Archive for real estate sales

If You Started in Real Estate Today, What Niche Would You Go After?

By Rob Minton · Comments (0) · Thursday, January 17th, 2013

I recently had a consulting call with a new agent. During the call, the agent asked a pretty good question that I thought I would share. His question was…

“If You Started in Real Estate Today, What Niche Would You Go After?”

Apparently my answer was not what he expected. Here was my reply…

“Where is the money at in your housing market?”

 

I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist adding this video! Back to this new agent…

He didn’t have a great answer to this question. Selling real estate is just like any other business. You have to pay attention to the numbers. What homes are selling? Where is buyer demand? Where can you generate the most income with the least amount of work? These answers differ from market to market and change over time with the peaks and valleys of the real estate market.

Historically, investors have been a great niche to focus on for several reasons. Investors typically buy multiple properties providing recurring sales with no additional marketing. In addition, the investor niche opens up the doors for many back end business opportunities including tenant placement and property management.

However, today investment properties are pretty challenging to specialize in and the reason is because the commission income per sale is typically not worth the amount of time you have to invest to close a sale. Most of the homes in our area have dropped significantly in value and require a great deal of work to close. Sure, you can charge the investor a higher commission or flat fee, but if the deal doesn’t close you still lose out. And sadly, many of these investor deals are not closing for various reasons.

My entire “Less Clients More Money” System for real estate agents was engineered to make more money from each client. The idea is to design your business so that you maximize your income from every single client. Make more while working less.

As an example, if you were looking to become a waiter or waitress at a restaurant in your area, what would be a better choice for you: Denny’s or Morton’s Steakhouse? At Denny’s you’ll have more tables to service, but this higher volume is offset by lower tips. On the flip side, at Morton’s Steakhouse you’ll have fewer tables to service, but you would make a great deal more in tips from each table. It would make more sense to become the best waiter or waitress at a higher end restaurant, because you’ll make more with less work.

If I were starting out in today’s real estate market, I would specialize in higher priced homes. Home prices for larger homes are very attractive right now and interest rates are so low that these larger homes have become very affordable. In fact, I just wrote a new lead generation advertisement highlighting a beautiful 4 bedroom, three and a half bath home sitting on a golf course that could be purchased for $1,800 a month with just 5% down. This home isn’t my listing, but is being used as a lead generation tool for another agent. (My Master Marketer Club members will get this advertisement next week.)

From a marketing perspective this situation (low prices and low rates) gives us multiple opportunities for lead generation and lead conversion and I would focus my time and attention today on larger, higher priced homes. The reason why is because I believe it will be easier to generate and convert quality leads and you’ll make more money with less work.

I sent this new agent my Automatic Showings Report and System and suggested he use it to generate and convert higher priced home buyers in his business. The reason I sent this to him was because I included several lead generation and lead conversion systems for higher priced homes. If you would like to learn how to set buyer home showing appointments automatically, watch the video at: AutomaticShowings.com

Additional Reading:

How to Follow the Money In Your Real Estate Business

My Secret Market Domination Strategy (Can be used for any niche)

A Marketing Strategy We Can Learn from Boxing

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My Own Prison…

By Rob Minton · Comments (0) · Wednesday, December 19th, 2012

Creed – My Own Prison
A court is in session, a verdict is in
No appeal on the docket today
Just my own sin
The walls are cold and pale
The cage made of steel
Screams fill the room
Alone I drop and kneel
Silence now the sound
My breath the only motion around
Demons cluttering around
My face showing no emotion
Shackled by my sentence
Expecting no return
Here there is no penance

For many years, I was diligent about protecting my cell phone number. However, over the last year or two, my cell phone number seemed to get loose and before long I was getting work related calls and texts constantly. I could be out to dinner with my family and in comes a text from a tenant about a plumbing problem. Buzz…buzz and another text comes in with another work related issue. I would hold off on responding to these issues, but began to realize I would think about the various issues buzzing in throughout our dinner. It became impossible to separate myself from work.

