How to Maximize Profits in Today’s Shaky Real Estate Market

The real estate market is tougher now than it has been in the last 20 years. Buyers are harder to please and sellers don’t want to lose money selling a property short of where they bought it. Selling a single property is the short term way of making a commission. Many home buyers will purchase 4 -6 homes in their lifetime. That’s 8-12 transactions from that client alone!

What today’s agent should focus on is building a client base that will come back to them and recommend them to their friends again and again.

People in general choose to deal with agents or salespeople that they know, like and trust. This is where focus should be concentrated. Once you meet a client or get their name from a referral, you as an agent need to start generating and increasing the “know, like and trust” factor. There are many successful ways to increase how a client, either buyer or seller, perceives you. But they all have to do with creating a personal relationship.

Recently we had a local Realtor send out postcards with her contact information and a recipe for a pasta dish along with a picture of her and the plated pasta. It was a nicely done 4 x 6 color glossy postcard. After reading the recipe it seemed like something to our taste so we bought the ingredients just as stated on the card and made the recipe. The results weren’t pretty. The recipe was a disaster.

Now, from a marketing position, that wasn’t all bad as we will link her name with bad pasta but it would have been better had the recipe been a great recipe. The results were mixed in this case because she increased the Know part of the equation but decreased the trust variable. So if this is a marketing strategy you adopt please check the recipe out before you put your name beside it.

You should use open houses to build your list of clients/contacts as much as trying to sell the house where you are holding the open house. Follow up sometime in the next week with the people that came to your open house on Sunday whether they were just looking or were sincerely interested in buying a house. Give them a call and if they are not ready to buy or list, see if they may be able to refer you to someone who is. Continuing follow up will eventually lead to more referrals and more sales. But at the same time your follow ups should be in the form of something usable to the potential client. Send out a newsletter or flyer indicating that you’ve listed or sold a house in their neighborhood along with the price of the property.

Another way is to offer tips for increased curb appeal which will increase the value of the house they are in now. Maybe partner with a local nursery for coupons offering a free plant. This would be good business for you and the nursery. The client comes in for 1 free plant but goes home with several more purchased ones.

How about offering to have 2 rooms of painting done for free when listing a house. Again a great deal for you and the painter. You get the listing and he gets some work. Many times the client now sees how bad the other rooms look compared to the freshly painted ones and gets the painter to do more work which will increase the selling potential of the house.

Another way to say thank you is a dinner coupon for referrals. Local restaurants many times have particularly slow nights during the week and would be happy to offer discounts or maybe even free meals on those nights to help fill their tables.

Once you seal the deal for your client make sure to follow up on how you did as a service provider and ask for a referral. If you aren’t getting referrals from clients it’s because of one or two one of things. Either you are not serving your customers needs well or your product/service may need some fine tuning.

Another avenue of approach could be creating a presence on the internet and having people come looking for your services if you’ve established yourself as an expert in either your geographic area or in your niche market. A niche market could be specific help for first time buyers, lake property, retirement property or income property. Creating a presence online and getting people to search you out as an expert is a topic for another paper.

I hope you have found some useful tips that you can implement into your business in this article.

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