In a tough market, get back to basics!

In a tough market, get back to basics!

Remember your first listing? You hurried back to the office, eager to write it on the “New Listings” board, proud to show everyone you were officially in the real estate business? Remember how excited you were to have other Realtors go through in on “tour” or “Realtor open house?” Do you recall how you labored over each word in the first ad, choosing words that would make a buyer’s mouth water?

Yesterday, I got a call from a homeowner to “come list me.” When I asked how she got my name, she said, “I saw the SOLD sign you put on the house down the street. It’s the only house that has sold in our neighborhood in more than six months and I figure if you can sell theirs, you might be able to sell ours.” Basic. Simple. Sometimes, admittedly, overlooked. Sometimes in the frantic scramble of finding new business or getting sales closed, I’ve missed putting a sold sign on a property until just days before the closing. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve missed putting a sold sign on a few altogether.

There is no better advertising than proven success. Use it.

One agent in my office who has been doing this for 35 years still drives around on Wednesdays putting “Open Sunday” signs on the properties he’s going to hold open the upcoming weekend. I asked him once, “Why do you do that? You could pay someone 8 bucks an hour to do it for you.” He replied, “Yep, and they’d never see me working. Do you know how many people visit my open houses and tell me they saw me putting my signs out? Sometimes I even drive up and put up a new rider just so the neighbors see me working my tail off.”

In my office, we still do “tour.” Every Tuesday morning, we’re out walking through our office’s new listings. Some agents think it’s a waste of time but when you work with agents who do a lot of business, it’s surprising how often they have the perfect buyer for your new listing.

Take your ad-writing seriously. Recycling worn-out clichés such as “park-like yard” or “cream puff” don’t create excitement with buyers. Tell the buyers how this home will fulfill their dreams. Tell they how they’ll live, not how sturdy the shelves are. Be as enthusiastic about writing your ads as you were with your very first listing.

Mail out “Just Listed,” “Open House,” and “Just Sold” postcards to 30-50 neighbors … every time. Better yet, print them and walk them around the neighborhood, knocking on doors, introducing yourself: “Hi, I’m Harry from RE/MAX. I just listed the home on the corner. If you know someone who might want to live in your neighborhood, call me!” The postcards or flyers needn’t be expensive – you can print them on your home computer printer – but do it consistently and you’ll be amazed how many times you’ll get a call from a neighbor who met you or saw you putting forth the effort to get your listings sold.

Your sellers will be far more agreeable to a price reduction, too, when they see you’re working hard to get their home sold.

In our techno-savvy world of internet marketing, we sometimes forget this basic: People work with people they know and trust. People tend to trust hard-working people. And they feel they know people they’ve met in person.