The devastation in the real estate industry over the past three years has had a huge personal toll on the tens of thousands of people who had built businesses, and personal wealth, during the real estate boom. Real estate agents, brokers, mortgage professionals, appraisers, builders…all have seen their income plummet along with home prices and the pace of transactions in the market.
At NCI, our fortunes are closely tied with professionals in the housing market. One of our largest brands, The Real Estate Book, is a premium marketing outlet for real estate agents, builders and mortgage professionals. By Design is a leader in the market for personal branding solutions. Unique Homes is a foundation brand in the luxury real estate space.
Over the past year, we’ve done a lot of work to be certain that we understand EXACTLY what value we offer our customers and how they can best use our products and services to be more successful. We’ve conducted controlled tests to determine how many leads — property-specific phone calls, e-mails and web visits — we drive for our advertisers. We’ve done research of past and current customers to understand what is working and what isn’t. We’ve done research of home buyers and home sellers in order to understand how they acquire information during the home purchase process, and why they pick one realtor over another.
During this process, we began to realize that there was a fundamental challenge every realtor was facing. There is no shortage of ways to market your listings and your personal brand. Some are free, some just require an investment of time and some require you to part with your hard-earned money. The problem is, Where do you start? What should you do? And who should you listen to in the cacophony of experts — some true and some self-appointed — who claim one tactic works and another doesn’t?
A light bulb went off: A real estate agent should start by stating how much money they want to make, calculate how many homes they need to sell to make that amount and then decide how many buyer and seller leads they need to sell that many homes. THEN they should make decisions about how to market.
We term this An Income-Based Approach to Real Estate Marketing. And we decided we could do a service to all of our partners by fleshing out the approach and making it easy to implement.
For the past three months, Scott Dixon and Todd Walker, the leaders of The Real Estate Book brand, have been interviewing dozens of leading real estate agents about the underlying metrics of their practice: How many homes do you sell, how many leads do you get, how do you process them and what sources do you use to generate them? Scott and Todd have a natural advantage in this conversation: they have been intimately involved in the real estate industry, working with agents to help them build their business, for more than 20 years.
This week at the National Association of Realtors convention in San Diego, Scott and Todd are rolling out the work of their efforts.They ‘ve created a workbook with worksheets real estate agents can fill out in order to build a concrete and fact-based marketing plan.
They’ve worked hard to create something that will be of value to real estate agents. They’ve worked very hard to create something that is intellectually honest and fact-based. For instance, their research has shown us that advertising in The Real Estate Book is a good way to drive a high volume of leads and to stay very visible to your sellers and to the market. But, it is more costly than many other marketing programs, and is an investment that should be made by an agent who is looking to sustain or build a high level of activity and income. Scott and Todd try to make that clear in the book: your approach to marketing should be different if you want to make $50,000 in a year than if you want to make $150,000.
To get your own copy of the workbook, visit this link. We’d love to hear your feedback. You can share your thoughts and experiences at The Real Estate Book blog or join the conversation on our Facebook fan page.
Above all, use the book. It will help you set a concrete goal for your income in the year ahead and it will break down into discrete steps what you need to do to make that goal. 2010 is your year for growth! And it’s about time.
