$11 Million Sold off the Internet This Year Spurs Agent to Innovate More

Commentary by Mike Parker Print Article

RISMEDIA, July 14, 2009-A little less than 18 months ago, Rick and Joyce Tietz were hanging on in the real estate business by tapping into their 401(K)s and hoping for something big to happen. This year, their commission income will top $300,000. They now have a team of four additional buyer’s agents, have staked out another market to attack, and they have quadrupled their sales in one year. Quite a turnaround, to say the least, and accomplished while so many others are quitting the business. What did they do and how did they accomplish these things?

“We’re not in one of those high-priced markets where homes sell for millions,” Rick Tietz explained to me on a recent phone interview, “Every one of our sales required hard work and we haven’t had a day off in months. To put it bluntly, in 2007 our median house value in Antioch was $497,000; today, it’s hovering around $300,000. These have been tough times and we either had to get smarter about selling or find another job.”

Getting smarter about selling homes
“I actually went and took community college courses on Internet marketing back then, because we believed that the Internet was the future of selling real estate,” Rick continued. “The college courses were interesting, but we really didn’t learn much we could use until I hired a firm that delivers online marketing services for Realtors. That’s when my education in how to sell homes online really began in earnest.”

We’ve all heard the homespun advice “If given lemons, make lemonade,” but that is not always easy to accomplish. Rick and Joyce looked around and realized that the local real estate market was beyond hurting; thus they decided to focus about half their Internet marketing on short sales, foreclosures and bank owned properties. “With as many as 90% of homes for sale in our town in foreclosure (or pre-foreclosure) proceedings or already bank owned, I didn’t need a professor to tell me that we should focus on that market segment. The only problem was that I didn’t know how to target that segment online—until, by some lucky alignment of the stars, I read about a company that did know what to do. We hired them for the grand total of $3,400, and we may see a 100 times return on that investment this year.”

What did they actually do to succeed online?
“Our online marketing services company taught us how to interact with Internet visitors,” Rick continued. “Actually, let me start over-they taught us how to attract the traffic to our website by placing us on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN for just about everything related to Antioch, CA, then they taught us how to incent a percentage of these anonymous visitors into becoming leads, then they taught us how to properly follow up on these leads. Now, fully 90% of all our sales come from our self-generated Internet leads. We learned how to make and package information visitors want, then we made it available. We learned how auto responders kill so many leads, so we switched to personalized email response. The end result is that a visitor to our website can choose between useful market information, lists of bargain-priced properties, lists of bank-owned properties, programs for first-time buyers…the full gamut of hot specialties. The visitors request the information; we follow up and nurse them into becoming buyers. We post our listings and maintain our updates on our site and the leads keep coming. We’ve added up to seven new clients in one weekend.”

“I’ll give you just one example of how our online marketing services company has improved our conversion rate of visitors to leads,” Rick offered. “We had this ‘drip email’ program that automatically sent out various follow-up emails to anyone who registered on our website. Very few prospects responded to these drip emails. Our partners told us to stop sending drip automated emails and to start sending personalized ones, instead. They rightfully convinced us that-after a time-the prospect receiving thee ‘drip emails’ felt like they were on the receiving end of the infamous water torture, and were deleting these ‘drip emails’ out of hand. We were alienating the very people we were trying to cultivate. We took that advice and our conversion rates quadrupled. It’s such a simple thing, but it illustrates how people who know what they are doing can have such a huge impact on our livelihood. Once we learned Intelligent Response and we attended the ‘How to follow up Internet Leads’ training our online marketing services company offers to all clients, we just kept getting better and better at converting these visitors into sales. In retrospect, the ‘something big’ we were hoping for turned out to be selling houses to Internet buyers. We can’t wait for when the economy finally recovers.”

They’re not stopping there
“We’re expanding our practice to a town adjacent to Antioch,” Rick confirmed, “and we’ve changed our affiliation from our former franchise to Altera. One thing we’re not going to change is our commitment to the Internet. We just subscribed to our second service from our online marketing services company: the Professionally Managed Lead Site – a totally new idea where we have a new website branded and built for us and managed by our marketing partner. That partner is totally responsible for our Internet prospecting for our new market target. We do nothing but tell them what we want for targets and they do everything else. They build and run the site for us and we own the output exclusively. This entirely new concept puts real leads in our inbox ridiculously fast: we had five qualified real leads in our first three days. We’re hoping to sell an additional 20 homes in that new town by the end of the year.”

Rick and Joyce ask a favor of all of you
Rick and Joyce welcome you to go see the materials they offer, their services that attract buyers, and to see how the simplicity of their website puts any need for you to spend big dollars on your website out of your mind: “When you look at our site and seek to criticize it as “unsophisticated” or “too simple,” please remember the success we have with it. We opted for “effective” over “pretty.” If you go on the site and sign in to obtain materials, please leave a comment that you are a professional agent, so we don’t waste time trying to contact you. And if you want to see our Antioch site, just type in “Antioch CA Real Estate” or any phrase relating to bank-owned properties or homes for sale with Antioch CA in front on Google or Yahoo. You’ll find us there.”

Rick and Joyce Tietz went from struggling to succeeding during the worst real estate market in many years because they saw the writing on the wall and chose the timely market and the Internet as the way to exploit it. Now, they’re continuing their best year ever and looking forward to doing even better next year. Will you be?

About the Author: Mike Parker (mparker@theblackwatercg.com) specializes in online marketing services for Realtors®. To request a free review of your online marketing and website to determine if it is set up properly to be effective click here and it will be evaluated free. Also if you’d like more information about the new and game-changing Professionally Managed Lead Site, write to PMLS@CompassInternetSystems.com It will be sent to you by return email.

RISMedia welcomes your questions and comments. Send your e-mail to: realestatemagazinefeedback@rismedia.com.

For more top stories see:

Social Media Mindfulness – What Every Real Estate Professional Needs to Know
Re-Inventing Your Career at Any Age
The Do’s and Don’ts of Short Sales