market update series

Take Control of the Real Estate Market Narrative and Keep it Positive

May 22, 2023

“The party’s over for America’s Housing Market …,” blasts a headline from MarketWatch.com.

“Is The Housing Market About To Crash?” asks one at BankRate.com.

This is the real estate news that consumers are hearing daily. It’s quite challenging, in fact, to find positive news.

Even though there is positive news.

It appears that agents who want the good news pushed out to help counter the bad need to take control of the narrative.

If you pride yourself on keeping in touch consistently with those in your CRM, whether by direct mail, social media marketing, or anything else, blasting out the good news is not difficult.

Real estate consumers beg to differ with the media tale

A funny thing happened to the media narrative on its way to becoming an ever-more negative Nellie. Fannie Mae released its Home Purchase Sentiment Index®, proving that real estate consumers are more positive than the media thinks.

“Fannie Mae’s Home Purchase Sentiment Index® (HPSI) jumped 5.5 points to 66.8 in April, marking the highest monthly gain in two years,” Adam Barnes said at TheHill.com.

62% of those surveyed said it’s a good time to sell. This represents an increase of “… 5 percentage points month over month,” Fannie Mae suggests in a recent press release.

Optimism about the housing market from those who will actually be involved in it. Who would’ve thought?

There is more positive news

March was a great month for home sellers. According to ShowingTime, there was an increase in foot traffic through homes for sale (mostly in the Midwest).

The low inventory prevents many would-be buyers from continuing their home searches, so the news that showings increased is very good.

If you have fence-sitting homeowners, share this news with them. And, just FYI, “Not all regions fared the same in March,” according to the pros at ShowingTime.

“The overall increase in showing activity was driven by the Midwest, up 18% from February, and the Northeast, up 15%. The South stayed relatively flat with a monthly increase of 1.4%, and the West dropped 2.7%.”

Your part in the process

Sharing the positive aspects of the market with your potential clients is more important than ever. Blog, post to social media, and create direct mail pieces to grab their attention and fight the negative narrative.

PLUS: When you have time…below are some marketing tools to help support your success.

1. Put Your Real Estate Business a Step Above with Your Own Branded Magazine

Homes & Life Magazine is a customizable magazine with rich, full-color content and a sharp, professional aesthetic. It includes compelling, direct response-driven articles written by real estate industry experts and engaging lifestyle content. Send out Homes & Life Magazine in Just Minutes – No Minimums Required. Or we’ll ship it to you. Homes & Life Magazine is the ultimate “Coffee Table Lingerer”! …and it costs less than sending a greeting card! – Click Here

2. The Free 12-Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan

The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 12-Month Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do and when. Four key market segments include niche Markets, geographic farming, sphere of influence, and past clients. – Click Here

3. The Free Interactive Real Estate Business Plan

The Free Interactive Real Estate Business Plan allows you to enter your business goals for this year and get a breakdown of how many prospects, listings, closing, and so on are needed to reach your goals. – Click Here

4. The Become a Listing Legend Free eBook

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Become-A-Listing-Legend-3D-Book-White-274x300.jpg

Ready to take a vertical leap in your real estate career? If you’re looking for inspiration…and the tools and methods to dominate a market and go to the top in real estate…you’ll find them in this free book. – Click Here

How to Determine Market Value in a Transitioning Housing Market

Apr 17, 2023

Depending on the condition of the real estate market, preparing a CMA for a listing appointment can be either a snap or it can cause you to go into a total breakdown.

The latter is an exaggeration, but when a market is in flux, a CMA can be challenging to put together.

In a market with rapidly rising home prices, you’ll find that recent home sale prices haven’t caught up to what is actually happening with current sales. In a declining market, the same is true, and you’ll risk overstating market value.

In a nutshell, both transition markets present a conundrum for the listing agent because “… comparable properties reflect yesterday’s home sales rather than the present market value,” which is higher or lower “… than it was even a few weeks earlier,” suggests Carrie B. Reyes at Firsttuesday Journal.

The CMA

For the benefit of the newbie, in a nutshell, compiling a CMA involves the following steps:

Go through the MLS to find recently sold listings and gather three to five that most match the subject property in age, size, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and lot size.
In a normal market, you would choose comps that sold within the past six months. In a transitioning market, grab comps that have sold most recently.
Typically, you would restrict your comps to within one mile of the subject property. Again, you may have to adjust this proximity outward in the current market.

