Property management – as it is known – or as it was known in Australia for the last 50 years is undergoing a massive shift – and the trends discussed here open the door for property management holding companies that take advantage of these trends to consolidate power across Australia and multiple states.
Also taking advantage of these trends will allow real estate companies to remain competitive, thrive and dominate in their area.
Everything I speak about I have witnessed in working with, and speaking with real estate agents in the real world – so this is not some “armchair academia” type piece – so I apologise in advance if it is a bit more informal – I believe if you adapt these changes in your holding company or your property management company you will see a sharp increase in closed property managements and retention of your current rent roll.
So… let’s get straight to it – ACTIONable points based on trends.
Tenants do not want to speak to you (Property Management AI)
Based on in-field research not only do tenants not wish to speak to their property manager directly – but they report much higher satisfaction scores from dealing with an AI based rental system like Rental Heroes vs. dealing directly with their property manager.
Think about it – in these days of instant – on-demand services – tenants expect to be able to open an app and report any property issues with a few presses of a button – take a photo of their issue – answer any relevant questions – and then await a time and date for when a tradesperson will come to fix the issue (or if any other information is required).
Not only is this a win for the tenant but it is also a win for the property management company – who will no longer need to handle tenant complaints/issues and deal with potential interpersonal conflicts.
And even finding a tradesperson to fix an issue is once again something that can be done automatically or by a centralised/white-label service – so if 90% of your property manager’s time is being spent handling tenant issues than that is an issue and a massive opportunity for streamlining costs.
2) Following Through and Being Honest is not a Differentiator (Property Managers ➝I nvestment Acceleration Specialists)
It is very rare to see landlords thrilled with their property management company. While it is not politically correct to say this – most investors see their property manager as a sort of “tax” that they have to pay to receive their investment income – sort of like a gas bill.
Of course property manager do much more than this – they have to find a tenant and get paperwork signed – but once everything is setup things go on auto pilot – and especially if you have a multi year tenant lease many investors can look at a property management fee as one big expense without a lot of upside.
For most property management companies their point of difference is literally “we do our job” – as this screenshot below illustrates:
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A typical property management company whose point of difference is that they “follow through” (as opposed to… not following through and doing anything?) – and they communicate “factual information” (which I guess is better than lying to everyone).
On a serious note most property management companies offer bare bones service and are only used because they’re in the area so to speak – which as we’ve learnt from trend #1 is going to be less and less of a competitive advantage as time goes on.
The solution to this is to start offering investors MORE – more value – and the best way to do this is to rebrand the “property manager” to an “investment acceleration specialist” – your team must be repositioned from the “people that collect the rent and call pest control/tradespeople when issues come up for an investor’s tenants” to investment specialists that advise an investor on how to maximise their income –
Because let’s be honest – when all is said and done – all that matters to an investor at the end of the year is how much money they put in their pocket from the investments that a property management company manages – everything else is wondow dressing.
You would think property management companies would spend some time figuring out how to help the investor achieve this – but you’d be wrong.
Calling competitor’s investor clients and simply asking if their property manager has ever spoken to them about rental increase strategies/tax minimisation/legal compliance and fine avoidance – and offering a trial or refund guarantee for a service makes easy pickings for any property management company that is willing to put in the work to easily grow and dominate (especially when this sales effort can be systematised) [link to REAA].
3) You Don’t Need to Tell me Where the Bathroom Is (Contact-less Inspections)
Sure – you might say – tenant issues can be handled through a centralised white label service but the property manager is still required to do property inspections for new tenants.
That will always be required – right?
Well – actually, no.
There are all ready a number of software and hardware solutions to automate property inspections – and these will actually be a win-win for the tenant and the property management company.
Firstly – we all ready know that forcing potential tenants to inspect properties at a time convenient to the property manager all ready scares away many high quality potential tenants (surprise, surprise – the best tenants actually have things to do at 1pm on a Wednesday when the property management company forces applicants to inspect – or whatever it is) – which leads to issues down the line.
The other option is flexible inspections – which means most property managers are running around showing properties and filling their calendar up (and cursing no shows) – an expense that simply cannot be maintained moving forward.
By the way – as someone who was looking for a property earlier these inspections are never fun for the tenant either – after running 15 minutes late due to traffic I called the property manager who was meant to show me the property – only to not be able to reach them, followed by being told that the inspection cannot go ahead because the property manager had to rush off to the next inspection – as someone who pays my rent on time and stays in a property for multiple years – I chose not to deal with that company because I am petty (and they lost another potential tenant to select from).
So – what’s the solution?
One doesn’t need a crystal ball to see the future because most of what I am talking about all ready exists.
In fact if you want to know what property managers are going to be doing 5 years in the future just look at what AirBnB owners are doing right now in the USA and other countires.
Hardware like the Igloo lockbox along with a key GPS tracking system allows you to grant one time PIN codes to people inspecting a property – and having the key attached to a GPS tracker means no one can take it away and duplicate it (you want to have every precaution – and I tend to always err on the side of caution).
Since you will only be granting the one time PIN code to potential inspectors who would ideally – share their details with you the chance of something happening is very minor – you can also install a motion detection camera at the front door if necessary.
By the way this isn’t some futuristic tech pipe dream – doing a personal calculation based on the items I’ve mentioned (and I have provided the links above) comes to the following: 1) Igloo lockbox – $179USD 2) Key GPS (optional) – $40 3) Motion dection camera (optional) – $179 (Nest camera from Google which will give you time stamps and video of people coming and going)
For a total of under $400 you have a system that can be installed in any property which removes the headaches of in person inspections – makes life easier for the tenant (believe me – the tenant does not want to inspect a property that they are looking to potentially live in long term with someone standing over them telling them obvious things like “this is the bathroom” and other un-necessary information) – much less doing it with 4 other strangers who are inspecting the property as well.
P.S. At the time of writing Kogan has a sale on motion detection cameras for as low as $38 – which drops the whole package down to under $260 for one property
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However the amount of people inspecting the property can also drop dramatically and save effort for everyone with of course…
4) The 3D Virtual Tour
3D Virtual tours are here – and they’re not reserved for film makers – the equipment required to create a virtual tour is dropping significantly – in fact if you have a centralised office you can bring tenants in and give them virtual tours using a 3d headset (isn’t the future amazing?).
