It is not uncommon that I tell an audience that they can have the greatest strategies in the world but if they don’t understand what makes them tick they are still never going to function at their peak performance. While I believe that this truth is the root of many people’s struggles to consistently create business, it is also still true that you still have to have great strategies even if you understand yourself. That is why today I am going to go a little outside of the box and cover a tip that I use with so many of our clients that in many ways differentiates them from their competition locally.
For this tip to work for you I am going to need you to commit to two things though – consistency and implementation. You probably would agree that the value of most conferences and Webinars that you have attended has not been found in every word that the speaker/trainer spoke or in the six hours you invested. The value that you take away from such events is in the nuggets that you pick up, and more importantly, implement into your business strategy. The same is true with the tip I am about to explain. Without consistent implementation you will not see the results that you desire.
Unfortunately I have to mention this because we are living very much in an instant-gratification-type society where the majority of sales people will try something for a week and if it doesn’t create five new transactions, they move onto something else.
It is a common practice in our industry for real estate professionals to send out “just sold” or “just listed” postcards to a neighborhood where they have just listed or just sold a property. This practice makes sense when you understand that history shows us that when a new house goes up for sale in a specific neighborhood, on average within the next six months, two or three more houses go up for sale as well. Even more important, 69% of the overall market does not have active representation, which means that seven out of 10 sellers of those new listings do not know who they will use as their real estate agent when they first make the decision to put their house on the market.
This makes sense because I have been telling real estate professionals for the past couple of years that the issue is not that there aren’t enough transactions out there, the issue is that too many agents aren’t even on potential buyers’ and sellers’ radars to even be considered as an option when they are at their moment of decision. So this begs the question, what can you do to become an option for more people when they are ready to make a decision?
One of the strategies we use is to leverage the principal of the “just sold” or “just listed” campaigns but instead we implement it in the neighborhoods where our buyers have gone to look at houses and didn’t find a house available on the market that they liked, but had interest in the area. We send the letter available below to the nearby houses in the neighborhood that are not currently for sale. You can download the letter we use by going to http://www.jaredjamestoday.com/buyer-neighborhood-letters.doc (*Note – I recommend customizing any templates you use to make sure that they fit your personality without tampering with the spirit of the message).
Without promoting any particular company there are many places that you can go to that allow you to type in an address and obtain the nearest hundred addresses and names of the owners or whatever number of nearby houses you want to reach out to.
By sending out this letter to the neighborhoods that you visit with your buyers you are reaching out specifically to areas where statistically we know two to three more houses will be listed in the next six months and 69% of those sellers don’t currently have an agent they trust. More importantly you are sending a message to these potential sellers that you are committed to your job and willing to do whatever it takes to get your clients what they want, even if that means working outside of the box.
Think of it this way: If you were going to be hiring an agent and weren’t committed to someone and you received a letter like this wouldn’t you at least consider talking to this agent? Even if I weren’t a seller and was only looking for an agent to help me find a property to buy, I think I would still contact them. In fact, I know that this works because our students have already seen results.
Since we implemented this nugget with a group of our coaching students they averaged seven more transactions over the past six months that have come directly from this strategy. The math makes sense though. If you went out to show new properties to your buyers twice a week and saw an average of three different neighborhoods over a 50-week work year, even if you only sent this letter to half of the neighborhoods you visited you will have sent it out to 150 different neighborhoods. If we assume the “two to three new listings in each neighborhood over a six-month period statistic” is accurate, then that would mean that you would have reached out to 300-450 new hot leads just by implementing and committing to this strategy.
Can you honestly say that if you started making this a part of your routine that you would not close on more transactions as a result? I know that you would – so the only question is will you?
Jared James is the CEO and Founder of Jared James Enterprises, an internationally sought-after speaker and trainer. James built one of the fastest-growing real estate teams in the country, was inducted into the International Hall of Fame for one of the world’s largest real estate companies and wrote a best-selling book—all before the age of 28. As an acclaimed speaker, James keynotes events for major real estate organizations and conducts regular webinars and training for nationally known organizations like NAR, CRS, Yahoo Real Estate,Trulia and Zillow Academy and blogs regularly for RISMedia.
To stay in touch with Jared James, visit www.facebook.com/jaredjamestoday and www.twitter.com/jaredjamestoday or visit his website at www.jaredjamestoday.com.