A while ago, the experts at Fannie Mae put together a guide for appraisers entitled “Fannie Mae Addresses Declining Market Issues,” a copy of which can be found at AppraisalInstitute.org.

You’ll find that some of the information included addresses how to deal with a more rapidly declining market than we are experiencing right now, but you can also take other useful tidbits from it.

Naturally, if this current market transition isn’t your first rodeo, you’ll sail through the market evaluation process with no problem. Less experienced agents, however, may find themselves in a panic or, worse, end up overvaluing their listings.

This is where a mentor would come in quite handy. Lacking such a goldmine of information, you may want to run your final analysis by your broker to ensure it fits current market conditions.

PLUS: When you have time…below are some marketing tools to help support your success.

1. Put Your Real Estate Business a Step Above with Your Own Branded Magazine

Homes & Life Magazine is a customizable magazine with rich, full-color content and a sharp, professional aesthetic. It includes compelling, direct response-driven articles written by real estate industry experts combined with engaging lifestyle content. Send out Homes & Life Magazine in Just Minutes – No Minimums Required. Or we’ll ship it to you.

Homes & Life Magazine is the ultimate “Coffee Table Lingerer”! …and it costs less than sending a greeting card! – Click Here

2. The Free 12-Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan

The Real Estate Marketing Planner is a powerful 12-Month-Guide that strategically defines what marketing to do and when. Four key market segments include niche Markets, geographic farming, sphere of influence, and past clients. – Click Here

3. The BusinessBase, SOI building system

The most effective thing you can do to build a real estate business is to become more visible, more likable, and remembered more often. The BusinessBASE™ not only checks these boxes but is also a business-building machine. In two easy steps, you can begin to build a robust sphere of influence that will provide you a lifetime of repeat business and referrals. – Click Here

4. The Free Interactive Real Estate Business Plan

5. The Become a Listing Legend Free eBook

Starting a Real Estate Team? Here are a Few Things to Consider

Mar 20, 2023

Imagine a trip to a doctor’s office. You approach the front counter, and there she is, ready to check you in for your appointment. Then, she is, again, prepared to accompany you from the waiting room to the exam room. She performs your exam and is at the desk out front to take your check for your insurance co-pay and schedule your next appointment.

Aside from seeing patients at various times during the day, this doctor will clean exam rooms after each patient leaves, call-in prescriptions to pharmacies, order and interpret diagnostic tests, work on bookkeeping, schedule appointments for other patients, follow up on telephone messages, meet with pharmaceutical company representatives and clean the office.

If this were your doctor, we’d bet you would think she’s either crazy or arrogant. After all, she’s most likely not a trained bookkeeper, administrative assistant, or skilled in sanitation practices in physicians’ offices.

The Market Update Postcard is shown above. See more **HERE**

When any professional works in a practice with many moving parts, it’s simply foolish to presume to wear all the hats.

Many agents across the country figured this out long ago. “We aren’t professional photographers or stagers. Nor are we phone specialists or transaction coordinators. And, we don’t want to be any of those,” says a friend and agent in Los Angeles, California.

This is why this agent built a team, offering professional specialists to each client. In her estimation, this team’s approach to real estate has made her so successful.

When you reach a specific volume, taking your business to the next level requires assistance. Most agents start with admin help.

However, the next level is to build a real estate team.

Structuring your team

Before you jump into the hiring process, consider how you’ll structure your team. This helps you learn who you need to hire and which skills to be on the lookout for. Check out Chris Linsell’s brilliant but simple Real Estate Organizational Chart at theclose.com.

To give you an idea of how to staff your team, take a look at our California friends:

3 listing coordinators
3 staging strategists
An architectural photographer
Marketing Coordinator
6 phone specialists to attract and reach out to potential buyers
17 buyers’ agents

Photo Introduction postcard. See more, **HERE.**

Naturally, you won’t need this many team members when you start but consider adding as your business increases.

Each cog in the aforementioned well-oiled wheel works in tandem with the others. For instance, the phone team recently received a call from a homebuyer interested in one of the team’s listings.

