Tag Archives: South Salem Real Estate

Converting Customers and Prospects into Clients | South Salem Real Estate

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There are two ways for real estate agents to obtain a client: (1) convert an existing customer into a client; or (2) convert a prospect into a client.

Converting Customers

Existing customers represent excellent opportunities to obtain clients. You just assisted them in one of the largest financial transactions they’ll ever undertake with a successful outcome. These customers feel good about their recent purchase or sale of a property and they associate you with their recent real estate success. These customers are poised to become your clients. The easiest way to convert a customer to a client is during your initial, discovery consultation.

Like any introductory meeting, listen to your client and present your credentials to demonstrate your ability to get the job done that they require successfully. Also show the value you bring to the transaction and what differentiates you from other agents competing for the customer’s business. Here’s what prospects want to hear to become clients:

  • Client vs. customer business philosophy
  • Contrast the client approach and the customer transaction approach so prospects understand the additional benefits of selecting you as their agent.
  • Begin with the following statement:
  • “My business approach is to serve clients for life, rather than just during this transaction. My objective is to be a trusted advisor, providing services and guidance throughout and after the property transaction.”
  • Here is what a client expects:
  • A meaningful number of value added products and services (later in this document)

Converting Prospects

Virtually everyone you meet in your service region is a prospect. A new acquaintance doesn’t need to purchase a home within the next six months to become one of your clients. It’s important to distinguish between client prospects and customer prospects.

Customer prospects are people who are undertaking a property buy or sell in the near-term. Since these prospects deliver a potential transaction in the not-too-distant future, agents compete aggressively for this business. The agent’s ability to win the prospect’s business depends on a number of factors, including their credibility, reputation in the community, capacity to deliver quality transaction services, personal referrals and guidance and hand-holding during the complex transaction. This free-market competition to represent a buyer or seller is fierce.

Client prospects are much easier to obtain. There is little competition from other agents to obtain them. Most agents spend the majority of their prospecting activities on obtaining customers, not clients. Not enough agents have interest in expending time and energy with a person who has no immediate interest in the buying and selling of property. To them, that person is not a customer prospect, so why spend (read “waste”) the time?

The search for client prospects is actually easier than finding customers – individuals about to undertake a property transaction on which you serve as facilitator, negotiator and, yes, trusted advisor.

There are fewer agents against which to compete for long-term prospects since most agents are focused on current transaction customer prospects. So a client-first agent focuses on the ways to obtain clients with little regard given to competing agents.

The longer view also requires a shift in attitude. The agents’ objective then becomes to increase the quality of clients, placing less focus on the quantity of clients. For example, an agent with a book of 100 high-quality loyal clients is likely to generate more leads, referrals and future transactions than an agent with a book of 100 marginally-engaged clients. Thus the challenge is to target those upper-tier buyers and sellers and convert these lead generators and property buyers and sellers into your expanding client base.

They get added to the mailing lists for your client base or bases (commercial, property management, rentals, special sales, etc.).

High-quality client prospects have common attributes that are more likely to generate leads, referrals and future transactions over time than lesser-engaged client prospects.

For example, a socially active family with children living in an active neighborhood is likely to generate more leads, referrals and future transactions than a retired couple living in an older neighborhood. In fact, the quality of a client prospect is determined, to some degree, on stage in life of the prospect’s real estate needs.

Prospect Level by Life Cycle

Lifecycle

Quality Level

Comments

First-Time Buyers

Fair

There’s some risk that they will move away from the community, but if they remain, there it’s usually for trade-up transactions.
Mature households

High

Mature households usually experience healthy earnings growth over time, increasing the likelihood of trade up, resort and investment transactions. In addition, these households become established in the community, resulting in more referrals and leads.
Established households

High

These households are at the peak of their social interaction in the community, making it like that, as a group, they generate the greatest number of leads and referrals.

In addition, ,established families’ children are in the first-time buyer group and this, combined with this demographics’ financial ability to purchase resort property and/or invest in real estate, increases the likelihood of future transactions.

Retirement Households

Low

Retired households are high risk prospects relative to other households. These home owners are entering the end of their home ownership years, and thus, may only have one transaction – a retirement home – remaining.

These older home owners are more likely to move away from the community. In addition, they are less likely to generate leads and referrals because they are not as engaged in community activity, as a general rule.

To build a client base of quality, all prospects offer opportunities for the client-centered agent and none should be overlooked. However, it’s both prudent and productive to focus on those home owners who have the greatest potential for referrals or future transactions.

via realestateeconomywatch.com

Get More Retweets | South Salem Realtor

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Have you ever tried to figure out why some of your tweets are retweeted more than others? Or why some of them are ignored? 

the art of getting more retweets infographic 150x150 Get More Retweets [Infographic]

There are a few techniques that can help you spread and amplify your tweets, including tweeting at ideal times and using popular Twitter hashtags. I’ve covered a few of them in two recent posts, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube: Strategic Marketing Best Practices and 11 Effective Twitter Strategies for Brands.

