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Restructuring in a Bad Market

By
Real Estate Agent with eXp Realty & Working The Magic, LLC

If you are a local real estate agent in the Bellingham / Whatcom County area you may have started to hear a bit of the buzz coming from our BuyerTours Realty office.

Too say the least late August, September and early October was IMHO one of the worst two month period in real estate since I first got in the business in 2002.  We had seen some slow downs post July 2005 however with the banks and Wall Street effectively melting down in front of our eyes that ultimately was felt at a very real level at our firm, a company that I have been building from the ground up for about 6 1/2 years.

This was both good and bad...  Up until this point our office a long with our other offices and teams were doing a reasonable amount of business each and every month.  I had become more of a cheer leader then a true leader because the systems that we had put in place though not optimum weren't technically broke.

Well the wheels fell of the economy bike in September and now everything was broke.

The first thing we had to do was buy some time.  At that point in time we had really been running lean and mean without a lot of cash reserves.  Ultimately we had to raise some money pretty quickly.  We did that buy selling a small interest in a couple of our emerging teams for Vancouver BC as well as Las Vegas Nevada.

The next thing we did was evaluate the business and make some major changes to the business model for agents.  Because we focus a great deal of our time, money and effort on lead generation we have splits which highlight the fact that agents don't have to spend money on their marketing and advertising.

Ultimately we started to evaluate the fact that we have some of the top web presences in the markets we compete in for terms like Bellingham Real Estate that we started to ask ourselves the question what would these domains do for more traditional offices in terms of recruiting and retention.  Well it was obvious that if they had a good machine for recruiting they would be able recruit and retain a higher percentage of the agents that they have.  If they were ultimately able to attract and retain say 30 agents that would ultimately make the sites worth in yearly net revenue in excess of $300,000/year (assuming a 100% shop like a RE/MAX or in our market a Muljat).

Well not to shoot ourselves in the foot it wouldn't make sence to simply make our new model a 100% shop but we have put in a transition plan based on agent count and agent productivity to ultimately achieve the same goals.

That having been done we also put in a number of new initiatives with regard to agent participation in the marketing side of the business.  We have attracted some of the most talented people on ActiveRain to join us and start blogging right on our site as well giving us both original content and making the site much deeper and meaningful then simply a place to search for properties.

Ultimately our goal is to be the Web 2.0 Real Estate Company in Whatcom County.

Want to know more.  Call me: Glenn Sanford @ 360-220-1470 or fire me a message right here off of A/R.

All the Best,

 

Glenn Sanford
Founder / CEO
BuyerTours Realty LLC &
Working The Magic LLC
Check out our Real Estate SEO Blog.

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