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Price to Sell in Any Market

The people who told you the only thing that mattered was location, location, location: were lying, lying, lying! There is a simple solution to listings that don’t sell – price, price, price. If you want to survive in the real estate business you must know the secrets of proper pricing.

In this class you will learn to obtain and communicate statistics, calculate absorption rates, and explain the Market Analysis so that any Seller can make the best decision in this important facet of their sale.  We will clearly define the difference between the marketing presentation and the pricing presentation as well as discussing the pivotal difference between having a property IN the market as opposed to ON the market.

 Highlights:

• Why pricing and marketing presentations are separate
• Can you market a commodity?
• Pricing from both sides of your brain
• The REAL “Law of Supply and Demand”
• Absorption Rates
• Outcomes
• Consumer Obstacles

Join Rich Sands, Senior Instructor at Matthew Ferrara & Company (and former Director of Education - Coldwell Banker Colorado ), for a tutorial on pricing in today’s competitive marketplace.

Webinar Tuition: $49.99

Register today and reserve your seat now:

• July 17th: 2:00pm - 3:00pm EST
• July 30th: 4:00pm - 5:00pm EST

Grow to Win

What do Hyatt, FedEx, Microsoft, and Burger King all have in common? They all started during recessions. And today they each are winning companies in their industries. Every one of them understood that recessions cause both economic uncertainty and reveal new opportunities. Their success is a result of capitalizing on the companies who went into “automatic” mode during good times, forgetting that change, and recessions, always come. One look at these companies today proves that recessions and innovation go hand-in-hand. They either invented or re-invented how their industry performs during a time when rivals tried instead to weather the storm. They took risks that helped them grow through the downturn, and win a dominant position in their industries.

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The Rest of the Listing Presentation

These days, too many brokers are winding down the clock to bankruptcy, with lots of help from their sellers. Too much misplaced blame has been on buyers of late. Other than foreclosures, we have not looked hard enough at sellers’ contribution to the inventory problem. And sellers are a problem. Too many brokers have trapped themselves with “list to live” strategies that have achieved anything but. No genius is necessary to see how holding a commodity for ten, twelve or twenty-four months, then selling after multiple price reductions, isn’t a business plan. It’s a going-out-of-business plan. No matter how large the commission, it’s barely enough to get out of debtor’s jail free. With record amounts of listing inventory still clogging the marketplace, REALTORS have no choice but to start doing the rest of the listing presentation with their sellers.

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The Dangers of Housing Inflation

It’s true that I’ve never agreed with the National Association of REALTOR’S Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. It’s nothing personal; but it’s everything professional. I just don’t understand why today’s economists can’t figure out why inflation is bad. Of all of the complexities of economics, inflation is pretty much the easiest to understand. We’re not trying to figure out the reasons for irrational exuberance or call the bottom on the stock market. Inflation is simply the slow and steady erosion of a currency’s value. And with a devalued currency comes devalued everything. Including housing. Yet for some reason, NAR’s chief money-thinker is still wishy-washy on whether inflation - triggered by 3 trillion stimulus dollars - would be good or bad for home ownership. I guess it depends on whether you want to turn American into a banana republic or not.

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Ten Reasons why MLS is Dead Already

Once again, as REALTORS converged last week for their MidYear meetings in Washington, D.C., the forces of stability and sameness were present, coming up with last-gasp-ways to protect the tattered vestiges of Real Estate, the Last Generation. New white-papers and shiny-Powerpoint presentations proclaimed the “we-can-renovate” mentality of Gen 2.0 MLS systems struggling to enter the 3.0 version of the industry. Much like Google and Yahoo - who refuse to admit their advertising model is crumbling in the face of social networks - MLS’s are trying one last time to burnish a brand that has already worn off the chrome. What’s left underneath are the mostly rusted pieces of a structure whose time has come and gone, even if some REALTORS still believe the Comparables Book will someday make a comeback.

