I have been selling real estate for around 15 years now and I have tried just about every kind of advertising there is over the length of my career. I have used direct mail, news paper, homes magazines, cold calling, open houses, radio and TV, but by far the Internet has proven to be the best ROI I have ever seen. It has been said by people much smarter than I that consistency is the key to success in any advertising.
In the beginning of my career I fell into the trap of trying different forms of advertising for short periods of time and after six weeks or so of little results I would drop it and move on to the next, and so on and so on. I probably had a few winners in there but I never gave them a chance to start working. Once I settled down and started to track where my business was coming from I did finally start to see substantial improvement in lead gathering. I was an early adopter to Internet advertising. I began with righting my own web sites around 1995. Ten years ago the Internet was far less sophisticated than it is today. I now look back on some of the sites I was using and shake my head thinking how did I ever generate business from that! As time went on my skill as a webmaster improved and at the same time the general public's use of the Internet grew by leaps and bounds. It always amazed me when I would go to an office meeting where the subject of technology came up and many of the old timers would seemingly brag about their ignorance of the Internet and how they had plenty of business. Needless to say you don't hear much of that any more.
So, I wrote my own websites for a few more years up until around 1999. The sophistication of the web and the public's expectation of what a good site looks like became too much for me to keep up with. I found myself spending too much time on web development and not enough time on the horse that pulls the cart "Sales". So I made a decision to focus more of my advertising dollars on a professional web developer and Search Engine Optimization Company S.E.O... It wasn't long before I realized that the vast majority of people out there selling these services knew no more or even less than I did. I tried to screen them as well as possible but even so I wound up throwing away a lot of money and time with almost nothing to show for it. I'm not selling anything so I'm not going to go into who I have worked with then or now.
So now I've wasted a lot of money and needed to find something that worked. I also knew enough by then to not take somebody else's opinion of what or who I should go with. Then I had an epiphany! It dawned on me to find someone working in another market that was very web savvy and was doing a load of business. I chose Atlanta because it was a large and very competitive market. I surveyed all the search engines and examined the top five sites on each engine. I looked for features that are important to prospects. Listings! How easy was it to view the listings? How easy was it to navigate the site? Did it have a professional look about it? What type of feedback options did the site offer? I knew enough by then to realize that even though some sites were ranked very high on search engines they didn't do as well as others because they were not capturing the prospect very well and some had a poor system of contact management.
The reason I chose to look outside of my market was because I wouldn't appear threatening to the agents when I called to speak with them. One thing that I noticed pretty quickly was that most of them were pretty web smart already. I also noticed that the more they knew about how the whole thing works from beginning to end the more they were willing to share with me because I could understand what they were doing and was able to appreciate it.
I eventually found a guy slightly older than myself in Atlanta that was dynamite. He was knocking down the sales and really knew how to focus his time on selling. To put it all in a nutshell, he explained to me how he went through the same experiences as I and now he was plugged into a group of other agents that spoke our language. You see the key to success in Internet marketing is to do your own research. What I mean is, to go out there and look at what's working and take from that what you can adapt to your market (use of auto-responders etc.).
Equally as important was to work with a web developer and SEO who knew what he or she was doing, and would give you exclusivity in your market place. Please whatever you do never use a local company for this mostly because you won't have exclusivity in your market. Everyone else in town will be trying to copy your efforts.
My mentor gave me the name and number of his web guru. After a long talk with him I made the commitment to employ his services. But that's only the beginning. If you want a great site you're going to have to work for it. That means doing your own research and giving the designer everything they ask you for as quickly as possible. You'll want to handle your own leads, so you need to do a little research on auto-responders and a few other things. Since I was already familiar with basic HTML code I started to do my own weekly update for my prospects.
The resort market I worked in was very competitive and buyers liked to be updated with every new listing that came on the market the previous week. So over time using a consistent approach of sending out updates to every prospect that ever signed up on my site (that didn't elect to opt-out), I was eventually sending updates to over 2000 people a week.
I had plenty of leads and this worked so well for me that I eventually dropped all other forms of advertising. I wasn't advertising for listings but I was still taking the ones that were realistic with their expectations. So as my expenses went down my sales were going up. And let me tell you I would rather work with buyers any day. I kept myself and my licensed assistant busy as well as my administrative assistant and there was a lot less stress from sellers. I'm sure I could have taken it to the next level but after Hurricane Katrina my market literally rolled over and almost died for about 18 months.
The good news for me was that I wasn't killing myself trying to sell listings that were never going to sell like all my fellow agents were doing. And believe it or not I still had buyers. I would go to meetings and people would be saying "take as many listings as you can". I'm sure glad I wasn't listening to that. I'm sure all those listings will start to sell at some point and it looks like the market there has finally started to recover.
I have since moved to La Veta, Colorado. After the last ten years of running a REMAX franchise I am living my dream. I just started as a broker associate at Bachman & Associates in La Veta a small mountain resort town in the Southern Colorado Rocky Mountains. I'm also building my own log home out on my ranch at 8000 feet with a view to die for.
I just started designing my new site for Colorado, www.LaVetaForSale.com. It's not going to be anywhere near as elaborate as my old Florida site because it doesn't need to be, not a whole lot of competition here.
I am a prime example of an average person with an average personality that has done well simply by being observant and not being afraid to go for it. You won't always be successful. I wish I had a buck for every dumb move I ever made but the key is to keep going and realize when something just isn't going to work so you can take the hit on your ego and quit throwing away time and money on it. Well, that's what worked for me. Everyone has a different way of getting there; just make sure you have fun along the way!
Ed Kirkland CRS, Epro
Broker Associate
Bachman & Associates
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