I was living in my own prison and there was no appeal on the docket.

In other words, my cell phone began to suck life away. I know the same is happening to you, too. Those of us in the real estate industry feel as if we need to be available for our clients 24/7. When we aren’t working (which is rare), we spend countless hours checking our phones for emails, texts and other messages. We are allowing our cell phones to slowly suck our lives away from us with each and every text, call, alert, or email. We create our own prison with no release date.

Our cell phones should be used for our convenience, not the convenience of everyone else. This means we should use our cell phones to enhance our lives, not distract our lives. If you would like to be released from your own prison, follow these steps and you’ll be free within a week.

1. Change Your Outgoing Voice Mail Greeting:

“Hi this is YOUR NAME and thank you for calling. I am no longer using this phone number and my new phone number is OFFICE PHONE NUMBER OR VOICE MAIL NUMBER. If you would still like to talk with me, please call me at this new phone number. If you leave a message on this phone number you just dialed, I will not get it and will not be able to return your phone call. Thank you for your understanding and I do apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Once again, my new phone number is OFFICE PHONE NUMBER OR VOICE MAIL NUMBER.”

2. Make Your Cell Phone Number Private:

Since our cell phones are for our convenience, it is important to block our number so that it cannot be captured by those we call. This way you can make out going calls and keep your number protected. If you need to call family or a friend, you can unblock your number and make the call. Or another option would be to simply let family and friends know that your calls will be blocked going forward. Yes, I know blocking and unblocking your phone number is a pain in the ass, but it is worth it for the peace you gain in the process.

3. Use Your Office Phone (not your cell phone) for the Majority of Out Going Calls:

I have a separate phone number in my home office with voice mail attached. I now use this phone for 99% of my out going phone calls. This phone number is not blocked so if someone calls me back, their calls automatically go to my office number, not my cell phone. This also will help you condense work to work hours because you’ll be returning calls from your office.

4. Remove Your Cell Phone Number From Business Cards & Marketing Materials:

Under no circumstances should you publish your cell phone on any marketing materials including business cards, flyers, advertisements, or for sale signs. You are trading your life away to every Tom, Dick or Harry who can interrupt you for any reason whatsoever. This is your life, not theirs. Protect it as if it were the most valuable asset you have, because it is. Use your office phone number on all promotional materials and return phone calls from your office.

5. Return Office Voice Mail Messages in a Timely Manner:

Now that we have all calls going to your office phone instead of your cell phone, return these calls in a timely manner. I try and return calls twice a day. Typically I return calls between 11 am and 12 noon and between 4 and 5 pm. This step is very important because if you don’t return their calls promptly, they will start calling your cell phone again. Train everyone that you will respond to calls to the new number. They will continue calling the number you respond from and it is critically important to respond to calls promptly from your office phone number.

6. Never Return a Call or Message Left On Your Cell Phone:
The first rule of fight club is… there is no fight club. The most important rule for exiting your own prison is… never return a call or message someone makes to your cell phone.

Just as with the step above, never ever return a phone call or message left on your cell phone. If you do, you will train the person that they can get to you through your cell phone. You have to ignore ALL incoming work phone calls and messages on your cell phone. This is not easy, but vitally important. If you break down and return a call to your cell phone, they will begin using your cell phone again and you’ll soon be in a prison of your own making.

7. Remove Work Email Accounts from Your Cell Phone

Save work emails for when you’re working. Delete your work email accounts from your phone. The reason I’m suggesting you delete the email accounts from your phone is because it is almost impossible to not check your email when you have an extra minute or two. I do not have the will power to not check it, so I have eliminated it completely. Checking work emails on your phone is a very slippery slope. I have a separate email account for friends, family, and newsletters that I enjoy reading. I do check this email on my phone, but it is free of work emails.