Again even writing this sounds like something out of the future – but all of these things are not only available now – but are also very competitively priced.
The Virtual tour has a number of benefits – as potential tenants will be much more engaged in properties where they can look around in first person rather than looking at photos from the side – especially because every tenant knows photos are taken to make the property look as attractive as possible and may not always represent the true spatial dimensions (especially with the selection of certain lenses that make rooms look bigger than they really are) – a virtual tour (or 360 photo) eliminates this.
By the way you don’t have to worry about buying 360 equipment – because with services like Snappr – you can login and schedule a photographer to come in and take all the 360 photos you want – and it’ll only cost you around $179 per property (sometimes less) – and Snappr is available anywhere in Australia as an on demand service.
The most popular real estate directoreis/platforms like Domain all ready have 360 photos allowed – and I want to stress the “contact-less” nature of this. Because you can get the photos taken by a photographer who you can grant a one time pin to – using the Igloo lockbox (in the previous point) – and it’ll save time for everyone as you will only get tenants that are 100% serious about moving in – since after a 360 tour the physical inspection is most of the time a mere formality.
Along with a digital signature service like Docusign – you could have everything signed and ready pending a physical inspection for move in – and make everyone’s lives easier… the new tenant could even have some of their items to move in on the first inspection.
5) The BDM Property Manager Hybrid
In the future there will be no “property manager”. The idea of someone whose job is solely to show people around properties, attend to tenant issues, shortlist applicants and chase up rents will not exist.
The reason for this is – as stated before – most of these jobs will either be outsourced to AI software like Rental Heroes (for issue management) – with inspections being replaced by hardware/software solutions – and any other remaining issues outsourced to a centralised white label property management service.
However even though many of the traditional jobs that the property manager does now will become extinct this is not to say the job itself will no longer exist – it will – however it will simply evolve to a Property Management/BDM hybrid.
There are all ready “Property Management BDMs” out there – or property managers who also have the dual responsibility of developing business now – however this will become standard in the future. Any property manager that does not possess BDM skills will find it more and more difficult to find a position in any real estate agency that is looking to streamline its services.
While many of the tenant facing services will be white labelled – the investor facing services will need to be doubled down on. The one with the gold makes the rules and the investor – who will have more and more options for the management of their property – will expect more in the future (tenants will always just want a place to live without anything breaking down etc.)
The Property Manager BDM will be responsible for closing and retaining current business (many property management companies lose approximately 10% of their managements every 6-12 months – a management retention campaign could be the best investment you ever make in your business – since a 500 managed property rent roll would lose 50 managements a year – so plugging up that hole would be extremely valuable).
As far as Business Development goes however this will not involve making continous calls to investors and turning a real estate agency into a call centre – rather this will involve talking to investors and learning how to bring value to those investors – in the form of tax minimisation, legal protection and asset maximisation strategies – and engaging in conversations with investors in assisting them in these elements.
The property management company that can retrain their property managers into Property Manager BDM’s will thrive – my REAA package includes the first step to doing this – lowering your retention rate and also setting up a foundational proven system to grow your rent roll on auto pilot (without acquisiton).
Well that’s it for the trends – the reality is that while technology is evolving rapidly it does take a lot of time for traditional “status quo” industries to catch up – for now managements may seem safe but the market is poised for a huge disruption by a player that can reposition itself from simple “rent collector” to “investment acceleration specialist” company with a trained property management BDM staff and scale nationwide with a centralised support team and contact less inspections (which by the way will make all the COVID avoidant people very happy).
The question is not will it happen – but rather will you be positioned to ride the new wave or will you be one of the company that is acquired and gobbled up.
http://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.png00KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2022-03-15 06:22:492022-03-15 06:33:125 ‘just-around-the-corner’ Trends that Will Make 99% of Property Management Companies Obsolete in 5 Years (And How You Can Ride these Trends to complete MARKET DOMINATION for your Real Estate Agency)
My goal with this article is to show you how I book one to five appointments every hour using cold calls. I’m also going to show you how the software I use ensures that I positioned myself correctly for those appointments. Finally, I will show you how you can apply this system in your own real estate agency.
By implementing this strategy, you’re going to be able to increase your appointment rate—especially if you feel that your current system isn’t working right. I bet that you will be able to increase your appointment rate by at least 400%. And even more importantly, prospective property investors or sellers are going to be excited to work with you and see you as their number one choice.
Let’s start by looking at the most common mistakes real estate agencies make when creating a cold-call appointment booking system.
Mistake #1 – Not rejecting themselves early & using email software
Your email list is powerful. In fact, email remains a powerful medium to generate sales. We all know that. But what you might not know, is that mass marketing email software is useless in the current market. Here I’m referring to programs like MailChimp, Aweber, or several other mass marketing email software packages.
Your rent roll and past customers and sales walk in list is powerful
Let me explain why I recommend that you throw all of the stuff out. Firstly, nobody is opening up email newsletters in 2021 anymore. The reality is that there’s already too much information floating around on the internet.
However, your biggest problem isn’t that people are ignoring your email campaigns. The problem is that most people—even your happiest customers—aren’t able to see your email campaigns.
I’ll prove it to you, and this is something you can try out for yourself. If you create a Gmail account, you will see at the top of your window a tab called promotions. Do you know what that is? When you send mail through popular email marketing software such as MailChimp or Aweber, it leaves a digital trail. If Gmail gets even a whiff of that digital signature, that email is stored under the promotions tab. Which means your prospects will never see it.
Most of the time your email campaigns will not even be seen by your prospects – as most will go into the ‘Promotions’ tab automatically
What normal person would click on that promotions tab to read all their spam email or access old email newsletters? It seems to me that only a crazy person would do that—not exactly the kind of customer you want.