It’s time for the real estate industry to implode the MLS model so they can build something better suited to the next generation of real estate practices. Read more

An Industry of Exceptional Success

If it’s true that exceptions aren’t the norm, why is the real estate industry built around them? In almost any other endeavor, exceptions are considered undesirable: unintended effects, accidents, unexplained occurrences. Not part of the plan, and generally bad. Exceptions are usually damaging - to the business plan, the mission, the consumer experience. To the bottom line. Since the industrial revolution, most businesses have benefited not from lucky exceptions, but from planned consistency. Management itself focuses on creating consistency of outcomes to maximize resources. Profits come from maintaining predictable, repeatable, desirable outcomes. Consumers pay for an expected outcome, not a surprise ending.

No wonder, then, that real estate professionals struggle for profits, when their management strategies focus on outcomes as exceptions, rather than rule.

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The Real Meaning of Days on Market

Real estate is a tricky business. At some point, you’d expect things to “mean” what they say. Yet we’re an industry that can’t even decide what exactly constitutes a “bedroom.”  In some markets, it’s a broom closet; others extend the definition to unfinished attics. Of course, small dens and breakfast nooks in big-city condos qualify as bedrooms as long as a curtain divides them from the next room. Funny stuff, but it gets more serious when you try to apply these definitions to market data. If we can’t decide what certain market data means, how can we plan a business strategy around it? When current listing prices are sketchy, foreclosures skew sold data and “for sale by owner” inventory makes it impossible to determine meaningful absorption rates, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pin down the meaning of something simple - like “Days on Market”?

Ironically, even that market metric is sorely misunderstood.

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The Listing Sheet is (Still) Pathetic

A while ago I wrote a short article comparing some of the “standard” real estate marketing tools with those of other industries. I remember commenting how REALTORS, who sell commodities in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, try to entice buyers with printouts made from an off-the-shelf inkjet printer on recycled paper, while automobile companies readily offer super-glossy-multi-page professional brochures to promote their lowliest of models. Of course, times change: When Baby Boomers invented the real estate industry, printing anything was a mimeographic achievement, so the small office printer was a revolutionary upgrade in marketing in the 1990s. Yet today’s buyers and sellers increasingly come from the Gen X and Gen Y demographics.

Does anyone still think we’re going to re-start the housing market by handing out listing sheets?

Let’s review some basic facts: Last year the average first time buyer was 31 years old, smack-in-the-middle of the Gen X/Y profile. This means many buyers were in their early twenties, while some lagged into old-age-thirties. Even the average seller was only 45 - the tail end of the Boomers, even if they try to pass themselves off as early X’ers. Either way we’re talking consumers who entertain on YouTube, read the news on their iPhones and post video clips to their Facebook page with their eyes closed. Whether it’s a kitchen faucet from Kohler or a new laptop from DELL, the way to attract these consumers is modern multimedia.

Of course, some printed items still work to provide information about products and services. For example, luxury products like the LearJet - comparable in price to some premier homes around the country - feature downloadable PDF spec-sheets complementing their virtual tour and video marketing. not completely unlike a property listing sheet found on some better real estate websites. Still, even LearJet could improve its printed marketing tools compared to a travel site like Abercrombie and Kent, whose Royal Scotsman Train Holiday offers an eight-page brochure online for a $7000-10,000 product. Even an inexpensive piece of software like ACT by Sage offers a multi-page full color product brochure.

The bottom line: One-page property listing sheets are simply pathetic.

To be fair, it’s not just the one page printout that’s awful; it’s the one-page information presentation that most real estate websites provide as well. Whether it’s a jet or a vacation or a software program, all of which have stiff competition in their price range, the marketing tools on their websites offer much more than a single page. Yet most real estate presentations stick to an address, a couple of photos, a few bullet points and a paragraph describing the product. Forget about the huge gap in multimedia - the Learjet site is NASA-like in it’s design while the ACT site offers a full-product video demonstration and a trial mini-site. It seems nearly impossible that real estate would ever reach that level of product marketing, considering the continuing challenge to get agents to put more than a half-dozen photos on every listing. Yet you have to wonder if the real estate industry has some other reason why it continues to propagate the one-page minimalist approach to marketing its products.

