Realtor Solutions

Real Estate Agents Succeeding This Summer

There’s no shortage of challenges this summer for Realtors.  Yet there’s no shortage of opportunities to succeed and scale up your real estate sales business either. Mind over matter.

Right off the bat, the challenge is about your mindset – that you won’t grow sales or become the market leader. It’s the issue of enforced limitations on your mind — rampant in the media, our society, and even in the real estate profession. Everyone gets sucked in, but successful people always escape it.

Really, there are no limits on your reach, leads you can nurture, or sales you can generate. You can eliminate these mental hurdles by focusing on big picture sales goals and doing what is required to reach them.  If you’re serious about yourself and your real estate career, you’ll clear the path.

After you’ve explored these 10 hurdles to success below, you will be able to commit to that path.  Almost all real estate agents have these challenges, and the most brilliant Realtors overcome them.  They do that in one moment by visualizing a business with no hurdles, because that’s where they’re going to be.

First we have some house cleaning to do.

2021 Summer and Fall Sales Season

And this summer and fall and into 2022, we’re into a little period of price flattening, which actually causes buyers to get back in the game and sellers to finally list their home for sale. It’s an ideal time to take control.

Just one point about sales leaders is that they are big picture people. They are the few who look at the challenge, and realize it is a big picture problem.  Vision = Big Picture Viewpoint.  And solving these 10 hurdles below brings you back to back to the big picture issue. That may be an issue of confidence and commitment that ruins your momentum.

The first challenge is in opening your mind to full access to digital marketing. You have to unblock, and see the digital real estate marketing channel’s capacity to give you everything you want. If you can’t open your mind yet, then it’s because you haven’t surmounted these ten key hurdles:

The BIG 10 Realtor Hurdles

1. Missing Unique Value Proposition – Let’s tackle the real number one issue right away. You don’t think you’re better and offer more value than other real estate agents. Not believing in your product/value leaves you like a raft floating in the ocean.

In a competitive market, you’re left unable to compete and make an impact.

Does your UVP suck? Why should a homebuyer or seller work with you? Why are you the most relevant person to help them with their buying selling experience? Are you personally aligned with their goals?

The matter isn’t really your brand or UVP, it’s really about you targeting the wrong target clients. By segmenting your audience, you’ll find buyers and sellers who want you.  All you need to do is work with a real estate marketing specialist to help you define your UVP, build awareness to the right audience, and begin a publishing strategy that starts the persuasion process.

Read up on real estate agent branding and how you can elevate your unique value proposition.

2. Weak Online Visibility – Another key issue. With minimal presence online, how will you reach prospects and communicate your value to them?

If they can’t find you readily, easily and consistently online, they’re finding another agent.  The other agent might be doing this right.  Visibility and reach are important. Those who get seen, get the sale. It’s not about vanity, it’s all abut access to clients. Without access, it’s tough to succeed.

Far from being impossible, visibility is achieved through excellence in real estate marketing packages.  The solution is to build out a series of visibility-building platforms including SEO, content marketing, social media, paid advertising, and a Realtor website.

Read more on creating the channels to capture the reach and visibility you must have.

3.  Insufficient Marketing Budget – A big mental stopping point for many Realtors. If leveraging expert real estate marketers and advertising is critical to success, how will you pay them?

You need to find investment partners who want in on the extravagantly profitable world of real estate sales.  Do you think there will be any takers? In fact, many of the Realtors that dominate today got funding from an investor to seed their business.  Whether for buying properties, conducting advertising and marketing, and developing key partnerships, they did what they had to do to ultimately reach market leader position.

Investors do want in.  It’s up to you to create a profit sharing model they can believe in. This requires commitment from you, and a plan that you can live with.  You won’t create a plan that creates stress for you and leaves you without the power to get results.  Finding mature real estate investors with the right mindset (systematic, empowering, and helpful) is important.

Without a good sized marketing and business budget, your sales will progress as fast as a turtle.  Read more on finding investors for your profitable real estate sales business. This is important!

4. No Emotional Impact! – After you’ve targeted and reached great prospects, you still have to get their attention and become relevant to them.

Your website, content marketing and social media sites will help you build impact. Impact depends on relevance, not on being loud, using hype, or being slick. Buyers and sellers just want material relevant to their goals and challenges.

Choosing the right topics, visuals, storylines, and key points to make is important to becoming relevant.  Different prospects have different values, imagery, voice, words, and goals.  Fill your marketing with images that appeal to the prospects you think will work with you.  An epic blog post or entertaining, insightful video can work well. A good home listing for sale is also impactful.  Impact means a focused message that makes them feel you have the path to satisfaction.  It’s not the thing, it’s the path. Present the material and messaging that makes them believe you are the Realtor who can get the right results for them.

5. Realtor Missing in Action – You’re not present in your marketing communications. Maybe you handed it over to a low price real estate marketing agency to pump out depersonalized, syndicated content.

