It’s been on my mind for a long time to do a series of podcasts for new agents, just because I remember so vividly how many simple things I had to learn the hard way when I started out.

One of the BIG things we all struggle with is time management, so here’s my take on whether or not new agents should call block, and how to do it WITHOUT losing clients.

(Please click the player below to listen, or use the link to download the mp3.)

One of my favorite inspectors does something when he’s explaining inspection items to my real estate clients who are couples that makes my toes curl up into little fists of despair:

He makes eye contact with the man about 70% of the time, with me about 20% of the time, and with the wife only about 10% of the time.

I don’t care how much he looks at me, but wouldn’t you be seriously annoyed if you were the wife and only got spoken to directly a small part of the time?

(I I did finally say something to him about it.  He had no idea, of course. )

So while this might seem like a no-brainer to some people, it’s still worth a reminder:

• Be aware of how much eye contact and interaction you have with each person in a group.

This includes older people in a family who might not come across as a primary decision-maker.  (My mother was appalled when at the age of 75 she was looking at condos with my sister, and the agent, after pretty much ignoring her and  then seeing a rabbit on the lawn, asked her if she liked bunnies.)

• Never assume that one person or another is the primary decision maker.

Just because one person is more reserved doesn’t mean the mental wheels aren’t churning.  Disregard that person at your own risk.

This isn’t a strategy, or a women’s empowerment thing.  (After all, a female real estate agent who connects more with the wife might have to make an effort to ensure that the husband doesn’t feel left on the sidelines.)

It boils down to common courtesy and smart business practice.  So yes, it’s normal to sometimes ’connect’ more with one person or the other.  Just remember to occasionally ask yourself, “Who you lookin’ at?”

Have you ever gone on a long-awaited appointment to a professional, like a doctor or counselor, and ended up disappointed because after all that build-up you felt like that person hadn’t really listened to you?

Well, I remember once as a pretty new agent I was being interviewed by prospective buyers who made me nervous, and almost as soon as they sat down I started in on my big buyer agent spiel – complete with workbook, etc.

I could feel them disconnecting from me with every passing minute, but I didn’t know what to do.  It was like being some kind of horrible Broadway tap dancer who couldn’t stop tapping.  (Except there was no big cane to reach out and pluck me off the stage.)

Here’s what I learned from that:

When people sit down with you for the first time, they’re full of hopes, concerns, fears and dreams.  They’ve been thinking about these things for a while, and they’re dying to share them with someone who can really help them.  So LET them!

A great way to start out a meeting is to:

• First explain that you know they have questions about specific topics (name them) and that you’ll be covering those.  Mention anything else they can expect during the meeting.
• Then, ask them to first give you an idea of where they’re at.  Even if they gave you information over the phone, you can repeat some of it to let them know you remember it, but explain that you want to make sure you’re clear on things.

You’ll be amazed at how the floodgates open (so take notes!)  You learn a lot of information that lets you help them better as clients, and at the same time you show them that you know how to tune in to their needs.

Do you have potential repeat and referral real estate business in your contact list that you’re just not sure how to tap into?

If you’re like most real estate agents, the answer is ‘Yes!’  To make it easier for you, we just posted an article on how to EASILY reconnect with those past clients when you think a little too much time has gone by.  You can read it on this page of our ToolsForRealEstate.com website.

OK, here’s an example of why I believe Zillow’s home value estimates should be used primarily for recreational purposes:

A few days ago a friend called me because his kids are selling their home in one of the cities near Seattle.  It’s been listed in the high $200′s for over a month, down $20K from where it started a few months ago, but it still hasn’t gotten any offers.

Bad Real Estate Decisions are Expensive

Now some serious questions are coming up:  With divorce looming, should they keep it on the market?  Re-list with another agent?  Have one person buy the other out, and if so, what’s a fair price?

If they keep it on, they’ll need to sell quickly.  Should they drop the price and risk coming up short?

Or are they leaving money on the table?  According to Zillow, the property’s worth $21,000 more than the current list price!

Big decisions.  Potentially expensive decisions.

Realistic Comps Are Not Optional

My friend sent me the Zestimate page, and that’s when I found myself fuming.