Here’s an infographic from Quick Sprout that summarizes some best practices and common factors that contribute to retweeting success…

how to get more retweets infographic Get More Retweets [Infographic]

 

 

pixel Get More Retweets [Infographic]

Tagged as: Infographics, Marketing, Social Media, Social media marketing, Twitter

via pamorama.net

4 ways we treat our homes like family | South Salem NY Real Estate

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If you know me (even on Facebook), then you know much about the antics of my little pug mix “children,” Aiko and Sumiko. Though I try to manage myself and post only one out of every 100 pics I take of them, what does make it to my social media channels tends to be the top 1 percent of their funniest, most humanlike follies, like Aiko’s meditation poses and Sumiko’s disdain for me taking pictures of Aiko’s meditation poses.

In fact, I felt validated when, last time I posted a pic, a friend mentioned how humanlike one of my dog’s facial expressions was. Can you say “preaching to the choir”?

This (mostly) harmless habit we have of attributing human qualities to animals is something word buffs and Jeopardy fans know is called “anthropomorphism.” And the reality is that we do this with loads of other nonhuman things and even inanimate objects, including our homes.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that homeowners who treat their homes almost like they’re human are some of the best homeowners around. Here are a just a few of the ways I’ve seen that great homeowners anthropomorphize their homes:

1. We name them. Some homeowners or builders actually name their homes human names, in the same way B.B. King named his legendary guitar “Lucille.” It’s quite common for homes to be assigned the family’s actual surname, creating even closer ties between the family’s identity and the home that serves as the site for their precious moments over the years, decades or even generations. Think: Spelling Manor or many of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous designs.

Other homes are given names quite literally descriptive of the property itself or its surroundings, like the infamous Grey Gardens mansion in the Hamptons (where the true story depicted in the popular HBO film took place), Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago or Le Beau Château, the 22-room Connecticut manor that was owned but never even visited, much less occupied, by reclusive billionairess Huguette Clark in the five decades she owned the property before she passed away.

(Le Beau Château can be yours, by the by, for just a smidge under $16 million.)

And it’s not only the wealthy and famous who name their homes. In my family, we tend to reference our homes in conversation by their street names, and I have friends and clients that name their homes from a variety of angles, calling their places “The Barn,” “The Country House,” “Casa de (family surname)” and even “The Ponderosa.”

2. We listen to them. In a healthy human relationship, we listen to the folks we care about, sometimes intently, to keep things functional and address issues before they spiral beyond repair. Same goes with a health-conscious homeowner and his relationship with his property: We listen for creaks, groans, drips, squeaks, moans, squeals and all manner of other ways our homes speak to us, “vocalizing” what’s happening in their inner works and often dropping clues to needed repairs and upgrades long before things actually stop working.

3. We expect them to behave age-appropriately — and worry when they don’t. We expect children to beg for checkout-counter candy, teens to wear weird things and borrow our cars, adults to be self-sufficient, and our elderly relations to have the occasional health issue.

And along the human life cycle, we expect people to outgrow things, wear things out and even need different sorts of equipment at various phases. In fact, the need for a first work wardrobe, a first home, a first pair of reading glasses or even, later, a first set of hearing aids is something we see as a signal that the people in our lives are entering new stages of life and facing the new challenges each stage brings.

We look at our homes the same way. New homeowners expect to have little or no repair issues for years, while some people buying and living in older homes actually go so far as to track the age and health of various systems in the home, from the foundation to the furnace, and use that information to create a maintenance and replacement calendar for the entire property.

This expectation that homes will act age-appropriately also leads to outrage when they don’t — and is a huge part of the reason it behooves homebuyers to obtain inspections, so the inspector can brief them on how old everything in the house is, how functional things are (or not), and what, if anything, will need to be done to maintain functional systems in the short and long term.

4. We feed them. Anyone who says homes don’t require feeding has simply never been responsible for one. We feed our homes with water, gas, electricity and the cold hard cash that pays the mortgage and property taxes on a monthly basis. Add to that the intensive ongoing care that we invest into our homes, from routine cleaning to major design and remodeling initiatives, and it’s no wonder that many of us actually “feed” our homes more and better than we feed our human families!

Question: Do you treat your home as a person? How?

 

                                                   

via inman.com

 

How—and Why—to Make Your Blog Print-friendly | South Salem Realtor

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When crafting your blog, it is easy to neglect how it might look to someone who wants to print your articles and posts.

After all, with huge monitors, smart phones, tablets, and the bevy of other ways people can access your content, who’d want to print it out on a piece of paper like it’s 2004?

Well, it’s the hallmark of a good designer to not assume how someone will want to digest what you have to offer, and it’s so easy to make your blog print-friendly that there is really no reason not to.

