In the words of the ultimate real estate marketer, Dean Jackson, “If you have one listing, you actually have an opportunity for at least five transactions.” Dean Jackson is the founder of GoGoAgent and Listing Agent Lifestyle. The following is his breakdown of how to turn one listing into 5 or more transactions using his listing multiplier method.
What money are you leaving on the table?
To understand your current ability to multiply your listings you need a measurement tool that defines where you stand and what you are leaving on the table. Enter the Listing Multiplier Index, a tool created just for this purpose.
Before you figure out where you stand, let’s review the 5 transactions available to you that all stem from that one, initial listing.
Listing Opportunity One: Your first opportunity is selling your initial listing, which most agents focus their attention, right? You do your job, launch a property, a buyer came along and purchased it and now you celebrate smiling in content at your commission.
Listing Opportunity Two: Hold on, don’t walk away so happy. You missed the opportunity to find the buyer. The person who bought the house you listed. It’s a great way to make twice as much money – find the buyer to buy the house you list.
Listing Opportunity Three: So you are now on the hunt for the perfect buyer for your listing, guess what, you have just opened up another opportunity. That buyer, if not interested in your listing, may buy another house through you, cha-ching, that’s the sound of opportunity number three.
Listing Opportunity Four: From marketing in the neighborhood of your listing, you create an opportunity to get another listing in this same neighborhood. Time to make sure everyone knows who that neighborhood’s expert agent is.
Listing Opportunity Five: The most important opportunity to orchestrate at the time you are setting up your listing is your referral from the seller. Start to plant this seed early on with your seller, so it is a natural occurrence for them to provide you with referrals by the end of their experience.
Related: The Secret to Converting Leads
Let’s check your current listing score
To determine your score, use your last 10 listings. You get one point for selling your listing, one for finding the buyer, one for finding additional buyers to work with, one for getting another listing in the neighborhood, and one for your referral. You have the ability to achieve 5 points for each listing, that’s 50 points total.
How many points out of 50 did you have? The score I find most agents fall into is between 8 and 15. Maybe you ended up with 10 points total, meaning all of your listings sold, but nothing more.
You achieved those 10 listings because your current “system” is set up to get a property on the MLS, stage it, price it right, promote it to other agents and get the property sold quickly.
In the past, you may have celebrated your average 7 to 10 days on market or your 98% of the asking price or 99% or 102% or whatever it is. But the reality is you likely lost a lot of money as well.
What money have you left behind?
Let’s take another look at your initial listing and say that each side of those transactions is worth $10,000. If you’re in an area of $300,000 homes or $350,000 homes, you’re looking at a $10,000 commission times 10 listings, which means you would have made $100,000. But what you missed out on was the $400,000 that you could have had if you had created a systematic way of multiplying your listings.
Just focusing on this fact can make a difference for you going forward. Even simple awareness can change things. Knowing that you’ve lost $400,000 on the last 10 listings that you had is an interesting place to start over from.
How many transactions are YOU missing out on?
Take the score you ended up with above, we’ll use 15 as an example, and divide it by 10 to get an index. 15 divided by 10 gives you an index of 1.5. This means every listing that you take is worth 1.5 transactions. You currently are missing out on three or more possible transactions from that listing.
Now you can see why being focused on this ” listing multiplier” approach is the answer. Rather than focusing on, “I don’t need to do Just Listed/Just Sold cards, infoboxes, or open houses because all of my listings sell so quickly”.
Focus on what NOT doing these things is costing you. Specifically, if your goal is to maximize the dollars you get out of every listing you touch.
The future success of your business
By applying this method, I’ve seen agents go from a 1.0 on the Listing Multiplier Index to a 3.5, with some simple changes and attention to detail. They went from making $10,000 in commission to $35,000 from one initial listing! That’s working smarter at its finest.
Imagine what it will be like to turn every listing that you take into multiple transactions. Imagine what kind of effect that will have if every time you take a listing, instead of getting one transaction, you get three or more.
What kind of impact will that have on your business going forward?