Oh, right: They want to force the customer to call.

Does providing less information lead customers to call, email or otherwise contact the “broker” of a product? Possibly. But has anyone ever wondered how many people simply don’t reach out at all, when so little marketing information is presented? Why do so many buyers who visit an open house fail to call for a second appointment? Was it because they didn’t like the house the first time - or that the listing sheet was such a poor “sales support piece” that it failed to inspire them to consider a second look? What percentage of online leads never inquire on a listing - or at best, delay that inquiry because the presentation of home information is flat, one-dimensional, and mostly organized like an IRS form?

Could the listing sheet actually be harming sales?

Any of this could be possible. But perhaps it’s not even that complicated. Maybe it’s just another example of how the Gen X / Gen Y consumer has moved far beyond the Baby Boomer modality of the real estate sales industry (I almost typed “stales” industry - what an interesting slip that would have been…) Listing sheets aren’t just a bad marketing piece; they are a bad marketing mentality. They reduce homes to uniform, tabular experiences that mostly fail to excite, entice or even adequately inform the potential buyer. The “just the facts” approach to room sizes, amenities and taxes smothers emotional excitement about buying a home.  Everything about the listing sheet presentation is dull, rough, plain-paper-bag.

Where are the download-ready multi-page flyers, with edge-to-edge high quality photography? Who is handing out CD’s or flash drives at open houses with dozens of photos, documents and videos to help the buyer learn as much as possible? Have you ever seen an agent offer to SMS a video clip from their smartphone to the buyer’s smartphone after touring a home? I’m guessing these aren’t the ordinary experiences that real estate agents are offering to their customers today.

Think about a great product experience. Perhaps it’s the thrill of flying on a private jet. The luxurious feeling of a train ride through the Scottish Highlands. The creativity of a powerful, intuitive piece of software. There’s no way those emotional responses can be conveyed on a single web page or printout. Complex sales take complex marketing tools. Capturing the value proposition of these products simply can’t be done in a sanitized one-page format.

Real estate is perhaps one of the most complex transactions - emotionally, financially, intellectually. Trying to excite buyers by handing them a single piece of paper seems - well - just a little pathetic.

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Real Estate Renaissance: Focus on Opportunities

There’s a paradox in today’s housing industry: The real estate marketplace is showing signs of potential, but the real estate business is still falling apart. Home affordability is the best in decades; mortgage rates the lowest in modern times. Sellers and buyers are starting to get it. Yet after hundreds of thousands of REALTORS have left the industry, the news continues to be about bankruptcies, layoffs and implosions at brokerages nationwide. Agents are demoralized; managers are shaken; brokers sweating. This, even at a time when online operational costs such as marketing have plummeted and technology-driven success stories are soaring. Why, then, is the industry stuck in the mud? Perhaps it’s because we’re focused on the problems - and not the opportunities.

Peter Drucker, the management guru whose works inspire the consulting ideas at Matthew Ferrara & Company, once said: “Unless there is a true catastrophe, problems are not discussed in management meetings until opportunities have been analyzed and properly dealt with.” In part because of their risk management orientation, [managers] are exceptionally good at detailing why a new initiative will not work. This includes both employee and customer issues.” Read more

Declaration of Internet Independence

Months ago, we reported to you that internet marketing was dead. That was August 2008, when MySpace overtook Yahoo in display ads totals for the month. Our argument then was that people prefer to interact with other people, even online, and that the original internet age of “blindly searching” the portals was dead. They just didn’t know it then. And for another seven months the world of SEO, PPC, page ranking and site relevancy made a few valiant attempts to remain relevant themselves. Yet today, David has finally slain Goliath: Advertising Age reports that Facebook has become a bigger source of traffic for some websites than Google.

