Great Class today - Slaying God-Zillow with Bruce Gardner

Great Class today - Slaying God-Zillow with Bruce Gardner - I always enjoy listening to what Bruce brings to the classes he teaches, we are very fortunate to have this national real estate coach right here in our own back yard. Bruce is getting a lot of national speaking engagements and for good reason, his topics and coaching style resonate with all agents at all levels. In his book "Seven Styles How to Design Your Real Estate Career of Success and Significance", (I reviewed this book a few years ago) he goes into great detail on how to find the style that fits you and then how to grow a business based on that style, with examples of top agents around the country.

Todays topic was how to best utilize the tools that Zillow is providing for the agents and also quite a bit of useful data that shows we really should not be concerned with this as long as we get back to the basics of building the business.

I loved that he had stats on where everyone's business actually comes from, I did a blog post a few years ago about tracking my numbers from 2000-2010 and the numbers were very similar to his data. His data shows that 54% of all buyers and 64% of all sellers will use someone they knew or were referred to. I believe the numbers were less than 10% of clients actually found their agents through websites, whether it was one of the big 3 or a personal agents site, so should we continue to focus on the small % of people that are going to go this route regardless or should we focus on the more than half that will use us because of our connection to them.

I will share a couple tidbits, but I would highly recommend taking a class when Bruce comes to town, pick up a copy of his book and dig deeper into his programs.

Here is a taste-

• Trade in your marketing dollars for lunches with people you already know, this is a very affordable way to reach 6-figures, for less than $1500 annually you can take someone to lunch each and every week for a year, I personally did this in 2005 and my business went through the roof
• Go to Zillow and write your own profile, people are checking you out and they are going to Zillow, you might as well make the best of it
• Respond to customers real estate questions, be the expert they are looking for
• On listing appointments or buyer appointments, print off Zestimates, Trulia estimates and other real estate related "guides" and then show your clients how different each and every one of them are
• If you know someone that is thinking of selling in the next year or so, take them with you to preview homes, you will develop a very solid relationship and they will learn so much more about the time, effort and occasional issues that arise, that are all just a small part of what we do on a daily basis