“The call came in at 10:30 on a Saturday morning,” according to our friend. “Our phone specialist returned the call two minutes later, at 10:32, and alerted one of the showing agents on the team. This agent met with the buyers to show them the home at 1 p.m. An hour later, they wrote an offer. This team approach had our listing sold in four hours.”

Impressive, right?

Check back soon for more ideas on forming a real estate team.

PLUS: When you have time…below are some marketing tools to help support your success.

1. Put Your Real Estate Business a Step Above with Your Own Branded Magazine

Homes & Life Magazine is a customizable magazine with rich, full-color content and a sharp, professional aesthetic. It includes compelling, direct response-driven articles written by real estate industry experts combined with engaging lifestyle content. Send out Homes & Life Magazine in Just Minutes – No Minimums Required. Or we’ll ship it to you.

Homes & Life Magazine is the ultimate “Coffee Table Lingerer”! …and it costs less than sending a greeting card! – Click Here

2. The Free 12-Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan

3. The BusinessBase, SOI building system

4. The Free Interactive Real Estate Business Plan

5. The Become a Listing Legend Free eBook

How to Market Your Real Estate Business During a Downturn

Feb 9, 2023

Recessions used to be painfully easy to spot. Lately, however, the definition of the word “recession” seems to stymie even the most experienced and well-regarded economists.

Is it any wonder that the general public, and real estate consumers in particular, are now confused about the economy?

Whether or not your real estate practice is feeling the financial pinch that many other small businesses are experiencing, it very well may be in the future.

Should you discontinue marketing during the downturn?

Your competition may be tempted to do so. Which is the biggest reason you should absolutely not stop marketing.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you several tried-and-true real estate business marketing methods that, although some are time-consuming, will be easy on your budget.

The Market Update Series is shown above. To see more, Click HERE.

Consider increasing your content marketing

Content marketing, by definition, is not meant to promote your brand (although it often does) but to attract and spark interest in your real estate services.

Right now, consumers (whether ready to buy or sell or wait it out) want to be kept abreast of the economy and the housing market and get tips on how to solve challenges in buying or selling in this market.

Blogging is one of the best and least expensive ways to accomplish this. Before you put your fingers to the keyboard, however, let’s take a look at some of the plusses of blogging:

Have a blog on your website? If you consistently add content to it, you may receive 97% more inbound links than the agent who doesn’t have an active blog. “Inbound links boost a website’s authority, which is a major page-ranking factor.” (Fundera.com)
Marketing advisory firm DemandMetric finds that “… companies with blogs generate 67% more monthly leads than those without.”
Their research also finds that you’ll spend 62% less on content marketing than on other forms of marketing.

Structure your blog posts for easy-reading

Most of us have landed on a blog post that hits us like a wall of words. And many will pass it by for just that reason.

Blog content needs to be easy to read, so break up long paragraphs and create additional interest by inserting bullet points, numbered lists, and lots of white space.

The folks at SEMRush find that a bulleted list every 500 words produces an average of 70% more traffic than posts that don’t contain these breaks.

Then, vow to add some spice to each post

Plan on adding images to each post. Types of engaging images include:

Stock photos
Screenshots that help explain the content
Infographics
Charts

According to the SEMrush State of Content Marketing 2020 Global Report, your blog posts’ images are critical to getting more traffic.

Blogging consistently during an economic downturn shows your website visitors that you’re still engaged in the industry, despite the slowdown. It demonstrates that you understand their concerns and are ready to assist them.

PLUS: When you have time…below are some marketing tools to help support your success.

1. Put Your Real Estate Business a Step Above with Your Own Branded Magazine

Homes & Life Magazine is a customizable magazine with rich, full-color content and a sharp, professional aesthetic. It includes compelling, direct response-driven articles written by real estate industry experts combined with engaging lifestyle content. Send out Homes & Life Magazine in Just Minutes – No Minimums Required. Or we’ll ship it to you.

Homes & Life Magazine is the ultimate “Coffee Table Lingerer”! …and it costs less than sending a greeting card! – Click Here

2. The Free 12-Month Done-For-You Strategic Marketing Plan

3. The BusinessBase, SOI building system

4. The Free Interactive Real Estate Business Plan

5. The Become a Listing Legend Free eBook