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Transcript

GeoFarming

Beatty: This is the Get Sellers Calling You marketing podcast for real estate agents and I’m Beatty Carmichael.  For simple to do proven marketing strategies focus exclusively on finding sellers and getting more listings, visit our website at GetSellersCallingYou.com.  And now, let’s begin our next session of Get Sellers Calling You. 

Caroline: Hi everyone, this is Caroline Springer and welcome to the next session of Get Sellers Calling You with Beatty Carmichael.  Beatty is the CEO of MasterGrabber, the creator of AgentDominator and one of the top marketing experts in the Real Estate field. Today, we’re going to be talking about the topic of geographic farming. We’ve been going through a little bit of the series and today we are going to focusing in on the 10 best low cost ways to touch your geographic farm. Just a reminder for those of you that are on our live call, we will have the lines muted, but we will open for questions and answers at the end of the call. Welcome Beatty.  I’m excited to continue on in our series.

Beatty: I am too but I feel a little offended.

Caller: Uh oh, why?

Beatty: You said I’m one of the best marketing experts. I thought I was “the” best marketing expert. What is this one?

Caller: Well, in my opinion, subjectively, of course you are the best. But, you know, I guess that’s just what you have to say, I guess, not to be too pompous I guess. I’m trying to be fair to any other market expert out there.

Beatty: Trying to be humble?

Caller: Yes. Are you going to give us a quick little run-through of what we’ve talked about previously? I know we’ve had a lot of great content about geographic farming and there is so much more that goes into it than most agents realize. If you want to give a quick refresher for anyone who maybe hasn’t heard previous calls and could maybe learn or have an interest in those they could listen. Then you could to jump right in to these low cost ways to do a geographic farm.

Beatty: Okay, perfect. Also, for those of us who are joining us on the podcast version, which means we’ve released this as a podcast, all of the previous calls are available on our website at: GetSellersCallingYou.com or in the podcast, wherever you are listening to it from.

So, if we take a high level overview and say where are we now and where are we going in geographic farming? You did make a moment and yes there is a whole lot more in doing geographic farming right if you want to make a whole lot of money with it than most agents really realize. And so over the previous sessions we talked about a step-by-step proven process to select the right farm. It’s not just a pick an area where you want to target if you want to make money. There is actually a due diligence process that will actually help you very specifically and accurately which area is going to produce the most money for you in the shortest amount of time and the most money long term. We talked about that. That was call number two. Our first call was just an overview. Then, on our third call, we talked about how to select the right lists because there are lots of options and choices depending on what you are trying to do. Okay? And we talked about you can get everything from the entire list of the farm all the way down to a segmented list that may be a higher concentration of just those homes most likely to actually move and go on the market in the near future. And then, last week on our fourth call, we were talking about how quickly can you earn money? It’s sort of like the attorney, it depends. Okay? It all depends on what it is that you are doing outside of just the automated type of touches. What type of touches you are doing. How many of those touches are personal and things of that sort. So that is kind of brings us up to where we are. Today, I want to cover, if time allows, about 10 different things that you can do that are low cost ways that you can touch your farm and get a good impact. And then, after today’s call, if we complete all of that today, then starting on the subsequent call or calls (I don’t know how long they will last), we are going to go very specifically into things you can do in postcard marketing. Because typically, in geographic farming, the most effective and consistent way that most agents do it is with postcards. I don’t think your touches need to be all of one type only, so it’s a breadth of different things that you do. The postcard mailing is definitely a real cornerstone of effectiveness with geographic farming. So that’s kind of the big picture overview of where we’ve come from, where we are and where we are heading.

Caroline: Perfect. Thank you so much. I think that is always good to do, a little refresher and give background and foundation to what we have done and I know today we are going to talk about some low cost ways to touch the farm. I think that is probably something too that may be a little bit out of the norm for some of our realtors. I know from even realtors I’ve spoken with that a lot of times they think that mailing to the geographic farm that they will see some warm leads come out of that and really, this is the game changer call to set yourself apart by introducing yourself or adding a personal touch, especially the world we live in today. It’s definitely out of the norm to do those things. So, I’m really interested too to hear what you’ve heard from realtors. I know you haves stories that will maybe inspire everyone on what you’ve heard and seen be successful. I’ll let you take it away and start us off on these low cost ways.