Mass marketing email software is ineffective in 2021. What you want to do instead, is send an email to your entire prospect list from the email address of the staff member who’s about to call on the phone—using that staff member’s email signature. What do you write in that email? Tell them the truth: that you’re about to call them because you want them to become your customer. The important thing is to give them the option to opt out of being contacted by providing a link.
Most marketing software is ineffective in 2021
Just be upfront. Hey, we’re about to phone you and give you a sales pitch. We want to talk about what it would take to make you our newest client. But if you don’t want to hear from us, please press this button.
In this way, the customer can opt out of hearing a sales pitch before you even make a call. So when your sales staff phones them, they’re not going to be rejected outright. Which makes it much easier to make cold calls—and takes away the biggest obstacle people have for calling up someone they don’t know.
This is a way for prospects to give you tacit approval to reach out to them and basically see if you can do business (especially when combined with the strategy from the next section). This is also going to get buy-in from your sales staff, especially your property management team. And believe me, you’ll hear fewer excuses from them like: Our investors don’t want to hear from us; they don’t want to hear our sales pitch; or they don’t want us to bother them.
Since the customers have already given their tacit approval, your staff will have less reason to complain. Which will lower your staff turnover. Who do you think is going to burn out faster—the staff member who phones prospects who are already willing to enter into a conversation, or the one who faces repeated rejections over the phone?
Allowing prospects to opt out of being called, is an easy solution to a difficult problem. On the cold emails I send out, I have three unsubscribe links and I get a 10% unsubscribe rate on those emails—which isn’t bad at all. How do I handle those people who opt out of receiving a call? I keep my word. They will never hear from me again.
In summary, get rejected earlier. It will lower your turnover rate.
Mistake #2 – Narcissistic Marketing
I’m going to tell you something you probably already know. You’re not the only real estate agent in town. You’re also not the only property manager in town. Here’s something else you probably already suspect: nobody reads your blog posts.
I know SEO. Check out some of the case studies I feature on my website. In one particular case, I generated $71,000 worth of additional organic traffic for a customer. Trust me when I say that most real estate agents don’t get the right information about their content strategy. The problem is that most real estate agents use SEO agencies that know little to nothing about real estate or how that industry works.
The results of one of my case studies
Let me go back to the telephone for a second. The one thing your real estate agents and property managers probably don’t want to hear when they pick up the telephone is the following: “Your pitch sounds great. In fact, we are looking to sell our home/we’re not happy with our current property manager. Why don’t you send us an email? We’ll look it over and talk later.”
What does the agent do? They send an email explaining why they’re the most amazing real estate agent in the world, and then they beg the customer to pick them. Which turns into more follow up phone calls and more emails—which is about the least fun part of being a real estate agent. Who wants to be the guy who has to make all those calls and send all those emails? It’s no wonder staff turnover in real estate agencies is so high.
No one wants to be the person calling up out of nowhere and annoying people – lest of all property managers with little sales experience
The issue is that when they pick up the phone, they give no additional value to the prospect except pitching a commercial to them. Switching from narcissistic marketing to value added marketing is the greatest gift that you can give yourself, your company and your agency’s income.
If you look at real estate agency websites, they look almost identical. From their websites you would think that all agencies are the same. But from my conversations with real estate agents, I found that every real estate agency is unique. Every real estate agency has a different approach and methodology. Some only do auctions. Some don’t do auctions at all. Some focus on the interior decorating to position a home—while others literally manage and do entire renovations on homes.
Let me ask you this: in the last 5, 10 or 15 years of operation, did your agency pick up a thing or two about selling or managing properties? Have you learned anything about getting results for your customers? Did you learn anything about sales—about facilitating faster sales times, achieving higher property values, and going through the process with less paperwork and stress? As a property management, did you learn to lower vacancy rates, achieve higher rental yields, and lower maintenance costs for your clients?
Now, answer this question: Do you think the insights you picked up over the years of serving customers could benefit your future customers? Of course they could! And do you think your future customers would appreciate learning about your insights? Absolutely! So why don’t you create a piece of content—especially a video—around one of those insights?
You could then send a link to that video content to a customer who asks to be contacted by email—instead of your normal sales pitch. This is highly effective. Why? Firstly, because people will actually watch your video. Nobody’s reading sales pitches or blog posts anymore.
Secondly, video content will position you as an expert in your field. It will also give you the benefit of the celebrity effect. When people see someone on video, subconsciously they start to see that person as someone important—even though almost anybody can make a video these days.
Video is a great way to get someone on your wavelength and bring them over to your point of view. It will make them more inclined to work with you. You’re going to give them insights, and you’re going to change their focus to the solutions you’re able to provide them.
And finally, sending out content emails will save you time. It will save you from having to repeat the same information in every sale appointment because it will already have been covered by the video content you sent out. Which means that you can put more of your focus on meeting your prospects’ unique needs. You will close more deals, faster, and easier.
When you get into the habit of creating high quality content, people are going to look forward to hearing from you. Your sales team is going to have a much better time engaging with prospects—and they will actively buy into the process.
Which means you’re ready for the next step.
Mistake #3 – Failing to check the pulse
I’ve got an uncomfortable truth for you: Your prospects will lie to you. Most people lie to themselves on a consistent basis. It’s just the way the world works. Prospects will lie to you for various reasons. Maybe they’re afraid to tell you how desperate they are to find an agent and sell their property as quickly as possible—or how horrible their current property manager is and how much they want to get rid of them.
Why would they lie to you? Because they’re afraid you may use that information against them—even though you need the right information to solve their problem quickly.
Some prospects are going to be very friendly—but no deal is forthcoming. Other prospects are going to be gruff and closed off, but they’re dying to make a deal happen.
Most real estate agents have no idea where they stand with their prospects because they don’t check the proverbial pulse. How do you read a customer’s actual intentions? With a little-known tool called “read receipts.”
Do you know what a prospect does after you get off the phone with them and you send them video content? Do they open the email? Do they watch the video? Do they watch the video once, twice, three times? Do you even know how to find out?