You’d be surprised by how many people will choose to print useful articles, especially if they contain some useful information that they would like to refer to when they’re not near a computer.

Printing from scratch

For the code-skittish, there are some special tools and plugins you can use to help get your print-ready blog set up, and we’ll get to those shortly. If you want to customize it exactly how you want—for example, adding a print-only message to the bottom of the page—the best way to do it is coding it yourself with CSS.

Start in the file called header.php in your theme, and look for the line below:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); ?>” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

That line tells the browser what style it should use based on the way the user is viewing the page. Most of the time, it will be viewed on a screen. Below that line, add this one:

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/print.css” type=”text/css” media=”print” />

This directs the browser to use a different stylesheet, called print.css, if the content is being printed. Of course, print.css does not exist yet, so open up your favorite text editor and save a new file called print.css, dropping it into your theme’s directory (the same place you can find your theme’s main stylesheet).

If someone is printing your article, they want just the content of the article. Excessive images that don’t add real value to the content usually wreak havoc on printers and ink supplies, so you’ll want to remove your site’s header, menus, and advertisements (you won’t be making any cash from printed out Internet ads, anyway).

How can you do this? Take a look at your page code, and find the div id of the section you would like to remove (e.g. <div id=”comments”>). Then, simply add the following rule to your print.css file:

#comments {display:none;}.

The reader wants the article formatted to fit the piece of paper it is being printed on, so scrap any sidebars and footers that might cause unnecessary white space and extra pages.

Finally, remove anything that a reader of a printed sheet cannot use. This includes comment sections (as we’ve just seen), navigation bars, and anything else that requires some sort of user action, like related articles links.

You can test your stylesheet as you modify it using your browser’s print preview function. Just keep removing stuff until it looks like something you’d want to come out of the printer!

Using tools and plugins

WordPress and Blogger are the two most popular blogging platforms, and for those who are not comfortable digging into code and writing a stylesheet themselves, both platforms have plugins that can quickly get you a serviceable print-ready page for every article on your blog.

For WordPress, the easiest option is WP-Print.

A very simple plugin, it gives you a few basic options about how your print page should look, including which links to include, what images should stay in the page, how to handle videos, and an option for a disclaimer.

Your user will simply see a Print button next to your articles exactly where they expect it to. Some other, more complicated tools might offer other functionality, such as printing a page to a PDF, emailing it to friends, or integration with social media like Twitter and Facebook.

If you run a Blogger site, the website printfriendly.com asks you to make a few simple choices, such as the appearance of your Print button and the inclusion or exclusion of features like email and PDF printing. It then gives you a link to download a Blogger widget you can install directly on your site, as well as code you can copy and paste directly where you want the button to show up.

Looking good … in print!

In the end, whatever method you choose, you will have an attractive print-friendly version of every page on your site with only a few minutes’ work.

It might not be the most used feature you ever offer, but for the occasions when a visitor does want to print out something you wrote, they will undoubtedly appreciate that you spent the time to accommodate them.

via problogger.net

Current Confidence Index for Single-Family Homes Steady | South Salem NY Real Estate

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The majority of REALTORS® continued to report rising home prices and improving days on the market.  However, REALTORS®   reported that  the market remains hampered by a “demanding and rigid loan qualification process”  that  has made mortgage underwriting  “a nightmare”  and “the toughest hurdle.” This has led to cash  buyers and investors easing out  first time buyers using mortgage financing.   Low inventory  persists and REALTORS® have reported homes selling above the list price.  Policy uncertainty on a variety of economic and and tax issues, mainly due to the tepid job growth and  measures to avert the the fiscal cliff  — continues to dampen  the market. Hurricane Sandy also caused a temporary market slowdown in the affected areas, although a recovery is anticipated in the coming months.

What Does This Mean for REALTORS®?

Concerns over the residential home sale market are probably reflective of  current economic uncertainties.  In fact, the home sales markets have been recovering in price and sales in many areas, and mortgage rates are low—although finding a mortgage may take a number of applications.  REALTOR® confidence is well above its level two years ago, and prices and sales are slowly increasing.  Assuming that the economy continues  and that the fiscal cliff issue is addressed — which is the assumption of most economists  —  one would expect a continued expansion of home sales.

via economistsoutlook.blogs.realtor.org

CoreLogic: Prices Rose 7.9 Percent in 2012 | South Salem Realtor

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December 2012 home prices are expected to rise by 7.9 percent on a year-over-year basis from December 2011 and fall by 0.5 percent on a month-over-month basis from November 2012 reflecting a seasonal winter slowdown, CoreLogic said today.

Excluding distressed sales, December 2012 house prices are poised to rise 8.4 percent year-over-year from December 2011 and by 0.7 percent month-over-month from November 2012, according to the CoreLogic Pending HPI.