The property was 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1300 square feet and built in the 1960′s.

Of the four main “comps” (comparable homes, supposedly) listed on the primary page,

- One was 2 bedroom, 1 bath
- One was 3 bedrooms, 2.50 baths, 1500 sq. ft. and built in 1990
- One was 4 bedrooms, 2.75 baths, over 1600 sq. ft and built in 1997

And the fourth one was even bigger.

What is going on?

I did a multiple listing service search and there were six or seven really similar comps from the last three months in that immediate area.  Those showed that the home was not worth $311K, and in fact was much better priced where it was at.

(I realize the fact that it wasn’t selling indicated it still might be high at the current price, but the photos of this home were really sub-par and missed a lot of the desirable features.)

It’s Nothing Personal - It’s the Algorithm

OK, I’m not a programmer - I think it’s the algorithm.

Here’s the thing – I have nothing against Zillow personally.  (In fact, the more I learn about online-based home valuation, the more I’m convinced of the job security of a good real estate agent.)

But it does really bother me that people make important decisions based on this kind of information.

My friend, who’s a smart, computer-savvy person, was enthused about the higher valuation and pointed out to me that the comps supported the Zestimate.  I had to point out to him that of course they did, since the Zestimate was a product of the comps.

(It’s like taking the average of a bunch of numbers, and then saying that the numbers support the average.)

After all this time, why can’t Zillow at least exclude homes that are clearly so different in age and size that they’ll never provide an accurate reflection on price?

Bottom line:  Crummy comps = crummy numbers = crummy market valuation.

(That holds true for Zillow and agents alike, of course!)

OK, not all of my business photos have turned out as sketchy as the one above.  (Trust me though – I’ve had some close runner-ups.)

In any case, I ran across some excellent photo tips in Christopher Knight of EzineArticle.com’s blog post on how to take a great business photo.

It’s a short article, but he tells you which direction you should face for a Western audience (something I’d never even considered), and explains exactly how to look at the camera in order to ‘grab’ the viewer.

So enjoy!  (Just click on the hyperlink above to go straight to the article.)

Want to add thousands of dollars to your real estate income next year? 

And add loyal clients to that bank vault of contacts you need for long term success?  Then follow these tips.  (After 8 years of running a now-thriving real estate business, I honestly think I would have at least $100,000 more in the bank if I had read a list like this earlier on.)

New agents, this goes double for you.

Here they are:

1.  Stay in touch with past clients.

I can’t believe how often I ask people who their real estate agent was when they bought or sold their house, and they can’t remember – even when they liked that person enough to use them again!  (Yes, that clinking noise you hear is the sound of money down the toilet.)

Next time you walk into your house, glance at the foundation and wonder how your home would look without it.

Past clients are the foundation of any successful real estate business.  Contact your current and past clients at least once a month.

2.  Automate your marketing.

Unless you have an assistant, at some point you’re going to be too busy to get your marketing out the door.  Plus, your time is too valuable (or will be too valuable) to spend doing everything it takes to churn out quality marketing consistently.  Start looking now, and find something that will go out regardless of how busy you are.

3.  Be yourself.

The best advice I ever got in my real estate career was from my now-gone Harley-riding agent friend, Rick Bakke.  It’s simply,  “If you can’t be yourself in this business, hang it up.”  (More on how to tell if you’re just leaving your comfort zone or becoming someone you’re not, in my other post on Rick’s advice.)

4.  Get your own domain name.

It doesn’t matter if you think you’re not ready for a website, or even if you’re not techie at all.  Just do this:  Go to Godaddy, search for your first and last name with .com after the end, and buy it if it’s available.  (It’s a measly $9/year investment, it’s easy, and you don’t need a website first because you’re just buying the name.)

If you’re feeling creative, search for some other good website names too – but at least buy that one.  Go ahead.  I dare you.

5.  Get your own blog

At least 70% of the agents I talk to either don’t have a website, hate their website or are re-doing their website (and spending plenty in the process.)  But these days it’s easy to be online, even if you have no web experience.  Get your own real estate blog - Active Rain is real estate-focused and is a great place to start for free.  (Blogger is another easy option.)

