Peter Drucker said that the purpose of marketing is to make sales superfluous. That should come as welcome wisdom to the real estate industry that is comprised of so many reluctant salespeople.
Watch this video

Here are seven secrets to making social networking one of your most powerful prospecting tools with today’s modern real estate buyers and sellers.

Matthew Ferrara explores how properly staging a home’s unique value proposition can make your listings more competitive in a tough market.

November 12 – San Diego, CA – As the National Association of REALTORS Annual Convention opens this week in San Diego, Matthew Ferrara & Company announced the launch of its latest learning service, real estate brainchain (http://www.rebrainchain.com). The new online video learning community features high-quality training lessons for real estate professionals on a broad variety of topics like sales, marketing, technology and management. As easy to use as YouTube, but with real estate specific content, brainchain launches with almost 100 ready-to-learn lessons featuring some of the industry’s top trainers. “Brainchain changes the paradigm in online learning for REALTORS,” says Matthew Ferrara, CEO of Matthew Ferrara & Company, the parent of brainchain. “In the last two decades, we have repeatedly delivered innovations in real estate training, first by incorporating technology into the classroom, then by creating the industry’s largest delivery system of webinars. We’ll deliver more than 3500 webinars this year alone, but we still don’t think that’s enough availability and affordability for the industry. That’s why we’re introducing real estate brainchain.” The new platform uses the latest video innovations to change how real estate professionals use the internet to grow their business. While many real estate agents have been using [...]

Peter Drucker said that the purpose of marketing is to make sales superfluous. That should come as welcome wisdom to the real estate industry that is comprised of so many reluctant salespeople who won’t telemarket, interact at open houses or even join Facebook (latest numbers show less than 35% of REALTORS with a social networking presence). So what can be done to improve the pathetic listing sheets, the photo-less listings or sea-sick virtual tours that are undermining so many sales? Perhaps a quick art lesson could help.

Why is it that some things just won’t go change? There, on my doorstep, was a reminder that some companies still don’t get it. Nearly two pounds of absurdity, neatly wrapped in a plastic bag, and personally delivered to to my front porch, was a reminder that the more things change, the more some things stay the same. Absurd, when you think of it: Who uses the Yellow Pages these days?

In the technology world, nothing is dull like yesterday’s news; unless the old news was right. That’s the case with the story of a technology strategy that might have made all the difference today, if only more brokers had taken it to heart. So it is that the “virtual office” is back in the news, which too many going-broke-brokers and paper-drowned-agents wishes they paid attention to last time. Didn’t the virtual office take off, you ask? Doesn’t everyone have a laptop, PDA and wireless email device? Sure, if we’re talking about college kids – but not the average agent in the average real estate company. NAR studies still show a mysterious 5% of agents don’t report owning a cell phone. Less than half of agents own a PDA newer than two years old and barely 20% are checking their email wirelessly. Brokerage infrastructure is hardly any better these days. Most brokers suffer from advice from over-cautious IT geeks still worrying about “security” rather than cost-efficiencies of installing wireless routers in their offices. Only a tiny fraction have created secure virtual networks or intranets so agents can access to email and marketing materials from home.

Regular readers of this column may remember the installment, No Photos, No Buyers, No Kidding, where I exhorted real estate agents to make every effort to upload multiple photos to every listing on their website. Back then, the argument was that online listings without photos were about as useless as jargon-abbreviated classifieds in the back of the newspaper. Truth be told, the consumer vindicated my efforts, with the NAR’s annual buyer survey reporting that the consumer ranks multiple photos as the single most important data they seek from online portals. Some real estate companies have gone so far as to mandate multiple photos as a pre-condition before a new listing will appear online. And yet, while any search (try one now) of REALTOR.COM will still find plenty of listings without photos, tremendous effort has been made by most agents to saturate their listings with photos and virtual tours. Now, however, I’m ready to admit that I was wrong. I concede defeat. Throw in the towel; anything you wish, if you’ll just stop putting more photos online. Please! What has made me change my mind? Just look at some of the photos now ruining the real estate space online and you’ll [...]

After another week on the road teaching some sessions and having lots of fun with my students, I’m happy to report that there seems to be a consensus amongst the (remaining) real estate professionals in the country: The Basics are Back. You know, things like prospecting, following up on visitors to your open house, being organized, calling customers back, even reasonably pricing properties (Ok, that one really isn’t back but we can pretend it is…). Sales, my friends. Good old fashioned sales. That’s what everyone is “suddenly discovering” is missing in the business. It’s no surprise: not to those of us who’ve been around a bit. Remember, according to the research, 60% of agents leave the business within 18 months; and 90% of the agent population turns over every 5 years or so. Now, if you do the math, that means that a significant proportion of today’s real estate agents (and managers) have been in the business for under 5 years. And many joined the business when it was HOT. So they’ve never “had” to sell before. Nope – no need to prospect or give the courtesy of a follow up to anyone when you can stand in front of [...]