Beatty: Great.  Let’s start with a story.  I think I shared this story last time.  I shared it because I think it’s a text book example of how to do geographic farming.  It’s a client of ours and he’s targeting a 1500 home farm and within this farm, there is a Facebook community page that they have.  At the time he started the farm, the community page only had 200 people tied to it.  It was almost nonexistent.  Our client’s is name, Nelson.  Nelson was a nobody in the farm in terms of if you were to look at all the homes sold and how many of those did Nelson represent the seller on, it’s like he’s one of a whole bunch of agents.  Maybe he had one listing or maybe two, but that was about it.  He was essentially non-existent.  We started to do some farming with him and he started to do some of these things I’m going to share with you today, the low cost things and as a combination of the 2, what we were doing in the mail, what he was doing with low cost touches, in 18 months, actually in the first year, he made over $150,000 in commissions from that farm in the first year. $100,000 was directly attributed to the unique style of postcard marketing that we were doing.  I will talk about that on the next calls.  $50,000 was generated through his low cost touches.  Six months later, now 18 months into the game, Nelson controlled 22% of all of the listings in that farm, outselling the number 2 agent by over 7 times.  Then another 18 months later, he controls 50% of all of the listings going on in that farm.  He is doing it right.  He’s a text book case example of what can happen when you do everything right.  So, starting with a story, that’s where this thing can go and I promise you, he has no interest in buying leads.  He has no interest in driving all over the city to try to sell houses because what he’s found is he can focus on his farm and he can make an amazing lifestyle just doing that one thing.  That’s where I’d like to go today. 

Caroline:  Wow, I think that’s definitely inspiring seeing the results like that.

Beatty:  Let’s breakdown what he did.  He did only 2 of the 10 low cost touches I’m going to talk about.  That’s it.  He only did 2 of them.  He did postcard mailings with us and did 2 of these other things and that put his business into overdrive in that farm.  The first thing that he did was door knocking.  1500 homes so that’s a lot of houses.  His goal was to door knock the entire community 3 times every year.  That’s once every 4 months.  When he first got started before he had a lot of business, he did that.  Then it slowed down to door knocking 2 times a year because he didn’t have time to do it 3 times and then I think that slowed down to probably 1-1/2 times.  With busyness comes lack of ability.  We’ve talked about different things and one of those things is door knocking.  Let’s test your memory for a moment, Caroline.  What is the value of door knocking in a geographic farm?  If you could say the highest value is what, what would that highest value be?

Caroline:  I would think that door knocking would be the top value.  I don’t know if that’s the way you’re asking the question.

Beatty:  No, I want to know why.  What is it about door knocking that makes it a top value?

Caroline:  Just that personal connection, face-to-face.  I know when you talked about door knocking in the past, you recommended to be wearing your name tag, adding that personal connection so they see your name, they see your face.  In addition to receiving the marketing in the mail, it solidifies keeping that realtor top of mind, that they’re the realtor they think of.  Like I’ve said before, I think that you can’t put a price on a personal connection.

Beatty:  Absolutely.  Let’s go back to some fundamentals.  You hit the nail on the head.  The fundamental is this.  You can take all the people you do business with and put them into 2 categories.  Those that you have met and those that you have not met.  If you look at the results in terms of how responsive they are to your marketing, how likely they are to do business with you, it becomes really polarized because those that you have met and they now put a face, a name, a personality to you are 8 to 10 times more likely to do business with you than if you haven’t met them.  The reason the door knocking is probably the most important thing you can do when doing a geographic farm is simply you take that person from being a stranger that they’ve never met and now they know you personally.  Once they know you personally, they begin to trust you.  They begin to form a relationship.  Real estate is a relationship business.  The more you can build and establish and foster that relationship, the more like you are to get that business.  That’s the value of door knocking.  It takes time, but let me ask you kind of a loaded question.  Do you think the door knocking was worth it time wise for Nelson to go from 1% of the market to 22% in 18 months and 50% 18 months later.  Do you think door knocking was worth it?