Let’s look at the problem of getting buy-in from your property management team or your sales team. Perhaps they complain that it’s a waste of time to call prospects because they’re just not interested. Wouldn’t it be useful to show them a report that some people clicked on the video you sent out once, twice, or even three times? (I’ve had prospects click on a video 13 times or more.) Wouldn’t such a report be useful for your sales and property management team to do follow up?
What’s more, could you think what a lovely conversation they could have with the prospect—asking them what they thought about the video? Or how would you like to go into a sales appointment or an appointment with an investor knowing they’ve watched a whole bunch of content? Do you think it’s going to be easier to win over the prospect and make a deal happen?
If you follow this approach, you’ll stand out from every other property manager and sales agent in the market. I can guarantee they’re going to see you in a different light. At they very least, they’re going to remember you. If you create a sequence of highly valuable content that you send prospects, they will remember to keep the appointments you make with them.
So check the pulse. Turn your real estate agency into an on-demand appointment generating machine. Turn your staff into a group of people who enjoy their jobs and are sold on what they do—because they’re not annoying people with commercials anymore.
Mistake #4 – Bad Data and whistles
Now I’m going to mention a topic that’s really boring: the organisation of your data. Part of my technical background is custom designing CRM systems. Over the years, I’ve used every CRM under the sun: HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, you name it. Unfortunately, most are more trouble than they’re worth.
Now, CRM systems are valuable in theory. They’re useful out of the box—until you need to adjust the software to suit your specific needs. This usually means that you have to send an email to customer support, wait two or three days for their response—only to be redirected to a 200 page manual to fix the program yourself. Does that sound familiar? What’s worse is that by that time your data is already trapped in the software and you can’t get it out. Which is not a good position to find yourself in.
I’m not going to tell you how to organise your data, but I can give you advice on software that will make your organisational work easier. When it comes to generating appointments over the phone, I like to go with a lean, mean piece of software. Preferably software without all the bells, whistles and distractions of these large CRM packages. What you need is a tool to sift through your data to extract the gold nuggets before you enter that data into your CRM.
What would I recommend? If there’s one tool that everybody on your staff already know, it’s Excel. But Excel lacks a lot of the database functionality of a CRM. So what if I told you that there is a tool that combines the functionality of Excel with the benefits of a database like a CRM—without all the bloat? A tool that is also fully customisable out of the box? Wouldn’t that be cool?
There is a piece of software which combines all of these features, and it’s called Airtable. Airtable is really easy to set up and to customise to your heart’s content. What’s more, they already have real estate solutions for you to use. In my experience, you can set someone up on an Airtable and get them using it proficiently in five minutes or less.
There’s a saying that the best CRM is the CRM you actually use. Well, I use Airtable every single day and I love it.
Mistake #5 – The Big Blue Cancel Button (Scheduling Software)
Online calendars and scheduling software is nothing new. What is new is all the creative ways you can use these tools to get buy-in from your prospects when you book appointments—so that they actually keep their appointments.
Let me share the strategy that gets me one to five appointments with top real estate agents every hour with ease. I will also show you how to apply this strategy to your own real estate agency.
My focus isn’t on overcoming a prospect’s objections to booking an appointment. Rather, I focus on making it as easy as possible for the prospect to cancel an appointment I already booked with them. Then I use the power of my follow-up sequence (I call it the “power sequence”) to get buy-in from the prospect so that they look forward to engaging with me in future.
I find that it’s easier to book appointments with prospects if they feel that they can easily change their mind and back out. This also helps you to separate those prospects who are truly interested, from those that aren’t. Which means it’s a win-win for both of you.
If you think about it, an appointment is really nothing more than a tentative callback. When your property management team makes sales calls, all they’re doing is getting buy-in from prospects for tentative callback times. Then it’s the job of your amazing video content and your power sequencing to lock in those appointments. This is how you get a team who may not all be sales superstars—especially on the property management side—to easily book appointments and have those conversations.
On the practical side, don’t send the client an invite link to book an appointment for themselves—book it on their behalf. Here I recommend Calendly scheduling software. Anybody can be easily trained to use their system. You don’t want your staff spending all their time booking and confirming appointments. Let Calendly do that work for you.
In my appointment booking emails, I include an automatically generated big, blue Cancel Button to make it easy for prospects to back out of an appointment. I also include a link at the bottom of every email which allows prospects to easily reschedule or cancel the appointment. Which makes them feel a lot more relaxed.
A callback appointment doesn’t have to be for 45 minutes. All you need is an 18 minute callback time. I can guarantee you that once a prospect goes through your power sequence (which includes the video content that you’ve developed), they will want to make a lot more time to spend with you.
Do you see the potential for this system to book more appointments and rapidly scale your agency?
Mistake #6 – Lacking Beautiful Positioning Forms
Many agencies have a form on their websites the prospects can fill in to request an appraisal. Then, once they have a meeting with your agents, they fill in a physical form while the agent asks them a bunch of questions.
But is it really a good use of your prospect’s valuable time to make them fill in two separate forms? Couldn’t the prospect fill in the same information prior to the appointment—and allow you the time to use that information to prepare for the meeting with them?
Welcome to “beautiful positioning forms.” I have an example here which I use on my own website—a form that has helped me scale my business from charging between $1,000-$1,500 to $5,000 a landing page.
You can tell your scheduling software to send this form to the prospect automatically once their appointment is booked. Your property managers shouldn’t be emailing these forms, these forms are sent out automatically.
The key is to use the process of the prospect filling out this form, as just another way for you to position yourself as the number one choice for property management services in your area. How do you do that? By asking the right questions on the form—questions that illustrate how you’re the perfect agency to meet your prospect’s goals.
For example, you could ask them about their current property manager. You could find out how much rent they are collecting on the property—much rent could potentially be collected from the property through rental optimization. This question makes them consider whether they could be getting more rent. It also puts the idea in their head that your agency might be able to help them achieve those higher numbers.
You’re not making promises you cannot keep. Rather, you’re positioning yourself as somebody that’s asking the right questions. You’re a company that understands what the prospect is trying to achieve. You’re working with the prospect to achieve their goals.
On the other hand, if you put an expensive-looking form in front of the customer to fill out, is it going to convince them to work with you, or make them wonder whether they can afford your services? Can you spot the difference?
