the people in Seattle who love my little faux-Bavarian vacation town and the recreation that surrounds it. I tweet to make connections that will lead to business or friendships.

Is your involvement in social media about points and followers or is it about running a business?

From those introductions, and subsequent emails and phone calls to David about all the glitches and issues I had with Zillow, I ended up being invited to Zillow headquarters to meet with a small group of agents, consumers (ok, just one consumer) and numerous Zillow staff (Zillow Blog article).

The topics for the meeting:

• How to make Zillow more useful for the consumer
• How to make Zillow more useful for the real estate professional

It boils down to this. Zillow is a media company and sells ads, both to companies and agents. What does Zillow need to do to get me to buy more ads?

I got my first sales call from Zillow the day before my meeting in Seattle. I got my second sales call from Zillow yesterday. I don’t envy someone who has to sell to salespeople and I certainly don’t envy them trying in this economy.

Some Ideas

• The sales folk tell me that my ad on Zillow is likely to get 2000 impressions a month. How many unique visitors is that? From what zipcodes? How long are these visitors staying on the site?
• I have two options for ads. I can advertise myself “Geordie Romer – Leavenworth WA real estate expert” or I can advertise the “world’s cheapest yet glamorous vacation home”. Which is likely to have a better click through rate? Which is going to make the phone ring? What kinds of agent ads work best? What kinds of properties make the phone ring? I’d love a white paper that tells me how to make the best of this opportunity.
• How and why do people go to Zillow? They certainly don’t find Zillow by searching “Leavenworth real estate” or “Leavenworth WA real estate” — nope, those visitors are going to my website or my competitors, but certainly not Zillow (or Trulia or Cyberhomes).
• If more consumers are using the Zillow iPhone app, how does this affect my ads? Are less people going to see it? Is there a way to make me easier to reach via i-Phone?
• Is the lack of consumer participation in my zipcodes on Zillow Advice and Make Me Move an indication of the kind of traffic I’ll get? Is there a correlation?
• It’s not about price. It’s about value. The cost per month is $30 or so. Less than $400 a year per zipcode. The cost is low – raising it to $50 or lowering it to $20 probably wouldn’t have much of an effect on me. I would spend $500 month if the return was there.

My job is to sell houses. If Zillow can help me do that more efficiently, I’m happy to pay my share. If Trulia or Cyberhomes can do it better, I’m happy to give them a try too.