How to succeed in today’s market (part 2 of 3)

Generating Business

Welcome back and congratulations on taking the next step towards being successful.

One of the things that came to me as a big surprise early on my career was that clients were not going to come to me just because I was in Real Estate and knew a lot about it. IT JUST DOESN’T happen!!! (You can be good at writing contracts, selling homes, knowing neighborhoods, but if you have no one to sell to - YOU'LL STARVE!)

I was at a point in my life in which my frustration was so high, that I committed myself to learning everything there is to know about starting a business. I didn’t want to leave this to chance… I wanted full control of the situation. That’s when I said to myself, “I am going to do whatever it takes to get this handled”. When you’re at that point, that’s when things really start to come together…. And I’ll talk more about this later.

Getting the business.

One of the best things about real estate, is that it can be a home based business. I love telling my friends that I haven’t applied for a job since I left the Navy and I stay home pretty much everyday.

The secret to getting the business is advertising. I don’t care whether it is through an open house, newspaper, flyers, business cards, postcards, newsletters, online, prospecting, the point is to get the word out there, that you have a product or service so people know you exist. Learn about what people want and offer them exactly that. (the more you tell, the more you sell)

A first time home buyer is going to be attracted to a different ad than a move up buyer or someone buying luxury real estate. If you’re working with first time home buyers, tell them that you know about homes they can buy with their little or no down payment loan. This is one of my best ads and it's great nowadays when FHA is the way most buyers are qualifying.

That’s it, place an ad and people will contact you. After that, you have to come up with a way to get people to work with you. I sign every home buyer into a buyer’s broker agreement. I will not leave it to chance and have them running around freely because if I spend time with them, I want to get paid. If they won’t sign a buyer’s broker agreement, I don’t get sad, I just call the other 15 people on my lead list until I find someone who will sign the agreement. When you have more business than you can handle, you can do this.

You guys run your business however you want to, that’s just how I do it.

As you can see, there are different levels to success. I’ve heard so many times that knowledge is power, but I think that is no longer the case. Information is readily available to many people, yet not many decide or commit to achieve success. Applied knowledge is power. You’re reading my blog because you obviously want to succeed in today’s market, but unless you apply what I just told you, it would do absolutely nothing for you.

Once I figured out how to make money, I came up with a new question. What am I going to do with the money?

Making money and creating wealth are two different things. In fact many Realtors got out of the business in 2006-2007 even though they made a lot of money in 2004-2005. They did not learn how to run a business. I will talk about that in the third series of this blog.