Posts

Often, we have ideas about how to grow our real estate agency business. Some are good and some aren’t, but many ideas never get a chance. This is because we think about something to do, or maybe a way to do something better, but never do it. Just think about it for a second, have you thought of something that you should do, or something that can be done better, a more “right” way, but just never do it?

Everyone has, they just don’t always admit it.

Now think of why you do it? What is the reason that you know you should be doing something, the right thing, but are not?

Wait! Save that answer for a therapy session. To be successful in real estate agency you don’t need to know why, you just need to do something when you realize there is a better way to do it.

Wasn’t it Confuscious, or maybe Phil Knight, that said “just do it.”

Don’t get “analysis paralysis,” if you know there is something that you should be doing, or perhaps a better way to do it, then take control in one easy step: make it so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where are your real estate clients? Are they offline or online?offline and online real estate marketing

There are two very important things to think about before you start on a real estate marketing campaign.

  1. What is your brand/identity
  2. Where are your clients

Brand/Identity is a topic for another day. For now we need to figure out where your clients are in order to effectively market to them.  So, this is what you do:

The first step is to draw a line between the online and offline world. Unplug your clients from the internet and think about the offline behavior of your target audience.

Where do they go when they are out and about? Are there groups that they are part of? What associative activity brings the community together and makes them a captive audience?

Schools are the most obvious example of a community staple alongside church. What about clubhouses or community events? The top agents in my community are at every neighborhood event promoting their business. When there isn’t an event they are sponsoring garage sales or promoting their local open houses.

Let’s go back online. When your target demographic is toying with the idea of buying or selling a home, how do they do it? Do they go online? If so, how would they come across you online?

Agents who have determined that their clients are online are very clever. They have an abundance of yelp reviews that mention specific keywords that relate to their niche.

They have a website dedicated exclusively to the local HOA with their info everywhere. These agents know that online clients do research and know what they are looking for. Top agents know these clients are looking up keywords that relate to housing tracts, schools district, HOAs, and other local niche words and landmarks.

What percentage of your clients are better reached online versus offline? You must determine this and dedicate a percentage of your marketing efforts to online and offline efforts before you draw up a business plan.

 

 

 

We’ve all seen the real estate agents that call themselves consultants rather than agents or salespeople. The reason is blatantly obvious, and a little cheesy, but there is actually a higher Real Estate Consultantlevel and deeper meaning than these real estate consultants may have ever considered.

Let’s face it, the title “salesman” has a bad connotation. People that are in sales squeamishly change their title to something like account executive, account rep., and the sales department has been rebranded as the business development team. Real estate agents would never call themselves salespersons on a business card, and to put their title as “real estate agent” strikes some agents as cold or generic. However, “consultant” is much more elegant. It just has a ring to it that that suggests a knowledgeable advisor.

Top producing agents don’t sell homes like most salespeople sell products. A home is an extremely dynamic and personal product, consumers already have in mind their needs. Their preferences surpass what they will ever tell their agent.

This is where the title “consultant” rises to more than just a better sounding title and becomes the true sense of the word. Good agents deliver high quality data to their clients and educate their clients so they can rapidly make a sound decision. They don’t push homes onto people like most salespeople push products. Facilitating home sales is a matching and information game.

Top agents do have the qualities of top salespeople because both personality types are often charming, persuasive, and carry a purpose. These qualities are just used differently.

Agents sell their brand and character, then they get down to business and perform the work when contracted. Salespeople sell a product and use their brand and character as reinforcement to make the sale.

All top agents make good salespeople, but not all top salespeople make good agents.

Please CLICK HERE  learn more about joining Balboa Real Estate

 

 

 

 

 

Many agents have the wrong idea about the purpose of their real estate website.

There is an important distinction that must be made about websites for real estate marketing

Your website is more of a trust and credibility tool and less of a lead generation tool.

Website traffic competition for real estate websites is extremely saturated. The cost to be a contender and elbow your way in for a sliver of a market share far outweighs the return on investment in Balboa Real Estate websitealmost all cases. It’s not advised to try to compete agains massive companies like Zillow and Redfin and their crippling marketing budgets for search engine traffic.

A website for real estate marketing is one that portrays you as a professional and shows that you have your act together enough to have an attractive website. This is somewhere people go to look you up when they are doing internet searches on your name in order to verify your credibility and slowly build trust. Your website should be mentioned on your marketing materials and should be full of content that will engage your target prospects in order to build a relationship.

Don’t get me wrong, your website can be geared towards lead generation too. 