How the mighty have fallen.

How we got to this point in internet evolution is not entirely unexepcted. In fact, it’s almost like the modern history of the Western world. The original web was a wonderful but overwhelming magical place where lots of information was stored “somewhere” online. Only a chosen few knew the secret words and algorithms that could lead you to it. The Pope of IP addresses, of course, was Google, whose methods of search-ranking madness were known only to the inner circle. Mere mortals could only dabble at guessing how the Google-gods would rank their sites, and send sacred torrents of traffic their way. Offering millions of dollars in a frenzied dance of pay-per-click prayers, websites marekters hoped the great Search Engines would look down favorably on their sites. And thousands of Lower Priests of Web Optimization, Metatag Monks and Archibishops of Analytics provided their intercession on behalf of the great Unwashed Surfers of the Web. Internet alchemists could turn a few leads into gold for some. For others, regular offerings were required for the Mighty Search Engines to hear your pleas. Read more

There Is No Spoon

One of the most exciting roles our company plays for real estate brokers and agents worldwide happens when we are called upon to do Strategic Planning with them. It’s fascinating to see how planning energizes people - even though so many of them may have been operating for years without a written plan (or a recently written one :>)

Usually, strategic planning starts out as  “pie in the sky” and then comes down to “I need to make this much revenue!” Somewhere in between, however, the process starts to become unnecessarily confused. Bogged down, is more like it, because too many brokers think strategic planning is about “beating themselves up” on what they aren’t doing well today. So the initial energy from planning starts to fizzle into anxiety and worry over mistakes and challenges. And usually, that’s why most people “stop” planning - or never start it in the first place.

So here are three tips we have used successfully to help brokers and agents use Strategic Planning to energize their companies and create themselves anew in the upcoming year.

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Higher Mortgage Rates Mean More Buyers

Warren Buffet likes to say, “When others are greedy, I’m fearful; when others are fearful, then I’m greedy.” As a rule for when to invest in the stock markets, the Sage of Omaha is cautioning the average investor against the psychology of the markets. Mass markets - like stocks, bonds and even housing - are subject to mood swings by the consumer. And frenzies - to purchase or sell - are the scariest moods of all. Buffets advice: Do the opposite of the frenzy, and you’ll be just fine.

Now let’s apply that thinking to the “lower mortgage rates” frenzy gripping our policymakers.

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More Evidence the Bailout is a Handout - and a Lie

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain, a Biography

If at first you don’t succeed, try to destroy the economy again. That seems to be Congress’ motto these days, as they prepare to vote on the “revised” bailout bill.This, time, however, the proposed bill is so full of spending pork - from exempting children’s wooden arrows from excise taxes to increased cover of rum excise tax revenues - that proves Twain’s other saying that there was nothing a Congressman knows that couldn’t be taught to a flea.

What a scam!

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The Bailout will Destroy the Housing Industry

Only in the United States Congress can a plan to destroy the housing industry and credit markets be called a “rescue” plan. It’s almost as farcical as calling  “card check” bill that effectively kills secret voting for unions a “secret ballot bill.” Far more troubling, however, is the fact that the elements of the plan are laid out - in plain sight - for everyone to see and think about.

Why, then, does the real estate industry and average homeowner, not see the danger?

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Why do Brokers Hire Sellers?

Listen to this blog entry by clicking the play button above.
You can also click the podcast icon to listen in your default mp3 player.

Ask any broker today what his “number one” problem with the market conditions, and he’ll tell you either there’s too much inventory or it’s all overpriced. Granted, if sellers want to put their homes on the market, nothing can stop them, with so many “for sale by owner” options out there. But that still leaves the issue of the overpriced homes that are represented by brokers. And that begs the question:

Why are brokers hiring sellers to sell their own homes?

Read more

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