Caroline:  Absolutely.  I’m sure Nelson, even if he tallied up the amount of time that it took to do that door knocking, I’m sure there’s no way that he would say that it wasn’t worth the monumental increases in the percentage of the market.  I would think, absolutely, it is.

Beatty:  He makes a lot of money right now and has the great lifestyle.  Keep in mind, he earned, just in that farm alone, $150,000 in his first 12 months.  That’s right at 5 million in sales volume.  It’s worth the time and effort.  I say that only because what I hear from so many agents is I don’t have time to do that.  That’s below me.  I’ve got other things I need to do.  You have to look at your time and say, what is the most important thing you can do for the long term success of your business.  Are you willing to sacrifice a lot of the busy work that you feel to do now so that you can gain the long term superiority and dominance in that farm that you can get over time.  It becomes a choice of today versus tomorrow.  Are you building your business only for today?  Are you building it for the long term?  If you’re doing it long term, then take the long term approach and door knocking is one of the most important things because it gets you in front of all those homeowners.  That’s the first thing.  It’s low cost dollar wise, but it does take time.  The second thing is the Facebook community page.  I want to talk about this for a little bit.  I can tell you right now, this call is going to go into second call, at least, to cover all 10 low cost ways of touching your farm.  Just be prepared.  We’ll be continuing this topic next week.  The Facebook community page, let’s talk about this because this was incredibly instrumental with Nelson and with other agents I’ve talked to.  It plays a huge part because if we take a step back and look at what causes someone to choose an agent.  If a homeowner is going to choose an agent, what are the reasons he or she chooses that agent?  It boils down to only 2 things, trust and top of mind.  Trust is do they trust you to sell their most valuable asset and trust that you will get the best deal for them.  Top of mind is simply when it comes time to think of an agent, are you on the top of their minds so that they end of up calling you.  It’s a convergence of those 2 things. If we were just to take a real quick snapshot so that you understand how door knocking and how Facebook community page, and how all these other touches that we’re going to be talking about, and then postcard marketing and actually the touches, how all these converge.  It converges on the concepts of trust and top of mind.  You can actually multiply trust by top of mind and come up with a relatively accurate number of how likely are you to get the deal when that deal is ready to come on the market.  Let’s say we put both of them on a scale of 1 to 10.  Your trust on a 1 to 10 and top of mind on a 1 to 10.  If your trust is a 3 and your top of mind is a 3, then that means that you multiply them together.  That means that it’s 3×3, you’ve got about a 9% change that when that homeowner is thinking about a real estate agent, they’re going to call you.  If you can build your trust to a 5 and build your top of mind to a 6, then you’ve got about a 30% likelihood.  If you can get your trust to a 9 and your top of mind to a 10, you’ve got about a 90% likelihood.  Now, this is very rough numbers.  It’s not accurate specifically but it gets you in the general direction of at least an understanding of the influence of trust and top of mind.  What the door knocking does, is it increases trust because now they’ve been able to meet you and know you as an individual.  The first step in trusting someone is having met them.  Am I making sense on this so far?

Caroline:  Absolutely.  I think like I said on this call, that personal connection is obviously going to go a long way, but also just to trust you versus what somebody says random.  A lot of people may have had a bad experience with a sales person in their life, so adding that personal touch so that they feel safe, they can trust you.  Like you said also, this is the most valuable asset they own, so this is likely the most important thing that they will ever sell or go into a transaction with.  I think that personal touch of where they feel they like you, they enjoy being around you.  It kind of makes them feel like they can trust you.  Absolutely, I’m following.  That’s right on the money.