If you are determined to generate leads from your website then you would need to load tremendous amounts of ultra-refined content on your website that is geared to dominate a unique segment that isn’t already heavily saturated. However, their is a cost-benefit analysis to all this. Could the efforts and resources that are put into your website to generate leads be better spent on another form of marketing. In most cases, yes, but YMMV.

Learn About Our True 100% Commission Plan Here

 

 

Dear Agents,

As we have said many times, successful agents have a branding niche for their real estate marketing purposes. They may conduct business out of their respective specialty areas, Yelp Real Estate Marketingbut they market their niche. We can talk all day about developing a niche, but for now let’s do a case study.

This particular agent (CLICK HERE) brands himself as the “downtown condo guru” which defines his niche and is not too exclusive because basically everything in his zip code is a condo!

He has twenty six  5 star Yelp reviews. I know from first hand knowledge he gets business just from his Yelp page alone. On the right hand of the Yelp page is a column, “People Who Viewed This Also Viewed…” One agent, has sixty four 5 star reviews. Unlike the condo guru, I don’t have firsthand knowledge of how well he does but I’m sure Yelp is a great tool for his lead generation.

Before Yelp and web-based tesimonials became huge many agents used tools from “By Referral Only”, a Realtor marketing program. One element of the program was to seize every chance you get to get a testimonial from every client you come in contact with. Then, every time you met a new prospect you gave them your portfolio of testimonial letters. The REMAX agent that was the Beta tester for the program had compiled so many testimonials that he would leave a phone book of happy client letters at his listing appointments. Who does the listing prospect choose, the nice agent or the other nice agent with 30 families recommending him?

Do you have a Yelp profile? Have you asked for reviews from your clients? For real estate marketing they matter.

 What is cloud storage and how it applies to Real Estate

By now most agents know what cloud storage is and how beneficial it can be for real estate agents.

Balboa Real Estate Turbo Transaction

To put it simply, cloud storage is a way for all your real estate documents and forms to be loaded onto a server that allows an agent to access them from any computer at any giventime. This server where all your files are stored on is called the “cloud.”

If you have gmail, hotmail, or any web-based e-mail then you are essentially already usually cloud storage. This is because all your e-mail and pictures that people send is stored somewhere else. An e-mail cloud is remote storage so you can access your e-mail from any computer with internet access.

If a real estate agent applies the same concept of accessing an e-mail cloud and applies it to accessing real estate transactions online, then they are using a real estate cloud.

Balboa Real Estate has developed a proprietary cloud exclusively for real estate transaction management.  It is entirely free for agents to use and the fastest and easiest way to submit completed files.

Once a listing is taken an agent can log on and in a matter of seconds upload the listing agreement. Same idea working with buyers. Any document uploaded can be accessed online and sent to any e-mail address at any time. Lost documents become a problem of the past.

When an offer is received on a listing an agent can open escrow, request a preliminary title report, and order and NHD all with a click of the button. This gives the agent a running start on expediting the transaction.

When an agent or the transaction coordinator uploads transaction documents throughout the escrow the the file will be complete so that there won’t be any last minute paper shuffling.

Turbo Transaction is another member service available for Balboa Real Estate agents. We offer agents 100% commission and residual income.

 

 

 

A blog on your real estate website is essential for adding the quality marketing content we always talk about.

 

This video reveals a secret tip to use for automatically generating content for you blog.

Here are the instructions:

Remember that original targeted content is best.

Put targeted words into Google Alerts and have them e-mailed to you daily.

When you receive relevant articles from Alerts, read them and then type a brief summary and introduction followed by the article link.

Do not copy and paste the article as duplicate content is bad.

Contact me with any questions.

info@BalboaTeam.com | 100% Commission Real Estate | 949.891.1094

 

 

What is a Virtual Assistant (VA) for Real Estate?

 

Virtual Assistants are people that work remotely and can do any number of online services.
For real estate, virtual assistants offer marketing services for prospects, lead generation, data entry, article writing, website or blog content, market research, social media management and so much more. Balboa Real Estate offers virtual assistant (VA) services for a discount for our agents.

 

Visit our Virtual Assistant page by CLICKING HERE

 

Balboa Real Estate offers 100% Commission + Residual Income CLICK HERE

 

 

 

How to fill out the 2013 California Residential Purchase Agreement for reference

This video should serve as a brief overview for agents that would like a reference to fill out their California residential purchase agreement.

Remember: Balboa Real Estate offers 2 commission options

1. $597 per Transaction

or

2. $1497 per year. That’s it!