The Basics
Its funny how lately in real estate, and life for that matter, how complicated things have become. QR Codes, Smart Phones, Text Marketing, Tags, SEO, Dynamic Positioning, Key Words, Robots, Spiders, Organic Optimization, IDX, Listing Sync, Facebook, Twitter, Zillow, Trulia, Google, Ad Words, Pay per Click, click through rate, stickiness, social marketing, 24/7 Instant News Sources ….you get the point.
But what does this all do for us? How does this make what we do for our clients better? After all having a QR code on a listing sign may be cool, but how will it work? Does the buyer driving by have to stop the car on the street, get out of the car, walk into the sellers yard to get close enough to take a picture of the sign? Maybe the picture can be taken from the car, but is that safe?
Is communicating with your Facebook friends and clients violations of Facebook terms, and client confidentiality and potentially violating your fiduciary responsibilities?
Does your personal website or company website and BLOG really warrant the investment in time and energy to compete against the big boys and girls in the industry? I read that our local board website www.LBAR.com was one of the top 30 visited MLS’s in the country this year so far. In a town of less than 300,000 people. Imagine that beating the big boys. But what does that say for me, and the other 2,000 other real estate professionals out there who pen $25-$1,000 a month for websites and all the bells an whistles to market it and get leads? Is it worth it? Or would our time be better spent elsewhere?
Has that paradigm shifted in the market and we are yet to face it? Here is the question I am proposing here. What about the basics?
I venture to say that every professional reading this post will agree, publicly or not is a different issue, that if being 100% honest with yourself you will find the following challenge and proposed theory to be true. Here is the challenge:
Log in to your MLS or black book, day planner, whatever you use and go back search for your last 5 years business (or as far as you can go back) - closed, expireds, deleted, actives, pendings all of it and print them out, and evaluate each one. Then for as many as you can write down where that business came from. i.e personal sphere of influence, open house, referral, past client, online client, third party source, walk in, sign call convert, yellow pages, cold call…whatever your categories are, just stay consistent in placing them. Then once you have done this go through and total up how many in each category. For example of the 100 sales, X came from sign calls, X from personal referrals, X from online,….. My theory is that an overwhelming percentage came from “old school” techniques, such as personal referrals, sphere of influence, sign calls, personal generated marketing, walk ins and a small minority came from online leads from personal website, third party leads, QR codes, text marketing, etc.
NOW does this mean that these other new fangled techniques are a waste of time and money? No, probably not. Does it mean that next year that QR codes will not become a bigger percentage maybe, maybe not. But I speculate it does mean that most of our time should be spent on proven, repeatable, productive activities. Such as….well that is a post of next week, this is enough to think about for now.
The point is that we as Realtors® and other sales professionals can get wrapped up in all the gadgets and glitz, and forget about the basics. Maybe its more its important to do the basics, and then add a little glitz, and gadgets.
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