Four Steps to Attract People to Support Your Real Estate Business

Real Estate Business

Don’t want to cold call or knock on strangers’ doors? Tired of spending your marketing dollars on farming materials or pay-per-lead programs? Starting to wonder if your friends really appreciate your frequent reminders to send business and referrals?

STEP ONE

Making a list of everyone you know and enter it into a contact management system. As you are putting together your very first list, or reorganizing the one you have, you will probably notice that there are two general categories of contacts, the first being those in your social network and the second being, well, everyone else who knows you and knows that you sell real estate.

STEP TWO

Writing an interesting, relevant, non-salesy announcement or reconnection letter to everyone on your list. Your friends have lots and lots of choices when it comes to real estate agents. Do not count on their loyalty just because you send them letters on a regular basis thanking them for their support and begging for their referrals. If you can speak intelligently and usually hold your listener interest, then you can transfer that ability to paper.

STEP THREE

Creating a business plan and set goals for yourself. All you need to do is sit down and think of activities you enjoy that include people you already know or increase the likelihood that you will meet new people. And then decide how many times a week, a month, a quarter or a year you are doing to do these activities.

“if you are a great real estate agent who stays in touch with the people you know without ever making a nuisance of yourself, you are way ahead of your competition.”

Here are some items:

• Lunch, coffee, dinner dates.
• Personal phone calls, personal emails, handing out business cards.
• Collecting business cards, collect business cards and adding names to your sphere of influence.
• Thank you cars and join a new group.
• Blogging and attend a community events.

STEP FOUR

Implementing your plan. It is pretty easy – just follow the plan! Schedule dinner dates, look for opportunities to pick up the phone and call people you know, spend half an hour every morning sending put personal emails. Keep your antenna up for opportunities to thank people. Accept invitations to parties and have a few of your own. Smile at people instead of avoiding eye contact.

The good news is that after a month or two of consciously following your plan, you won´t really need the plan anymore. You will be doing it naturally and you will be seeing results from it that will inspire you to keep it up.

So, the big picture… if you are a great real estate agent who stays in touch with the people you know without ever making a nuisance of yourself, you are way ahead of your competition. Your competition is made up of other great real estate agents and other real estate agents who stay in touch with their clients, but very few great agents who do a good job of staying in touch.

The Real Estate Buying Cycle

Real Estate Buying Cycle

First things first! Before you do anything else, you need to determine where the buyer is in his buying cycle. What criteria of house is he looking for? Budget rank, feature and amenities, neighborhood, hospital, and school district. After he find a dream house. What next! What you should know as real estate agent! This article will brief you how to do it from buyer´s house searching to closing the contract and getting the commission fee.

How agents approach and follow up with real estate customers?

“Research indicates that home shoppers begin the process phase one of buying a house about 4 to 6 weeks before the beginning of phase two, or 6 to 8 weeks before the beginning of phase three.”

The real estate buying cycle consists of three phases:

• Phase One: Information Gathering
• Phase Two: The Search
• Phase Three: Escrow (Contract to Closing)

Research indicates that home shoppers begin the process phase one of buying a house about 4 to 6 weeks before the beginning of phase two, or 6 to 8 weeks before the beginning of phase three.

Phase One: Information Gathering

The buyer is thinking about budget, features and amenities, neighborhoods, and school districts. The customer is solidifying in his own mind, what he wants to buy. He chooses his search criteria and his budget. Most importantly, Phase One of the buying cycle is the only part of the process that customers want to do on their own.

Phase Two: The Search

It is at this point that real estate shoppers understand that they need a real estate agent to help them in the process of finding their dream homes. The customer wants to look at real live houses. He now knows what he wants and is out to find it.

So how do you become that agent? By being there! You need to be there at the precise moment the prospective buyer decides it is time to find an agent. That moment he calls duty desk and asks to see a house or picks up a home magazine and calls the listing agent or is out driving around looking at neighborhoods and decides to call the number on a sign.

Phase Three: Escrow

Beginning with the acceptance of the contract and moving forward to closing, there is the third and final phase of the buying cycle.

The selection of the escrow holder is normally done by agreement between the principles. Real estate agent may recommend as escrow holder so you have to understand the process and having it with you all the time.

The duties of an escrow holder include:

• Following the instructions given by the principals and the parties to the transaction in a timely manners;
• Handing the funds and/or documents in accordance with the instruction;
• Paying all bills as authorized;
• Responding to authorized requests from the principals;
• Closing the escrow only when all terms funds in accordance with instructions and provide an accounting for same: the closing or settlement statement.