Remember, the pre-appointment form is not just about getting information, it’s about positioning yourself in your client’s estimation. This will further shape their opinion of you before you walk into that sales meeting or pick up the phone. I’m obsessed with the word “positioning” and use it regularly in my everyday conversation.
This is because the way you’re perceived by your prospect prior to the appointment is going to determine the likelihood of you closing a sale.
Conclusion
The common denominator I see in all the top producing real estate agents I speak to, is that they’re willing to invest aggressively and proactively into their own self-development and education. That’s why I would like to congratulate you on finishing this article. You’re investing in your own personal growth, learning, and also your agency’s growth.
If you can see yourself implementing the system I’ve outlined in this article, I would love to have a further conversation with you.
If what I’m writing here makes sense to you, why don’t you contact me? Please use the “Book a Consultation” link below to schedule a tentative callback. Choose a time that will work for you and let me know if you’d prefer a phone call or a zoom call. I only need 18 minutes of your time to see if we can do business together.
If you don’t want to make use of this opportunity, that’s fine by me. At the very least, I hope this article sparked your imagination and gave you ideas which you can implement in your own business.
https://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/6_mistakes.jpg7201280KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2021-09-28 08:29:392021-10-12 08:29:336 Mistakes 99% of Real Estate Agents Make when It Comes to Scaling their Agency using the Telephone
I just recently cleaned my letterbox, which was well overdue. There were lots of letters, especially from real estate agents. I work with real estate agents, so I thought I should make a video about it!
The thing with letterbox drops, is that the principles that apply online, apply offline as well. Many of the same principles apply with the letterbox drops, apply with Facebook advertising and your online landing pages as well. They just have a different medium.
With that said, it helps when you research what your competitors are doing! This can be difficult as some of them aren’t in your area. So, I thought it would be interesting to see who is doing it right and who is doing it wrong. So, let’s talk about the principles and start rating them!
Principle 1: Open Your Window to the Soul- For A Reason- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Showing Yourself
Some people reveal too little (moving somewhere with family), too much (which bores the prospect), or nothing at all (being a professional of 25 years). These strategies don’t work very well.
Introduce yourself as a real estate agent. Tell people who you are and include photos! With a photo usually comes a bio, which is very important. It creates a connection between the prospect and yourself. People don’t want to look at pictures of buildings.
How do you write about yourself? What do you write? Well, I will show you some examples of how to do it correctly and how to do it incorrectly.
The Generic Insight- Forgettable
The generic insight is where people will make themselves look like a 2D cutout. One example is with Carmen Briggs. The letterbox says, “Your local agent, Carmen Briggs, is passionate about people and helping them to achieve their dreams. Selling a property in the Inner Western suburbs of Brisbane for over fourteen years has not only given Carmen intricate knowledge of the area and its changing market dynamics, but also an extensive and loyal client database… exceeds their expectations…. personal commitment.”
She is the agent I would choose to use, even though she doesn’t have a good bio. So just because the bio is off, doesn’t mean they will be terrible. The bio is just a great way of presenting yourself.
If you say you’re passionate, well, is that relevant? Would you really say that you’re not passionate?
One way to check what you’re saying is to ask yourself if it has relevance. If you say you’re passionate, well, is that relevant? Would you really say that you’re not passionate? Everyone would also say they’re committed to customer excellence. Therefore you’re not positioning yourself different from others in any way by saying these things. Some things mean nothing and can be copied and pasted on any website. It’s forgettable, and when people read it, they zone out.
The Irrelevant Insight
An example of this is, “Steven stepped out of his civil engineering career in 2015 and joined his wife, Kathleen luck, in their small family business. He wanted to create a better work life balance for his family and support Kathleen in the growth of their real estate business, situated in Brisbane’s inner West suburb of The Gap.”
Steven Doyle bio reveals personal things about himself.
This bio is better than the original one I showed because he reveals personal things about himself. This is great, but the problem is, a lot of the stuff is irrelevant. For example, being in civil engineering doesn’t have anything to do with real estate, and he’s basically saying he dropped out. So, not the best way to start.
Another example is saying “I like basketball”, which is also irrelevant. Although it’s a nice gesture to reveal things about yourself, there’s not much to be said there. People won’t say, “that’s great. I want to use you as a real estate agent,” after simply hearing that. Again, It’s irrelevant.
The Shoot Yourself In The Foot Insight
This is where you say things that make it better for you not to have said anything at all. In this next example, she has a photo which is great, but then she describes herself as a mum, driver, chef, tutor, cleaner, nurse, family planner, financial controller, and one of Brisbane’s most refreshing real estate agents.
Alex Rutherford’s bio description. This is where you say things that make it better for you not to have said anything at all.
As you can see, most of these have nothing to do with real estate. They come with lots of questions. I would take out a cleaner, because is that really what you want people to think of you? I would take out the driver, because what does that mean? We all drive cars. I would also take out a nurse. Does that mean you’ve been a nurse and just started doing real estate? Maybe this means you tried different things and aren’t reliable. Overall, this is a shoot yourself in the foot example where you’re bringing people in but then turning people away with what you say.
The Conversion Implication Insight – Ray White Example
This is the gold copywriting standard of how to write about yourself. This example is from Ray White and her team of copywriters.
“Bridgette’s fascination and appreciation for real estate was established many years ago, having had a father who was a builder and a property developer. Bridgette fully understands the stresses in buying and selling houses, having bought, sold and renovated many of her own properties prior to her entry into the real estate industry. When you couple her local market knowledge with family values, integrity, and her proven track record as a real estate agent professional, Bridgette has to be your first choice.”
Gold copywriting standard from Ray White.
The wording is beautiful and amazing. You find out things about Bridgette that have meaning and implication with it. It shows that she has experience through herself and her father. This is pertinent to the value she provides.
By saying, “Bridgette fully understands the stresses in buying and selling houses”, she again speaks to the prospect by showing how much experience she has. When you talk about yourself in this way, you’re telling a story and sending a message to the reader. You’re showing your value. This is a perfect example because this is what will get people to call you.
