You Couldn’t Find Poppy Borland or the Properties She Sells on a Map

By Mike Parker Print Article

RISMEDIA, November 19, 2009—Ever since people stopped dropping into their neighborhood Realtor’s office to look at the MLS book, landing customers has been harder than many of us remember it back in the “good old days.” Let’s face it—with over a million Realtors out there, it’s very hard to stand out. It’s even harder if you find yourself in a remote community with few full time residents: while you can be sure there are plenty of real estate agents there, there may be few buyers who find their way to your town.

Worse, some of the old ways don’t seem to work anymore. Advertising in glossy magazines, yellow pages ads, mailing out calendars and pens or notepads, working desk duty at the office—all just don’t seem to cut it like they used to. You know your own difficulty finding new clients; imagine that you are transported to a place like Wolf Creek, Colorado—a place so remote most people couldn’t find it on a map. Visitors must drive 6-12 hours to get there, so walk-ins are not a reliable way to find new clients.

It was this fear of not having enough real prospects that Poppy Borland faced when she decided to go it alone and moved into her own one-person office In May of 2008. She knew that in order to prosper, she had to be capable of prospecting most of her business because there was not enough foot traffic to her market to assure that she would always have customers.

Where Is Poppy Borland?
Borland owns Two Rivers Realty in South Fork, Colorado; a small mountain town in Southern Colorado of about 1,000 year-round residents. (The town of South Fork has been known as being in the Wolf Creek area literally forever, and people will call this area either name). The town grows to 6,000 to 7,000 in summer and 2-3,000 at Christmas or Spring Break. The 300+ sunny days per year and the sunny and cool summer weather make outdoor activities just wonderful: golfing, river activities, hunting, and riding ATVs in the summer are very popular just as snowmobiling and skiing in the winter keep the visitors coming.

“This is a mostly unknown paradise because it is far off the beaten path,” Borland told me recently. “Our visitors come from Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arizona in the main and almost all of them drive to get here. That averages a 6-12 hour drive, so we don’t think of South Fork as a weekend kind of destination.” Combine that with the fact that the area is surrounded on three sides by the Rio Grande National Forest and you’ll begin to get the picture that Poppy Borland operates her business in a wild and remote location. This may be remote, but its remoteness makes its properties very valuable, and homes and land sell from under $100,000 to just under $2 million.

A Strategy Born of Common Sense
“I had read many articles about how the majority of home sales began online,” Borland continued, “and I wondered if that would hold true in a remote area like ours. I realized I would never know unless I got a website and tried to make it work. I figured I could get a lot more people to visit this wonderful place online than would ever drive here, and I hoped a few might be so overwhelmed by our beauty and peacefulness that they might consider buying land or a home here.”

Lacking a big advertising budget and having very little technical expertise, Borland started researching how she could supplement traffic to her site in order to always have buyers working. She decided that the Internet would be her main producer of prospects.

Then, reality set in; how could she make that happen? “I didn’t even have a website. I didn’t know anything about how to make one effective or how to make it so that buyers could find it (and me). The more I read about it, the more I became concerned that succeeding online was beyond my knowledge level and budget. I read about another agent in a town slightly larger than mine who had succeeded with the strategy I was trying to employ in an online newsletter. It turned out that she had the very same worries I had and she had decided to hire professionals to help her achieve her goals.

“It’s just too complicated for me to do it on my own,” she said in the article I read. “I’m a real estate agent, not a technical person and for me to try to achieve Internet success is just like a FSBO trying to sell a prime property: it might work, but it probably won’t.” That resonated with me and I decided to follow her lead.

I contacted the company that had made it work for her. They connected me with a really great Web designer who did fine work at a reasonable price so I could personalize my site to be what I wanted. When my site went live, I was really excited (www.wolfcreekareaproperties.com). The company that I contacted initially, CompassSearch, made that site be found by people looking at South Fork and Wolf Creek, CO real estate. Believe it or not, I sold my first Internet buyer in only two months and my commissions paid for my site, my subscription and I had plenty left over. So far in 2009 (September) I have had nine closings—six from my website. I get 700-800 unique visitors monthly, exactly double what it was even one year ago—and I am usually working with six solid buyers all the time. Five of those six buyers come from the website on average. My idea of selling this area online worked and without it, I don’t think I would have most of the clients I have today.

“Not all people who contact me close quickly,” Borland continued. “I closed on a $1 million+ property this week where the buyer contacted me on my website on August 8, 2008, a little more than two months after I contracted with my online marketing services company. It took a year, but he got a tremendous piece of property. Although that contact was made over a year ago, my online presence gets stronger and better all the time and keeps me busy with Internet buyers.”

One Benefit She Didn’t Anticipate: Her Internet Strength Gets Her More Listings, Too
One thing many agents don’t anticipate when making an Internet marketing plan is the huge benefit it brings to a listing presentation and the physical confirmation that presence gives that seller that you are the right party to list with. Here’s how Borland uses her strength online to list more: “It’s really great that Internet buyers from anywhere can find me online, and that reality has enabled me to list far more properties, as well. When doing a listing presentation, I will act like a prospective buyer and search for real estate in the area. Maybe I’ll enter “Wolf Creek CO Real Estate” or one of the hundreds of other phrases I have been found on. When my website appears at the top of the page—number one on Google [from the aforementioned search phrase]—the sellers are impressed. I then go into the back end of my website and show the sellers my website statistics, which convince them that I can bring buyers here from anywhere. Then, when they see how my website is simple and easy to use, they usually list with me.”

It Seems So Simple
Borland is so modest and unassuming that we had to convince her to share her story here: “I wonder if my experience will really be interesting to anyone,” she told me when I contacted her. “This is just a story from ‘County Life.’

Borland might not be so self-effacing about her success if she knew that 95% of all agents fail at online marketing, according to NAR. There are so many good agents out there who just can’t seem to crack the code of how to sell homes online that many have just flat given up at online marketing. “I just can’t catch any luck with that Internet thing,” so many say.

It doesn’t take luck; it takes a good plan, well executed. Make it happen for yourself and never worry about where your income is coming from again.

About the author
Mike Parker advises thousands of agents and brokers on the subject of online marketing services for Realtors. If you want to plan to succeed like Poppy Borland did or if you’d like to request a free review of your website to determine if it can be found by Internet buyers and if it is set up to be effective for you, click here and we’ll review it for you at no cost or obligation.

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Tuesday, February 9, 2010