8. Stop Work Related Texts

Instead of sending work related texts, switch to sending emails when you’re working. This way when the recipient responds, they’ll be responding by email and there incoming email will not distract you from living. You’ll get their response the next time you work. When you receive a work related text, send a reply asking the person to use your work email address.

I just went through this process with my cell phone and within 7 days, I had peace back in my life again. I have walked away from my prison. The good news is you can walk away from your own prison, too.  It will take a week or two to train everyone to use your office number instead of your cell phone.

Now I realize most of you who read this will not follow these steps. You’ll falsely believe that you must be accessible 24/7. You will continue to let others control you life. However, a very small percentage of you will actually implement these simple steps. Those of you who decide to take your life back will soon have a great deal of peace back in your lives.

Related Articles:

The Dude Abides

How to Abide in Business

The Goal of Business

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Controlling Media for Your Business (My Secret Market Domination Strategy)

By Rob Minton · Comments (0) · Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

In this article, I’m going to share a project I was working on back in 2006 for my real estate business. This was a pretty big project at the time and I had invested a lot of $$$ and time into getting it off the ground. My business worked exclusively with real estate investors. We helped our clients buy single family homes that were kept for rental income. I had engineered lead generation and lead conversion campaigns to attract first time investors. Most of our clients managed their own properties, but as my business grew it became obvious that we were losing sales to prospective clients that had no desire to manage rental real estate.

We began offering different services to help our clients with their rental properties. One service we offered was a tenant placement service. With this service, we would charge the investor a flat fee and we would advertise, show and screen rental applicants for their properties. Once the home was rented we would turn it over to the investor to manage. In addition, we also started offering property management services, too. See StartPropertyManagement.com for more info on how to do this in your business.

The more I thought about my business and our clients, the more I realized that our ultimate success would be based upon the number of prospective tenants we could attract. If we had a large database of prospective renters and could fill vacancies quickly, we would keep our clients happy and make our lives a lot easier in the process. We also had experimented with other strategies and realized that we had unlimited demand for profitable auto-pilot investment properties. In other words, we could sell homes at will if we had tenants for them offering attractive cashflow.

One of the ideas I had to attract prospective tenants to our investor’s properties was to create a “Homes for Rent” Magazine that would be dropped at grocery stores and other locations where you would find the “Apartments.com” and “Home Buyer” magazines. So I designed the “Rent2OwnListings.com” magazine and you can download my first issue from 2006 in PDF format here:

Rent2OwnListings Magazine PDF

NOTE: Before we go further, please understand that when I sold my business the new owner quickly abandoned this project because he thought it was a waste of money. This means the phone numbers and websites detailed throughout the magazine are no longer active.

There is a lot to share with you about this magazine. Let me summarize some key points for you here:

1. The title of the magazine was one of our websites, “Rent2OwnListings.com.” The idea was to brand the website and get more visitors. This website featured the investment properties of our clients and the properties we had in property management. When a visitor to the website wanted more information about a home listed, they would submit their contact information and we would capture them as a new lead helping to build our database of prospective renters. We would then email them a weekly “hotlist” of new rent to own property listings.

2. We sold advertising space in the magazine to our investors. We would post our client’s homes on the Rent2OwnListings website for free. However, if they wanted to advertise their homes in our new magazine, they had to pay a fee. This fee was simply used to offset the cost of the magazine. I had plans to sell more adverting space as the magazine grew over time. Other advertisers would be insurance agents, lenders, credit repair services and more.

3. The magazine had two different types of advertisements. The primary advertisement featured throughout was a specific advertisement for homes we had for rent. The advertisement featured a picture of the property, details and a phone number for the prospective tenant to call. These leads were called back and invited to an open house at the property. The other advertisement you’ll see in the magazine was a direct response offer for a free report. You’ll see this advertisement on the cover of the magazine. The prospect had to call the hotline and leave a message with their name and mailing address. We would mail them a report (aka sales letter) that ultimately brought them back to us to help them find a nice rental home for their families. The idea was to capture as many leads as possible. If someone reading the magazine didn’t like any of the homes featured, they would hopefully call for the free report.