Principle 2: A Picture Tells a Thousand Words. What do your photos say about you?
You Want to Show Your Window to the Soul.
Look into the camera. Our eyes are so essential and say many things. We also connect with people this way. For example, in this picture she is looking at the baby and not the camera. When you aren’t looking at the camera, it makes it seem like you are hiding something.
Kathleen Luck looking at the baby and not the camera.
Avoid the “Combat Stance”.
How you stand is so important. In this example, one of the guys is holding his hand around his private area, like he’s defending a soccer goal. Don’t do a soccer stance! You want to have an open stance. Also, don’t put your hands in your pockets like this other man. This makes it seem like you are uninterested.
Move to the side, smile and stay relaxed. Confidence is attractive! The lighting is also important. Find a photographer who understands lighting and visual cues!
Jack and Stephen Dangerfield doing combat and soccer stance.
Bonus Tip: Generic and Irrelevant Stand Ins
This is where you have a photo of something that doesn’t matter. It has nothing to do with the website or content itself. For example, this photo of a house and a dog. This is a fantastic brochure, but the photo is generic. I see this on so many real estate websites.
Picture of the inside of a home and dog on a letterbox drop.
Some also put photos of the insides and outsides of homes. Both of these are forgettable and add no value. The top conversion optimization experts know how important people are in this situation, that’s why car commercials and insurance commercials have pictures of actual people.
Use Your Family.
This may sound bad, but families comprise the largest target market of property purchases.
So, create photos of you and your family. A great example is the post by Remy Duriieux below. Whenever you go on a family outing, take pictures and upload them! This builds trust, similarity, and a connection. They say, “Oh, you have a family, I do too.” You’re much better off using a picture of you and your family in your bio. This makes you a real person to your prospects.
A great example is the post by Remy Duriieux. Whenever you go on a family outing, take pictures and upload them!
Principle 3: Be More than Just a Pretty Face- Pretty vs. Conversion Optimized Design.
Whenever people go to make websites or pamphlets, they focus on making it look pretty. This is great, but there is a difference between making something that’s pretty and something optimized for conversions. These are two separate skill sets. If I had to choose one, I would choose the one optimized and written very well. When your copy, layout and focus points are out of whack, it can break you.
Layout Hierarchy.
Make Certain Things Bigger.
For example, your awards! When you make your recent property sales bigger, you’re not achieving much. You’re supposed to sell properties. No one is impressed (unless you sold it over a reserve, within a quick turnaround, or set a record for the suburb of the street).
Below you see some serious accomplishments that should be made bigger. For example, “Agent of the year for The Gap”, “No 1 sales consultant residential” and the other awards are small. These are huge achievements and should be put in a prominent position. This usually happens because women are encouraged to be humble, but this is not a good strategy if you are advertising.
“Agent of the year for The Gap”, “No 1 sales consultant residential” and the other awards are small. These are huge achievements and should be put in a prominent position.
Make Certain Things Smaller.
For example, sections for selection of recent property sales. People expect you to sell properties! This is not important. No one will be impressed by this.
Carmen Briggs letterbox that needs certain things smaller.
Remove Some Things.
Remove what doesn’t add to your cause and things that work against you. Example: how many offers were on a property. If you only had 2 two offers, and put that on the letter, this wouldn’t give many people confidence in you. Putting that you had 3 inspections and only 700 views is also not impressive! I would completely remove this section.
Carmen Briggs letterbox that needs some things removed.
Focal Points.
What are your eyes drawn to first, whether with a letter or on the internet? Your eyes go to whatever is highlighted. So put focus on impressive numbers rather than their titles!
If you’re writing a long block of text, highlight what’s important, for example, the 21 offers made, and 83 buyer inspections in 24 hours from the example above.
Understand what you want to bring attention to. If you’re writing a long block of text, highlight what’s important, for example, the 21 offers made, and 83 buyer inspections in 24 hours from the example above. Make them red and bold as a vocal point. Also highlight years of experience. The property is not what matters, it’s the results you achieve with it.
Overall, your brochure can look pretty, have the perfect color scheme and still fail you. You need to make achievements bigger, past property sales smaller, remove unimportant numbers of inspections and offers, and draw eyes to what’s important.
Principle 4: Go Narrow and Flood —The Importance of Consistency.
If I look at letterbox drops, the one thing you’ll note is consistency. Everyone has sent me one letter. Ray White has sent me three items in a relatively short period of time.
Why is this important? You need to narrow your focus and go into one area/suburb and flood it with a ton of repeating messages. This creates a more focused budget. Going off a smaller area brings more success than trying to reach everyone.
Living room in Ashgrove market report.
This concept also applies to facebook. People think it’s a one time thing- you pay facebook and leads come. Sometimes you have to wait- 7 times.
Most advertisers do the same thing- pay for one advertisement and wonder why they aren’t getting results. The truth is people have to see things multiple times for it to click and for them to remember it.
This is what I do with my clients- even if someone books something with me, I send a ton of content before the appointment. The reason is I’m positioning myself in the appointment so they know who I am. Also send emails, which is another thing I do. They tell me they’ve never had someone email them so much – but they end up watching my videos.
Principle 5: Don’t Insult a Customer’s Intelligence.
Putting this on a letterbox drop is sleazy. What does this mean anyways? If they come into your office, are they obligated to do business with you?
Dangerfield’s letterbox drop that includes “Obligation free appraisal”.
No one charges to book an appraisal. It’s expected to be free. No one will be excited to meet with this real estate agent for saying this.
Instead talk about what they’ll receive in the appraisal. Provide a personalized marketing strategy (based on your experience of selling 500+ properties in your area). If you do facebook advertising, provide a custom demographic report as part of the appraisal appointment. Show them the audience you will target on facebook.
Principle 6: Men Lie, Women Lie, Numbers Don’t – Using and Positioning Numbers to Increase Conversion
Decide Which Number You Want to Display
People trust numbers because it’s harder to refute. This shows you are trustworthy. People are very skeptical these days, so be specific. Saying “our customers trust us” won’t make people trust you.
