One of the most expensive and time consuming efforts on the part of a real estate agent is to brand themselves. It’s a long-term process and commitment. To ignore it is to fail before one begins. With over 50% of business still coming from referrals, it’s imperative that people get to know you. It’s a ZEN thing – you, your reputation, your branding – are one. See earlier post – Who You are Speaks Louder than Words.

Your branding deserves some quality alone time. It needs face-time with you – up close and personal, with the cell phone off. The last thing you want to experience is redoing your branding after putting in a year of effort and thousands of dollars.

Your signs are one of the most critical pieces of branding in your marketing program. To skimp on signs is worse than a cheap business card. With a business card you can always tell the person you’re passing it to that you ran out of the good ones and had to print up a bunch of inkjet junk to get by. But your sign just sits there communicating to people who you are and how you approach your business. So, please don’t use cheap, no image, no branding signs like these mentioned in the last post. Here are examples of our signs

Which of these stands out? One day this past summer, there were fifteen directional signs on this very corner. We received a comment from one of the home hunters that day that our sign stood out from the crowd – MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! In the course of business, we often hear – oh yeah, I see your signs in the neighborhood – HIGH FIVE!

Because we have sign police in San Ramon, we have to place our directional signs on private property. Our signs are valuable assets to our business. So, this provides us a great reason to knock on doors and ask permission from the homeowner to place our sign in their yard. Can you believe this – most of them tell us that we are the first real estate agents to ask for permission!!??

Well, you can imagine how it goes – a business card leaves my hand, we chat a bit, and establish a relationship that gets reinforced every time we need to place a sign in their yard. If they ever need a Realtor, who are they  going to call - the agent  who just plops their sign down without even a "may I," or the agent who shows some consideration?

In my next post, I am going to share how we mange to get homeowners to chase us down to thank us for putting our signs in their yards.

 
The Harper Team – San Ramon & Danville, California Real Estate  – We want your business and referrals. We guarantee our services in writing because – It’s a ZEN thing.