6.  Learn basic Search Engine Optimization.

If you read even just Day 2 of this great SEO Power Strategies course by Brad Callen (it’s free), you’ll be light years ahead of 50% of the people who are online.

7.  Learn basic copywriting.

Real estate is actually a marketing business – but 90% of us jump in without ever having learned how to make someone want to buy something!

Here’s a cheat sheet:  It’s about them, not you.  Talk about benefits, not features.  People buy on emotion first, then justify with logic.  (Thus, starting a home description with “$2,000 carpet credit”, like I just read yesterday, is a bad idea.)

For the best advice, start with Copyblogger.  (Brian, I would have said that anyway.

8.  Ask for a referral at the end of your voice mail greeting.

Just say, “And if you were referred to me by friend or family member, please let me know who that was so that I can tell them ‘thank you’.”  This reminds people that you expect and appreciate referrals.

9.  Ask for referrals, period.

Most people find this painful.  But what I learned is, it works.  No matter how much people love you, sometimes they will forget to refer you unless they’re reminded.  And, no matter how badly you botch the asking, they’re more likely to refer you afterwards.

And speaking of botching….

10.  Get the referral spiel down.

If asking for referrals feels awkward, you’ll subconsciously try to avoid it.  But by not asking you’re guaranteed to lose out on thousands of dollars in future business.

So make it not awkward.  I don’t care if it means locking yourself away in a hotel room with a week’s supply of Crunch Berries, do what it takes to come up with a spiel that sounds like you and that slips nonchalantly off your tongue.  (That tip alone will pay for years of high-end coaching – which now you may not need!)

11.  Beware of time-wasters.

If you work in a social office, this can be a challenge.  But the next time someone pauses at your office door in a well-meaning attempt to talk about their Schnauzer’s last toenail operation (or worse, to commiserate with you about how real estate sucks), remember that there are always more of them than there are of you.

Beware, and find ways to politely guard your productive time.

12.  Don’t ask “How much can you afford?”

Ask, “What price range would like to stay within?”

13.  Learn the basics of home staging

This is key to getting listings in the future.  You don’t have to get a certification (although that’s not a bad idea), but learn what it takes to prepare a home for sale.  Over 80% of agents don’t do this, or if they do they flub up the photos.

And speaking of photos….

14.  Always take “Before” photos of your home staging.

Why?  Because a “Before and After” home staging photo gallery is one of the most powerful marketing techniques you can use to get home listings. 

(But take it from me – you’ll be tempted to skip the “Before” part, so just make yourself do it.)

 15.  Learn how to take good real estate photos.

Or, hire out.  But the current level of quality for real estate photos online is abysmal, and clients are getting tired of it.  Be on the crest of that wave, not behind it.  Start by using a 24 mm camera, or wider angle for interior shots (not the usual 35 mm.)

16.  Ask for testimonials, and use them in your marketing.

The power that other people have when it comes to selling your services is far greater than your own.  Yet most real estate agents have a string of happy clients and no written testimonials they can quote.  There’s an easy way to ask for and get testimonials that I only learned a year of so ago, and it’s in my post “How to Get Better Testimonials”.

17.  Hang in there.

At the end of my fifth year of real estate (and having done pretty well during the third and fourth years), pretty much all it took for me to burst into tears was for someone to say something incredibly poignant along the lines of, for example, ”Hi Irene, how are you?”

I went five straight months without a paycheck – working like a horse the whole time – and by the end I seriously was wondering if the jig was up.  Was this going to be, in hindsight, the part in the story when I would say “And that’s when I got out of real estate?”

I went from November through March without a paycheck.  But by December I had made twice what I made the year before.

Often we’re tempted to give up when we’re 80% of the way to reaching our goal.  And nearly always, the last 20% of your effort will produce 80% of your results.

So, hang in there. 

We just updated The Agent Guide’s main resource page for new agents – if we do do say so ourselves, it’s pretty good! Head on over and see what you can find – there’s plenty of free stuff, plus our top picks for good business tools that work.

(And if you just need a smile today, click on the “Just for Fun” link to see Libby starring in her own video.)

So… On Sunday, the other agent said you could expect the inspection response from his clients to arrive on Monday or Tuesday.