Zac Tully Example
The example below is very popular with new agents because they have to prove themselves.
Saying, “83 buyer expectations in 24 hours, 21 offers made, 6,885 views online, 50+ buyers still looking for a family home in Ashgrove” on your letterbox drop is a very smart move.
Use great numbers of buyer inspections, offers made, and views online. Use numbers that are believable. These numbers show that he’s good at selling real estate.
Another example is showing the most recent sale and showing the amount of views his property got compared to average on the site. This shows how much traffic he drove from facebook to the property.
Use great numbers of buyer inspections, offers made, and views online. Use numbers that are believable. These numbers show that he’s good at selling real estate.
Don’t Use Numbers Against You
Don’t use low numbers. This will just work against you. Remove numbers not adding to the cause. For example, “3 open homes, 2 offers, and 19 inspections”. This is not impressive and brings you down more than helping you.
Remove the numbers not adding to the cause.
7. Ray White’s Secret Weapon – All the Powers Combined
What Ray white does is offer a report, which gets a high retention rate and makes it real.
Be Different
Most of the letterbox drops are saying, “look at me, pick me. I can sell your home.” What Ray white does is offer a report, which gets a high retention rate and makes it real. People will not toss it out.
Easy To Do
The great thing about the reports is it shows recent sales, which aren’t all sold by Ray White. So even agents starting out can make a report like this.
Ray White’s fantastic report sheet that brings high retention rates.
Hyper Localized
Ashgrove is a very small suburb, it’s not North Brisbane or Brisbane, it’s one suburb. A property report for your suburb is unique and hard to get. It’s not something they’ll be able to find at the book shop, that’s for sure.
Numbers
The “Houses and units sold last quarter” section don’t all have to do with Ray White in ashgrove. So, you don’t have to use your own numbers. The numbers build a case by showing median sale price. This is great because it’s not just saying, “look at me”, it’s giving numbers. It’s giving solid evidence.
These numbers build a case by showing median sale price.
Great Copywriting
Also write a bio and show what you can give, like the one below. It gives testimonials. In this case, a great copywriter is vital. Also, don’t be afraid to toot your own horn. You are advertising and need to show what you can do.
A bio from Bridgette Righton that gives testimonials.
8. Summary
Think About Your Value
All of these concepts apply to any online marketing you do, whether it’s emails, facebook or phone calls. People want to know statistics about their own suburb. So, use the statistics for the concentrated area. You also need to understand how to communicate and know the value you provide. This is why localizing your work is so important. It helps increase your value.
Use A Follow Up Strategy
This is like what I’ll be doing. I’ll be sending this out to real estate agents and making sure they watch it. Check your own letterbox drops and all marketing materials. Advertising is very important.
Shift Your Strategy Towards Value
All the value you create will be useful for your online strategy, letterbox drop and follow up strategy. It’s easier to follow up when you have something to follow up with.
I want to be completely transparent about my strategy. I hope you’ve gotten some value from this. This will give you a better eye for good and bad advertising and you can use it in many of your own advertising strategies.
http://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.png00KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2021-08-07 00:47:092021-08-11 01:14:54Drop It Like It’s Hot – 6 Principles to Stop Burning Money on Real Estate Letter Box Drops (and Ray White’s Secret Letter Drop Weapon)
According to Borrell Associates 89% of real estate agencies ad spend went towards online advertising in 2019 – with newspaper ads making up just 4.8%.
Many real estate agencies are advertising on social media. However just because a major real estate agency uses Facebook ads does not mean that they are doing it correctly.
And this is not a guess – I’ve been speaking and auditing Facebook websites and speaking to real agents in Australia and seeing the results they have been coming up with. Many don’t even know how much leads they are receiving because their traditional agencies is pushing stats like views or impressions etc. – after speaking face to face with real estate agents in Australia I have come up with and the truth is after researching and speaking to not only agents but successful advertisers I have come up with cutting edge research – not available anywhere else – where I can show you what is – and what isn’t working when it comes to getting appraisal appointment leads on Facebook in Australia.
By the time you finish watching this blog you will learn the mistakes that 99% of real estate agencies make when they start advertising online – which will help you save tens of thousands of dollars and learn information that even the top Facebook agencies don’t know about when it comes to filling your pipeline with leads.
In the first section I will talk about the biggest mistakes real estate agencies make when advertising on Facebook and in the second section I will give you the full blueprint of not only how to advertise and fill your selling pipeline with leads but also show you how the top 1% of real estate agents are all ready doing this with a real case study.
1. Spy on your Competitors, just don’t assume they know what they’re doing (or that what’s good for the geese is good for the gander)
Facebook’s ad transparency initiative means you are now able to see what ads your competitors are running now and in the past – across Facebook and Instagram.
Do you think if you were looking to start advertising on Facebook it might be a good idea to check out what others have been doing – and what’s worked and what hasn’t worked for them?
Just go to any company’s Facebook page and scroll down to the ‘Page Transparency’ section – click ‘See All’ then scroll down and click ‘Ad Library’ – voila – you know have the Facebook advertising blueprint for some of the biggest real estate companies in Australia.
This means you can go to the Facebook page of realestate.com.au – who spends hundreds of thousands on Facebook every year – and find out exactly what ads are working for them right now – or you can go to the biggest real estate agency in your city and see what ads they are running.
Before you start copying or getting inspiration from other real estate company’s ads please keep the following two points in mind:
Realestate.com.au is not even a real estate agency so their Facebook strategy is going to be completely different to yours – it’s a great place to find ideas but you must understand they have completely different goals – which is not getting property appraisal appointments – which is what you want.
Just because a successful real estate agency has a Facebook campaign does not mean that they’re successful because of their Facebook campaign. This is a mistake I see a lot of real estate agents make where they’ll come to me and say “Well we want to be like this company and this is their website” – and I say “Their website is horrible – it’s terrible.”
Most of the time when I research this “big and successful” real estate agency I find out the reason for their success usually has to do with their consistent and unrelenting client follow up strategy or some other reason – but in many cases it’s not because of their Facebook campaign.