Home buyers and seller prospects want to see the real you online, so you must appear to be publishing personal posts, making comments, offering stories and insight from your own personal experience – (significant, personalized).  If your real estate marketing consultant is doing this for you, it’s okay because prospects will respond as if it really was you.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve congratulated colleagues and connections for their great posts online, only to have them tell me it wasn’t them. They hired a good copywriter.  I believed it because I wanted to.

If you’re outsourcing content, then your content creator must get your personality, values and language into it, so when you meet the new buyer/seller lead, the meeting is natural and builds on what they’ve experienced on your website — authenticity and comfort.

6. Missing or Poor Quality Content – In the mobile, digital era, good content is what people are hungry for. It’s not just data, it’s about support for their quest. Good content shows you’re enthusiastic about your business and your desire to help your customers. Buyers and sellers don’t want to waste their time in conversation if they can see you’re not into it. Your website content surely reflects your zest for your business.

Online content is more than fodder for Google’s search rankings. Great content associates you with the customer’s ideals and intent. It aligns you with the path to their home ownership or selling dream. It makes you look like a leader. If other realtors have excellent content, they’ll grab up that prospect and get that phone call.

7. Transaction Oriented– this is where the Realtor looks at a sale as an isolated event where they collect a commission. Some Realtors take pride in this brand of transaction specialists.  There’s no panache in that. It just tells buyers and sellers that you’re hitching a ride on the success train.

Being present isn’t much of a value proposition.

Being transaction-oriented assumes you have the property listings and all that’s needed is to close the deal. It takes much more as you know, to nurture any lead through to close.  Leadership, empathy, support, helpfulness, responsiveness, reliable advice, and decisiveness all come into play. So, shouldn’t these be the essentials of your brand image?  They imply that you’re with the client from start to finish, giving them big confidence that you’re the most relevant Realtor for them.

8. No Google Rankings – Search is huge whether free organic results or PPC ads. You have to be there ranking high and wide in the Google search results. These are the house hunters and home sellers who are online doing active research. They’re the most ready and qualified prospect possible and perhaps the easiest to convert.

If you’re thinking you can’t rank against big competitors, that’s not correct. Google’s algorithm has some interesting features (SEO secrets) that make top rankings possible for individual Realtors. I discuss many of them but it actually requires orchestration of many of them to beat competition like Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Sothebys, Remax, Trulia and the rest.

But I’ve making a living doing sophisticated search engine optimization for 23 years and I frequently beat the biggest corporations. Get it out of your head that isn’t doable. It is.

9. Ugly Dysfunctional Website – An ugly web design, with poor graphics and a non-inviting, non-engaging interface is a downer.  Since leads always land on your website (they’ll always Google you), the website must deliver value and reinforce the Realtor brand image you create.

Consider that your Realtor website isn’t a listing of homes for sale, but rather a way prospects test your sincerity, skills, likeability, and your UVP.  They’re not going to choose a Realtor who neglects this opportunity to connect with them. Always respect the medium that brings them to you.  This is 2021.

Whoever you hire to redesign your new website, make sure it looks and feels right and provides an exceptional visitor experience. You’ll find Website templates that work very well, although you’ll have to look hard to find the right one. Visuals and how the site looks and feels are really important. Images? I would chose bold imagery that’s not like anyone else’s. Differentiation requires some thinking, but you have to present a unique brand.

10. The Call to Action

The call to action involves orchestrating your complete digital marketing strategy to focus prospects minds so they call you right now. Personally, I don’t believe in forms and email.  Time is an enemy. Getting a phone call asap to begin the personal engagement process is the goal.

Your marketing content is designed to create the right image, and give them an urgent reason to call you right now.  The sooner they hear your voice, and they hear discussion that’s consistent with their goal of buying/selling satisfaction, the sooner they’re going to choose you.

All of your digital content on any marketing channel is just a prelude to contacting you. The message is to make them feel like they can’t wait to speak with you. Your content then has to contain a certain open-ended conversation with reasons for them to contact you. It creates questions, reasons to confirm, points to explore further, and an addictive need to get involved with you.

You’ve created the personal magnetism, engaged them, and given them a reason to contact you.

Now that you’ve explored most of the hurdles stopping you from succeeding, you must begin to process that leads to hiring me as your dedicated real estate marketing specialist.  Ambitious, smart agents want reassurance that digital marketing will make a difference. Make the right choices, do the right things, invest the right funds and it will make you a market leader.

You know I’ve been doing this for 23 years, have a focus on creating better value than competitors, have authored two books, and I am actively asking for your business.  You must have someone who is committed to helping you succeed, to find solutions to your sales challenges.  That’s a lot of work, but we’ll get it done.

Check out these industry leading Realtor marketing services packages now and let’s get this ball rolling!

Call me at 416 998 6246.

Gord provides services for clients in Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Bay Area, Denver, Dallas, New York, Austin, Vancouver and Toronto.

Leverage a rare skill/passion for real estate marketing and building leadership in your regional real estate housing market.  Gord has consulted with many big brand corporations in Canada, London UK, California, Florida, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois including Franklin Sports, Remax, Dream Homes Magazine, Delta Hotels, Boston Laser, Humboldt Moving Company, ManageCasa, ManageCasa, United Van Lines, and more.

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