Now it’s Tuesday 3 pm, and so far nothing.

Technically, they’re still within the time frame they mentioned (and their legal deadline doesn’t run out until Wednesday).

On the other end, your own clients know that you might not get any response at all until all the way up until Wednesday and it would still be OK.

So do you call your clients to check in anyway on Tuesday?

(You know you’re on top of things – maybe you’ve even left a voice mail for the other agent asking for an update and haven’t heard back yet.) Either way, essentially you have nothing to say, right?

But here’s what your clients are wondering:

“Did she forget????”

An easy gesture that goes a LONG way with clients is simply just calling to say,

“Hey, I just wanted to let you know I haven’t forgotten about you, we’re still waiting on (whatever it is). As soon as I hear I’ll let you know right away.”

GONE is the mounting annoyance and growing suspicion that you might have forgotten, along with…

The nervous desire to call you to check, combined with the frustration that they have to call you to check…

Replaced with, “How great that she called just to update us!” RELIEF!

Yes, this seems like simple pie when we read it in the calm light of day. But in the midst of a busy schedule when we have many important calls to make, it can be easy to forget that it doesn’t matter if WE know we have something covered if our clients spend the day thinking that maybe we don’t.

(They experience frustration just wondering about it, so in a sense they – and our image – suffer some of the same result as if we had actually dropped the ball.)

So sometimes, just taking the extra minute to pick up the phone just to say “nothing” can do wonders – and your clients will love you for it.

I was shocked last year to lose some buyers that I’d been working with in the 700K to 1 million price range. I referred them to a well-known agent who worked with many high end clients, and who was a “neighborhood expert” in their area of preference. I assumed it would be a perfect match.

Wrong. It turned out to be a good lesson in how matching personalities is just as important as being a competent agent.

These clients, a young couple, had taken the time to interview me carefully before we started working together. They had been told to find someone who was an expert in a certain city, and in answer to that question I told them that while I was very familiar with the area, I did not consider myself to be a specialist.

I went on to explain what I feel to be the complete truth – that while knowledge of an area is important, how well an agent handles the information available to them is one of the key determinants of a client’s success. I’ve seen too many long-time agents price incorrectly in their own backyards to ascribe completely to the theory of the neighborhood expert having a magical eye.

I explained that to find a good agent you need a combination of:

1. Competence – so that the agent is able to accurately assess the market, give good counsel about whether a home will suit a client’s needs, point out features that make for good and bad re-sale value, and analyze recent shifts in pricing in order to catch any trends in the making.

2. Integrity – so that the agent shares this information with the client.

3. Local market knowledge – so that no one is surprised later by the plans for the highway overpass, the smell from the soup factory when the wind blows from the north, or the traffic bottleneck on the commute to work.

(And if I had to pick the ones you can’t do without, I’d pick #1 and #2 – a competent agent will at least do a good job of amassing local market knowledge.)

This couple was communicative, responsive, and reasonable the entire time (about 6 weeks) that I worked with them. Unfortunately, my follow-up after I referred them was poor, and I learned too late that they felt thwarted and dismissed in their attempts to go through any kind of interview process with the referral agent (who immediately summed them up as “not serious, and not committed”.)

For the record: I can spot “not serious, and not committed” from twenty paces, and my gut response is straight out of “Monty Python’s Holy Grail”. (“Run away, run away!”)

In talking with both parties afterwards, it became clear that I had sent my buyers to someone who was used to a steady stream of devoted clients, and who simply wasn’t up for spending time justifying their own worth. Needless to say, it was an unpleasant experience for my buyers, and lost me a substantial chunk of money.

So think about it.

When someone comes to us for help with a home purchase or sale, essentially what they’re saying is, “Please help me invest $700,000.” Or maybe it’s $300,000, or $2 million. Even if it’s just $40,000, why wouldn’t they expect to interview the person helping them spend it?

As our businesses grow sometimes we have experiences that act as checks and balances. This one reminded me that regardless of how accustomed we become to dealing with huge sums of money in the whirlwind of real estate, every client is potentially starting out at square one from a mental standpoint, and deserves the chance to be met there.

(Otherwise, they might just “Run away, run away!”)