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Nov
16Five Content Ideas for Real Estate Emails
Filed in: Real Estate Investing by Mike Lautensack on 11-16-11How does your real estate agency use email? If youre just sending weekly property listings to your clients, then youre missing out on the great relationship building potential an email marketing campaign can offer.
Like most small businesses, real estate depends on nurturing strong relationships with your clients. The better you respond to your customers needs, the more theyll trust your guidance during their major life decision. And that trust can lead to a better sale.
While the bulk of real estate relationships are built in person, its easy and natural to extend that relationship into your clients email inbox too. Lets take a look at five different kinds of content you can send that go beyond the basic property listings and speaks to your customers needs.
Home Buying Tips
Buying a house is a big commitment that comes with plenty of questions and considerations for your buyers. You can probably answer all the questions from a first-time home buyer in your sleep!
Use your email campaign to address these common questions and lead them through important tips to consider, like:
- Choosing an agent
- Financing – What kind is right them? What are the points and closing costs?
- Negotiating a lower price – Getting seller concessions, Making counteroffers
- The total cost of ownership, beyond the mortgage basics
- Appraisals
- Home age – Should I buy a newer or older home? What are the trade-offs of each?
Local Factors – Where Should I Buy?
Proximity to work or school is only one consideration for new home buyers when theyre comparing locations. The neighborhood, local attractions, school districts and other demographics also play a role.
Help your clients decide on the best location for them by addressing some of these concerns in your emails:
- The relative cost of housing in the area
- Quality of public services (education, water, sewer, parks)
- Age of the community – Young families may prefer neighborhoods with children, while an older couple might prefer a quiet area.
- Mean and median income
- Entertainment venues (theaters, concerts, sports, restaurants)
Profile a new township in a monthly newsletter with some highlights of who would feel most at home there.
Market Trends
Buying or selling a home is usually a long and involved process. By the time your client is ready to close on their home, the buying and selling market might look completely different than it does right now.
Keep your clients up to speed on market performance. Is it a better time to buy or sell right now? You can also discuss other factors that influence the market, like:
- Unemployment
- Interest rates
- Foreclosure rates
- Seasons
Transparency about the housing market can also help your clients trust your input more.
Home Maintenance Advice
Closing on a home sale might be the end for you, but its just the beginning for your clients. A new homeowner might feel overwhelmed with new responsibility for a big property.
Make the transition easy with tips on home repairs and installations your new owners should invest in:
- When to replace windows
- Comparing different types of flooring (hardwood vs. carpet vs. tile vs. linoleum)
- Comparing wall treatments (wallpaper vs. paint vs. paneling)
- Different heating systems (gas vs. oil vs. electric)
- Plumbing considerations
- Roofing comparisons (slate vs. asphalt shingles vs. clay tiles)
- Exterior design (brick vs. siding vs. stucco vs. paint)
Discuss ways these improvements can make your clients home a worthwhile investment.
Success Stories
Getting testimonials from other satisfied customers adds credibility to your marketing campaign and makes it feel more human.
People trust the opinions of other people. So give your previous clients a voice in your emails. Include testimonials about your customer service. Have a customer write about how easy you made their home buying process, or how you eased their first-time-buyer fears.
Featuring feedback from your customers shows that youre an expert too: People who turned to you for advice are willing to recommend you based on that advice. Featuring your positive feedback can lead to more good reviews – and more business! – in the future.
Keep Building The Relationship
An email marketing campaign built on addressing your clients needs builds a strong relationship that can lead to more referrals and business later on. Think about what a new home buyer needs to know and frame your campaign content around common buying and selling questions.
When you anticipate your customers needs in the inbox, youll be the first agent they turn to the next time they need quality service.
Justin Premick is the Director of Education Marketing at AWeber, the leading provider of email marketing software and autoresponders for small businesses. To get more email marketing tips from Justin and AWeber, enter your email address here.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Nov
16Get Out Of the Alligator Pit At Least An Hour Every Day
Filed in: Real Estate Investing by Mike Lautensack on 11-16-11Recently, two business partners came to visit me, looking for magical help with their host of terrible problems. Without dragging you through all the details, the bottom line: they have no terrible problems. They have a few minor problems. But, overall, they’re in pretty good shape. Theirs is a business that peaked at about 2.5 million, dipped to 1.6, but is now back up to 1.8, may break 2 this year “as is”, has lost some markets but gained different opportunities, and is satisfactorily if not excitingly profitable as compared to industry norms. But to hear these two, you’d think the sky was falling..
The blunt truth: they need a therapist, not a marketing consultant. Actually, they need to start with a very simple but important strategy….
Unlike most authors of most success genre content, he makes no attempt to deliver ideas that will be popular with a large audience. This mirrors my own approach as an author, spanning, now 32 years and more than 20 published books. (www.NoBSBooks.com), My scariest is No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits.
One of the Eternal Truths that I quote in one of my books is: when you are up to your ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your original objective was to drain the swamp. It’s easy to get so caught up in managing all the problem parts of a business that you never do anything else. And that’s a sure path to where these two partners are now: burn out. I could give ‘em the all-time killer sales letter, the best marketing campaign ever devised, and it wouldn’t do them much good…when they go to the office each day wishing they weren’t there, fatigued from first thing on, going through the motions, viewing their activities as drudgery…and end the day without any sense of measurable progress toward meaningful goals…their ‘walking dead’ aura pervades ever nook and cranny, every employee, every customer, every aspect of their business. It’s the psychic equal of trying to attract a lot of customers to a restaurant that smells like rotting, burning flesh.
Prescription: each and every day, keep a pre-set, inviolate appointment with yourself or with one or two key people, out of sight and hearing of the alligator pit, no matter how many alligators there are or how hungry they are, to do nothing but focus and work on positive, productive plans and strategies that look to the future, that are linked to goals and progress, that you can be excited and optimistic about. Simplistically, this is a means of maintaining perspective. Even better, add taking one action, getting one thing done every day, no matter what, that you know moves you forward, toward positive goals. Go home if you must knowing you spent 7 hours and 58 minutes in the alligator pit, but at least you found 2 minutes to put something in motion that will improve things.
DAN S. KENNEDY is a serial, multi-millionaire entrepreneur; highly paid and sought after marketing and business strategist; advisor to countless first-generation, from-scratch multi-millionaire and 7-figure income entrepreneurs and professionals; and, in his personal practice, one of the very highest paid direct-response copywriters in America. As a speaker, he has delivered over 2,000 compensated presentations, appearing repeatedly on programs with the likes of Donald Trump, Gene Simmons (KISS), Debbi Fields (Mrs. Fields Cookies), and many other celebrity-entrepreneurs, for former U.S. Presidents and other world leaders, and other leading business speakers like Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy and Tom Hopkins, often addressing audiences of 1,000 to 10,000 and up. His popular books have been favorably recognized by Forbes, Business Week, Inc. and Entrepreneur Magazine. His NO B.S. MARKETING LETTER, one of the business newsletters published for Members of Glazer-Kennedy Insider’s Circle, is the largest paid subscription newsletter in its genre in the world. https://gkic.infusionsoft.com/go/newmifge/lautensack
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