Beatty:  Okay, great.  Now, let’s talk about top of mind because Facebook starts to be more top of mind than trust.  There’s some trust element there, but what Facebook allows is for you to always be there.  What happened with Nelson in this area is there was this Facebook community page that had already been set up but no one was really engaging on it.  He recognized it as an untapped asset.  If you’re going into a geographic farm yourself, one of the things that you want to look at is there a Facebook community page set up for that area that people are participating in.  If there’s not, create one.  If there is, participate in it.  Find out where the people are congregating.  If they’re not there and they’re not congregating, then you can promote it.  That’s what happened with Nelson.  They were not congregating in the Facebook community page because they did not know about it.  As Nelson was getting started, the first thing that he did as part of his door knocking is he went door knocking with a purpose to then introduce them to the Facebook community page.  After he finished door knocking, it went from 200 people to 800 people on the Facebook community page entirely because of his door knocking.  He would leave a door hanger, if he missed them.  It was branded to him and directed them to join the Facebook community page.  It said, things like, learn what’s going on in Horse Thief Canyon, learn about buy and sell things, like if you’re looking for something and someone has posted it for sale.  Whatever it may be, but he got the attendance from 200 to 800 initially.  The last time I talked to him, I think it was like 1200 out of 1500 homes.  He continues to push on it.  Then, what happened is he actually became one of the administrators of the Facebook community page because the guy who was administering it was getting tired of it and Nelson said, well, I’ll help you out.  Wouldn’t you love to be the realtor who is managing the Facebook community page for the entire community?

Caroline:  Oh, absolutely.

Beatty:  Now, he didn’t overstep his bounds at all.  What he did is he ensured that it was going to be a valuable asset because it was part of his marketing pillar.  Then, what happened is anytime people would sign up for the Facebook community page and join, he would then get their information, copy it to his personal Facebook page and then message them and say, welcome to the Facebook community page.  My name is Nelson.  I’m actually a realtor in the area and look forward to having you on the community page.  So, he would introduce himself, identify who he is and now they’re on his personal Facebook page and on the community page.  That sets the groundwork.  What do you do from there?  Obviously, Nelson is active on his personal Facebook account he’s posting things out there so people are always seeing him.  That’s important.  Top of mind, Nelson’s always there.  He also made a point that every week or two, he would respond to someone’s post on the community page.  He would always make some sort of reply or a comment or love the photo or anything like that simply so he could get his name out there again and they would see that he’s still there.  Now, any agent could promote on the Facebook community page.  He didn’t cut anyone out.  Most agents never took advantage of it, but he did.  Any time he got a new listings, he would post a coming soon message on the Facebook community page and then he would post just listed and he would then post open house, then he would post under contract, then he would post just sold.  For every home he listed in the community, he was getting 4 and 5 touches into that community through the Facebook community page, touching again and what that was showing was activity.  By the time coming soon and then open house and then under contract, by the time each of them came out, people don’t always recognize that it’s the same house, but what they see if Nelson is an active agent in this area.  One of the pillars of trust, back to trust and top of mind, one of the pillars of trust that we’ve been able to verify and validate is do they trust that you are actively selling real estate.  Just because you’re a realtor doesn’t mean that you’re actively selling.  You have to let them know and remind them.  Let me ask you a crazy question.  You’ve been married for how long, Caroline?

Caroline: Five and a half years.

Beatty:  Five and a half year, okay.  Did your husband tell you I love you when you got married?

Caroline:  Yes

Beatty:  Alright.  Does he show his love to you by his actions?

Caroline:  Absolutely.

Beatty:  If he never told you again except that one time at marriage, I love you, would you feel something’s wrong?

Caroline:  Maybe, but no at the same time because he shows his love through that, but yeah, I would wonder why.

Beatty:  Most women want to hear it all the time.  Even though they know, they want to hear it again.  Does that make sense?

Caroline:  Absolutely.

Beatty:  The same thing happens with homeowners.  Even though they know you’re probably selling homes, you’ve got to keep reminding them.  You’ve got to keep showing them.  Here’s another sale.  Here’s another listing.  Here’s another under contract.  Here’s another open house.  The more you keep reminding them, the more it reinforces that you’re actively selling.  That’s a huge pillar of trust.  If other people in the community are trusting you to sell their home, now you have that social validation that they so desperately need to make a decision.  By using the Facebook community page, he’s out there all the time.  Every home that he personally manages on in their community, he’s now posting this message.  People are seeing him all the time as an active agent.  They’re seeing him periodically as an active neighbor commenting on people’s posts.  They see him in the neighborhood.  He still door knocks. They get to meet him.  He still does postcard mailings.  They see him in the mailbox.  Three years after starting, he’s got 50% of the market share.  Does all of this make sense?  Do you see how everything is converging to the same point?