76% of all buyers will work with the first agent they talk to. If you are first, the odds doing the deal are 3:1 in your favour.

Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way by Richard Branson

Image from gettyimages

Richard Branson born to be a businessman. He had idea for business since he was eight years old when he had an idea to grow Christmas trees. He quit school since he was 16 hence he did not have formal education from any business school. Nowadays, he owns more than 300 companies from music business, to airline, to health club, to train, to retail, to space travel, etc. Many companies he lead as describe in the book, he changed from conventional business idea to be better than other. He knows how to make employees happy and customers happy then make stakeholders happy too.

Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I´ve done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin success.

The strength of “Losing my Virginity” is Branson’s modesty and honesty. He shows he is the man and sometime he shows himself is just a man. He speaks frankly about his first failed marriage, and the happiness he has enjoyed with his second wife and children. He bought Necker island just wanted to impress a girl. He has even stayed one night in prison because of tax fraud of his business from his early age and his mother gave him the strength. He knew how to deal with the debt when the bank told him that he had to pay money with three days otherwise they took his properties. He has big dream! He is visionary! He loves life! He loves doing business! He started airline business with only one plane across Atlantic Ocean but it was never easy because giant company Britain Airline wanted to eliminate any small airline by using some dirty trick but at the end Virgin Airline won and grew bigger and bigger. He sailed across Atlantic Ocean; He made attempts to circumnavigate the globe by balloon but ended up from Morocco to Hawaii. He found Virgin Galactic, which will take human to travel to space in the future. He does many things for better world for humanity to figure out how businessman, politician, and organisation around the world could work together to fight climate change, to make sustainable development, to protect wild animal, etc. He found a group called Elders to solve conflict and instability between country and country, and civil war in a country. Here some note from the book:

For the time being Nik and I concentrated on building up the image of our shop. We continued to work on different ideas to make our customers as welcome as possible. We offered the headphones, sofas and beanbags to sit on, free copies of New Musical Express and Melody Maker to read, and free coffee to drink. We allow them to stay as long as they liked and make themselves at home. Word of mouth began to spread, and soon people began to choose to buy records from us rather than from the big chains.

Iraq had invaded Kuwait the previous week and the world was in a tailspin. The price of crude oil has soared from $19 a barrel before invasion to $36. All independent airlines were now facing disaster: we were having to operate when the price of fuel had more than doubled, and the number of passengers flying had dried up.

Now that we had offered to provide the plane, the Red Cross put out an appeal on national radio and from that evening a warehouse at Gatwick started filling up with blankets. Two days later, all the seats were removed from one of our 747s and replaced by over 40,000 blankets, several tons of rice and medical supplies.

Television is a very powerful medium. By my speaking on TV, the tons of medicine, the foodstuffs and blankets and tents reached the refugees. Free advertising is to start on the BBC and ITV. I believe that by moving quickly a major disaster in this case has been averted. But, by not speaking out, it would not have been.

People asked me, `Why don’t you have some fun now?` but they were missing the point. As far as I was concerned, this was fun. Fun is at the core of the way I like to do business and it has been key to everything I´ve done from the outset. More than any other element, fun is the secret of Virgin success. I am aware that the idea of business as being fun and creative goes right against the grain of convention, and it´s certainly not how they teach it at some of those business schools, where business means hard grind and lots of `discounted cash flows´ and `net present values`.

Let me first explain the challenge that faces all us balloonists who want to go around the world. It is not just the elements, or the technological challenge. Sadly, it also involves people and politics. As always in life, it is not the ordinary people who get in the way. It’s a handful of politicians at the top who selfishly make their country and this world a sadder place to live. After all, this is a sporting challenge and a mission flown in peace. Let me begin by suggesting that you pull out a map; imagine you are a balloonist in Switzerland, in America or in Morocco as we were. Then cross out some of the countries whose politicians say you cannot cross: Russia, Iran, and Iraq.

What I’d always thought was that Virgin should be more than just a money-making machine, and that, as Virgin has the wealth of a small nation, we should use that wealth to tackle social issues more than we had in the past. Companies do have a responsibility to tackle them. Bill Gates, over the last few years, has invested enormous amounts of money trying to develop vaccines to stamp out deadly diseases. Despite the difficult time he’s had, and the bad press Microsoft has received, he’s given an awful lot back to the community. He’s a tremendous example to all other entrepreneurs.

My rate on this book is 5/5.