Home prices nationwide, including distressed sales, increased on a year-over-year basis by 7.4 percent in November 2012 compared to November 2011. This change represents the biggest increase since May 2006 and the ninth consecutive increase in home prices nationally on a year-over-year basis. On a month-over-month basis, including distressed sales, home prices increased by 0.3 percent in November 2012 compared to October 2012. The HPI analysis shows that all but six states are experiencing year-over-year price gains.

Excluding distressed sales, home prices nationwide increased on a year-over-year basis by 6.7 percent in November 2012 compared to November 2011. On a month-over-month basis excluding distressed sales, home prices increased 0.9 percent in November 2012 compared to October 2012. Distressed sales include short sales and real estate owned (REO) transactions.

“Housing was one of the past year’s biggest surprises. Even without significant gains in income, housing mounted an impressive recovery in 2012,” said CoreLogic Chief Economist Mark Fleming. “While the economy is strengthening, there is more to be done. For example, concerns remain around structural unemployment and the falling labor force participation rate.”

Highlights as of November 2012:

  • Including distressed sales, the five states with the highest home price appreciation were: Arizona (+20.9 percent), Nevada (+14.2 percent), Idaho (+13.8 percent), North Dakota (+11.3 percent), California (+11.1 percent).
  • Including distressed sales, the five states with the lowest home price depreciation were: Delaware (-4.9 percent), Illinois (-2.2 percent), Connecticut (-0.5 percent), New Jersey (-0.5 percent) and Rhode Island (-0.3 percent).
  • Excluding distressed sales, the five states with the highest home price appreciation were: Arizona (+16.5 percent), North Dakota (+12.9 percent), Nevada (+12.6 percent), Hawaii (+11.6 percent) and Idaho (+11.6 percent).
  • Excluding distressed sales, this month only two states posted home price depreciation: Delaware (-3.5 percent) and Alabama (-2.2 percent).
via realestateeconomywatch.com

For-sale Inventory Only Half of 2006 Level | South Salem NY Real Estate

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Only half of many homes in America are listed for sale compared to the height of the housing  boom in 2006 while median list prices are about the same as they were a year ago.

The size of the inventory declined steadily in 2012, with the number of for-sale properties in December roughly 50 percent below the levels observed at the height of the housing crisis.  The national for-sale inventory continued to decline in December, falling by -6.51 percent over the month and by -17.32 percent on an annual basis. The large year-over-year decline in the for-sale inventory is a positive sign that the market has worked through much of its excess inventory, which should help to bolster housing prices and potentially set the stage for additional growth.

However, while list prices also increased significantly over the first half of the year, they have declined in recent months, with the median list price in December now roughly the same as it was one year ago.  In addition, a growing number of housing markets-primarily in older industrialized areas-are registering year-over-year list price declines, according to December data from Realtor.com

These potentially off-setting trends suggest that house price appreciation in the upcoming year is likely to be more moderate than it was in 2012. The median list price in December ($187,900) was essentially the same as it was a year ago despite the significant gains that occurred earlier in the year, when the median list price rose to as high as $195,000 in June 2012.

On a year-over-year basis, December median list prices were up by 1 percent or more in 66 of 146 MSAs, and up by 5 percent or more in 49 MSAs.  Median list prices were down by 1 percent or more in 49 markets, while 14 experienced a decline of more than 5 percent.  The remaining 31 markets have not experienced significant changes in their median list price compared to a year ago.

Over the past few months, the number of markets experiencing year-over-year price declines has steadily increased, while the number experiencing list price increases has steadily declined. In fact, compared to one year ago, the number of markets ending the year with a year-over-year price decline has more than doubled (49 in December 2012 vs. 20 in December 2011) and a significantly lower number of markets have a year-over-year price increase (66 in December 2012 vs.101 in December 2011).

California markets continue to dominate the list of areas experiencing the largest year-over-year increases in their median list prices.  In addition, Phoenix, AZ, Atlanta GA, and Seattle, WA are among the top performers. The 10 markets with the largest year-over-year list price increase are shown below.  All but one of these markets (Phoenix) experienced year-over-year declines in their for-sale inventories of -20 percent or more, while six of these markets had inventory declines of 40 percent or more.

For more than a year, older industrialized markets that never experienced the rapid run-up in prices that led up to the housing crisis have been registering the highest rates of list price declines.  This pattern continued in December.  While Jersey City and Chicago had year-over-year inventory declines of -31 percent and -22 percent respectively, most of the remaining areas experienced inventory declines that were well-below the national average (-17 percent).

The median age of inventory of for sale listings was 111 days in December,  up by 9.90 percet from November, but -9.01 percent below the median age one year ago (December 2011).  While the median age of the inventory is highly seasonal, the year-over-year decline is consistent with other data showing a general tightening of market conditions over the year.

via realestateeconomywatch.com