Caroline:  Absolutely.

Beatty:  That’s two out of 10.  Let’s go with Number 3, let me find a short one because we’re going to run out of time on Number 3.

Caroline:  Oh, no, I’ve been trying to edit my commentary to give you more time. 

Beatty:  Yeah, I get it.  Let’s talk about the cupcake give way.  Ice cream or cupcake give away.  This is something you can do when you have a community that operates as a community especially if they have a common area like a park.  Maybe a local school that everyone congregates at.  It’s difficult if you don’t have any green space.  There are some other ways to do it and we’ll about it later.  If you have a green space, a common area, a part or an elementary school where you can go meet on the football field or anything like that, then the idea is to have a social.  Invite the whole neighborhood.  Make sure that you give enough opportunity to announce it ahead of time so people can work their schedule around it.  Maybe hire a DJ.  Maybe get some of those blow up activities like slides and things like that, bouncy rooms and have an ice cream truck or a cupcake truck come over to give away free ice cream and free cupcakes.  Now, what we’re doing is we’re going to create a community wide, social event on a Saturday morning.  All the people are going to come.  They’re going to bring their kids.  You’re going to promote it and as you promote it, obviously, it’s got your branding on it.  You promote it through Every Door Direct, you promote it through the Facebook community page, you go door knocking, and you put out flyers.  You hire high school kids to go put flyers on every door.  Whatever it takes, you make a big deal out of it and people come to the park.  The whole reason for this is now you get to meet them individually.  What you do is you stand by the free give away.  You stand by the ice cream truck or you stand by the cupcake truck as they’re handing it all out for free.  You’re smiling and you’re shaking hands.  You’ve got your name tag on so they can see your name and recognize instantly who you are.  You put your same face on that you have branded on all your other stuff.  Don’t use a photo from 20 years ago as a lot of agents may do and you don’t look anything like the photo.  Make sure the photo in all your branding looks like you in real person so when they meet you in real person, they go, ah, yeah, I keep seeing you.  I wondered who you are.  Now, they get to meet you and you’re shaking hands.  You’re saying, it’s been a while since I’ve seen you, it’s so good to see you and it comes to the event that they get to meet you and talk with you personally.  If they know you, they trust you and they’ll do business with you 8 to 10 times more likely than if they don’t.  This is a great way, low cost on a per home basis, but immense return on investment on that.  That’s going to be the third out of 10 things, so we’ll see how much we get through on the next call.  I think we’ll get through a little bit more because I tried to lay more of a foundation on this call as how these all interact.  Let me turn it back over to you because I know we need to start wrapping up the call.

Caroline:  Yeah.  I think it’s good to take the time to lay that foundation and explain and show the statistics and percentages and successes you’ve shared, like for Nelson.  It’s so important for realtors to hear that it’s not a waste of their time because we know it takes time to go and door knock.  We know that might be the reason it seems daunting but when you hear results like that, it’s hard to argue with it.  I think this is great and I think we will push through those last 7 on the next call.  We are just about out of time, so we need to wrap up.  Beatty, thank you so much for your time and expertise.  I think it really was a great call.  Before we close out of the call, do you have anything else that you’d like to share?

Beatty:  I would.  As always, I like to unabashedly plug our service for those that want help in what you do in marketing.  What we’ve learned in marketing and how to do it right, we’ve learned by helping other agents do it and providing service to them in that regards.  If you find yourself overwhelmed and you say, I really want to outsource something.  Now, I can’t outsource door knocking.  I can’t outsource for you the Facebook community page or standing in line and greeting people, but what we can do is do a lot of the other stuff.  Like the postcard marketing and some of the online sort of stuff.  If you have interest in that, just go to our website, AgentDominator.net.  You will see some information about us but the most important thing over there is you’ll find our form where you can request information from us on that.  Let me encourage you to do that, and that’s my plug.

Caroline:  Perfect, so we’re out of time.  What we’re going to do is for those that are on the live call with us, if you have questions that you’d like to ask Beatty, just hold on and as soon as we wrap up, we’ll go into a short questions and answers time.  That’s all we have for today.  Thanks again and thank you, Beatty for sharing.

Beatty:  Thank you

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