4. This magazine was published in December of 2006 before social media. Today, the magazine would obviously be designed to leverage Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media opportunities.

5. As you look through the magazine, notice that I didn’t brand myself or my real estate company. You won’t see “Multimillion Dollar Producer” or my picture. The goal wasn’t to make the magazine about me. It was to create media that would attract investors and renters to my business. The goal was to control media. I was “flying under the radar” as Craig Proctor taught us many years ago. You will see my company name as it was required by licensing laws for advertising.

Now this magazine was expensive and time consuming to produce. We paid to have the magazine designed, printed and hosted on the magazine racks throughout our area. It was a long-term investment for the business. The goal was to create advertising media that we controlled. Over time the plan was to completely dominate the rental side of the market. If a prospective tenant wanted to rent a home in our area, they would look for our magazine and to our Rent2OwnListings website. I realized that if we controlled the rental side of the market, we controlled the investor side of the market, too. The investor side of the market followed the rental side and we could sell homes at will because we controlled the income flowing into those rental properties. In addition, we could turn many of the renters in our database into regular home buyers extracting more sales and income.

This magazine was an asset that would grow in value over time. In fact, had I not sold my business in 2007, I believe the magazine would have become a business in and of itself that could have been sold separately after we had a few years of production and had fleshed out other opportunities surrounding it. The best way to build your business is to solve your client’s biggest problem. When you do this, you become indispensable. In my business, vacant rental properties became my client’s biggest problem. My goal was to solve this problem for them and build a very valuable asset in the process.

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Partnership = Money Machine?

By Rob Minton · Comments (0) · Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

Note this article is continued from “The Goal of Business – Part One” and “How to Turn Your Business Into a Money Machine – Part Two.”

There are three assets you must have in your business for it to become a money machine. These assets are marketing, systems and people. Without these three assets, you’re business will never be a money machine. Remember, the goal of a money machine business is to provide time freedom, not wealth. In this article, we’re going to spend some time on partnerships. A good partnership may be a strategy you can use to turn an existing business into a money machine, or to start a new money machine business. From where I see things, we all have two partnership opportunities:

1. Partner in your existing real estate business.
2. Partner to start a new business inside or outside of real estate.

A good partner can make a huge difference in any business. And if you stop and think about your current business, you might realize that a strategic partner might be a fast way to completely transform your business. For example, you might have a strong buyer business with a few buyers agents. You might consider partnering with a someone who has a strong listing business. This way, your two strengths compliment each other. Or maybe you have great systems inside your business, but struggle with marketing. Could you partner with someone that is great with marketing, but has poor systems?

Now I know what you’re thinking…

Partnerships? No way…they’re a nightmare!

Before you write off this idea on partnerships, it might be helpful if you shift your perspective a little bit. When most people start a partnership their goal is to make a ton of money….get rich. I now believe this is the major cause of all partnership problems. Each person in the partnership wants to take as much from the partnership as possible. The focus is on $$$ and if we haven’t learned it by now, greed is not good. Greed causes many problems and can rip a partnership apart pretty quickly.

If we shift our focus away from $$$ and instead focus the partnership on time freedom for the partners, the entire partnership dynamic changes. More time, not more money.

The goal of a money machine business is to provide time freedom and a partnership may be the fastest way to have time freedom in your business.

We have a family friend who started a home design and decorating business in Pennsylvania last year. She started this business with a partner and the business has taken off. In fact, they’ve already outgrown their current space and are looking for something larger. As this new business has grown, each partner has been able to take several vacations (three or four a year) with their families. This is because they’re able to leave their business behind knowing that money will come in the door and all problems will be handled in while their gone. Their business has become a money machine and the main reason is the partnership.

Two of my most successful coaching students Tom and Nick Karadza, who built a multimillion dollar real estate brokerage from scratch, are brothers who partnered together. Neither had any real estate experience when they started their partnership. Today, they have hundreds of clients, a large team of agents and multiple income streams. Their real estate business is an amazing money machine.

Another coaching student, Josh Schoenly, partnered with Ryan Hartman and their information marketing business literally took off. Both partners add tremendous value to the partnership and both partners can leave the business without worry.  They now have a very valuable money machine business.

Now I’m not saying that you should run out and start a partnership today. I’m simply suggesting that you be open to the possibility of one or more strategic partners. My guess is that you have a few strategic partners at your finger tips right now and may not realize it. Good partners can be found just about anywhere. You simply have to pay attention as you do go about your normal day. Or block an hour for “partnership possibilities” and make a list of everyone you know in one column. Now in the column next to it, list their skills and think if the person might make a great partner. When you’re finished, you’ll have a list of a few good potential partners.

P.S. Some of the best businesses in the world started as little partnerships. Some of these include Apple, Microsoft, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Ebay, Intel, Procter & Gamble, Yahoo and… Ben & Jerry’s. There is no way I’m leaving Ben & Jerry’s off the list of great partnerships. Their ice cream is da bomb.

 

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Categories : Business Re-invention, Time Management
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FEAR

By Rob Minton · Comments (0) · Monday, May 9th, 2011

In a previous article, I wrote about “The 50th Law” by 50 Cent and Robert Greene. It’s a good book with many lessons for those of us in sales – especially real estate sales.

For this article I thought I would share a little more from the book about fear. The reason I decided to write this article was because I have had many private phone conversations with real estate agents over the last few weeks and these agents, for the most part, are fearful. It is easy to understand why many agents are operating in fear. The real estate market has been brutal and we have no idea what is headed our way in the next 2 to 3 years.

From the book…

“Fear creates its own self-fulfilling dynamic – as people give in to it, they lose energy and momentum. Their lack of confidence translates into inaction that lowers confidence levels further, and on and on.”

When we operate our businesses out of fear, we make many subtle changes that continue to hurt the business going forward:

- We stop advertising to attract new customers
- We stop communicating with our sphere of influence and database
- We stop recruiting agents to help us in our businesses
- We focus more on cutting costs rather than growing revenue
- We begin to miss “opportunities” because we stop seeing them

Slowly but surely, our businesses are dying a slow and painful death. This is sad, but true. It’s important to examine ourselves and see if we are operating our businesses from a position of fear. To do so, we must be honest with ourselves and ask some very challenging questions.

  1. Do I really believe I can increase my home sales this year?
  2. Do I really believe I can increase my commission income this year?
  3. Am I generating enough leads each week/month to meet my sales goals? If the answer is no – why not?
  4. Am I working to build a better team?
  5. Am I testing new advertisements?
  6. Am I talking to enough qualified prospects each day?
  7. What new opportunities am I pursuing right now?

By answering these questions honestly, you should be able to “see” if you’re operating your business out of fear.

Remember Roosevelt’s speech?

” So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

In The 50th Law, the authors wrote…

“What Roosevelt sketched out in his speech is the knife’s edge that separates failure from success in life. That edge is your attitude, which has the power to help shape your reality. If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat mode…. you will give disproportionate attention to the negative and manufacture the very adverse circumstances you dread. If you go the opposite direction cultivating a fearless approach to life, attacking everything with boldness and energy, then you will create a much different dynamic…. something strange and remarkable can occur – that margin of control over circumstance increases.”

In reality what we fear typically isn’t as bad as we might initially believe. Think about whatever it is you’re worried about in your business and ask yourself what would happen if it actually happened? I can still remember how scared I was to buy my first rental property many years ago. To conquer this fear, I made a list of everything that could go wrong and what I would do if the item listed did go wrong. I quickly realized that what I was afraid of wasn’t very scary at all.  You might find the same thing regarding your real estate sales business.

It’s more important today than ever to operate our businesses from a position of strength. I realize it’s not easy, but it IS necessary.

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