Some of the biggest real estate agencies that I’ve spoken to have had Facebook campaigns where they didn’t even know how many leads they were getting, the lead acquisition system was completely broken and their advertising agency was pushing numbers on them like “Total Impressions” which means nothing.
2. Stop Treating Facebook Like a Magazine (Because it’s 2021)
News flash – Facebook is not a magazine – yet advertisers are still obsessed with treating it like one. What do I mean?
Well let me ask you this – if you were advertising in the year 2050 in a magazine and you had the option to advertise in a magazine – but you could have a video play on the futuristic paper or have a still image – what would you choose if you had a choice? -and they said to you —
What do you think would grab a user’s attention more? A video – or a still photo?
This ad is great because it uses people which draws the user’s attention – and has a clear benefit – however it could benefit by having more interactive copy content so it competes better with content users are all ready scrolling through.
And what if you were told that both a video and a still photo cost the exact same?
What would you choose?
Now what if you were told that it would cost you $1 for every person that viewed your video and $7 for every person that viewed your still, boring photo.
What sounds like a better investment?
If you think you’d be crazy to not use video – then yeah – you’d be right. And that’s exactly what most companies are doing.
In fact the biteable.com research found that the cost per click on a video ad was $1.19 vs. $7.11 for a static image.
But Facebook doesn’t just have video ads – they have Gallery ads and Instant Experience ads – they make such an effort to give you creativity and stand out – but of course most media agencies whoa are used to advertising in magazines still don’t get it.
“But we don’t have the budget for a commercial” – you may be thinking.
Sure – but do you have 4 images you can put together into a slide show? There are online tools you could use to put this together in as little as 30 minutes – no big Hollywood budget required.
And this is coming from someone who specialised in video production and has been responsible for many commercials – and I can tell you – it’s not necessary.
But how do we use video ads specifically for getting more appraisal appointments – well we’re going to get to that!
3. Stop Giving “Fake” Value – Start Giving “Real” Localised Value
Many real estate agents try to create generic reports like the one above (taken from a Real Estate agency in Australia). These do not work for the reasons listed below.
Since we know that nobody on Facebook cares about your business and only wants what’s relevant to them many companies make the mistake of creating “reports”. You’ve seen these – the 5 tips to sell your home in 2021. The 5 tips on how to manage your property in 2021. Whatever it is.
Long story short – not only do people not care about your business – they also don’t care about reports. The market is flooded right now with information products – especially in the real estate field – and there is a flood and over saturation of this type of content.
The market is flooded with real estate informational products of a generic nature – so don’t try to add even more to it!
Also creating generic reports like this is lessening the value that you can give to your prospects – you need to create content that plays to your competitive advantage.
And what is your competitive advantage? Well if you’re a real estate agency – many real estate agents say they are the “Local experts” – and that’s what your value should demonstrate – not only is this better for the prospect but by doing this you position yourself as the No. 1 choice in your area – not just a great real estate agent.
For example – did you just sell a property in your area that set a record for the highest price, perhaps you’re more of a hands on agent and you did some renovation for your client prior to the sale in the area you serve. Maybe you’re a property manager and were able to significantly increase one of your client’s rental yields – sellers are looking to hear information like this – especially if it’s in the area where they are selling.
And later on in the ‘Blueprint’ section of this blog I’m going to show you exactly how an agent has applied this exact strategy successfully – so stay tuned!
4. Behold the Power of the Emoji
Plain text is boring – and as an advertiser you want to ensure your ads stand out and capture the user’s attention right? How else can you ensure your value proposition is read and connects with your audience?
The problem is unlike others – whose friends are actually interested in what they have to say – very few people are interested in what a company has to say about themselves.
When creating your Facebook ad you want to create engaging content that people will read – but at the same time you know that no one is looking to read an ad when they land – much less a long one.
So when you have a message that’s longer than the typical 6 word Facebook post – on a platform where no one is looking for you to come in and state your piece – how do you ensure that it actually gets read – and stands out?
Well what if I was to tell you that you could do this using a technique that most people on Facebook don’t even use – which is free to use – makes your message be 50% more visible and won’t cost you a cent extra?
Well – here it is. Behold the power of the Emoji!
People LOVE emojis – they can break up your text. What looks better a bunch of bullet points like this?
Or a bunch of bullet points like this?
You can use emojis to make your text powerful and because they’re so rare and so few advertisers use them (because they don’t know about them) – much less people that use Facebook. Emojis – combined with powerful copy targeted at the right prospect will PULL the person into your copy.
You can find a list of all the supported emojis on Facebook using this link
[bit.ly]
There are emojis for every need – and I’ll go through how to use emojis for real estate ads specifically on Facebook after this!
5. Don’t Buck the Zuck (Please the Facebook Lord – and Keep People on Facebook)
Mark Zuckerberg is the guy who runs Facebook – and if you want to be successful on Facebook you have to understand Mark’s philosophy on how advertising should work on his platform, how the advertising platform works on a technical level – and understand -how- Mark Zuckerberg’s goals and work within those.
This is what separates those who know how to post an ad on Facebook – and those who make millions of dollars year after year exclusively from Facebook advertising and dominate the competition in their industry – -and I’m going to break down these- – let’s break each one down.Segment your engaged audiences – Mark’s goal with all aspects of his Facebook platform is to ensure that the end user is served with the most relevant content – and that the user keeps scrolling. The longer a Facebook user scrolls on his phone – the more ads Mark Zuckerberg can serve that user – the more that user will come back again and again.
Tracking and Segmenting
Mr. Zuckerberg has created one of the most sophisticated systems to track how engaged a user of his product is with the content his system serves.
We’re not just talking about whether someone clicked on your ad – we’re talking about, did they hover their mouse over your ad, did they click on ‘Read More’. Do you have a video ad?
Well you can see how many people watched it for 5 seconds, for 15 seconds, for 30 seconds – and we can even segment those audiences and say “Let’s show everyone who watched the ad for longer than 30 seconds… another ad!”
Not only do you have access to all this tracking information – but you can build audiences around how engaged prospects were with your ad – and re-target those audiences. For example let’s retarget everyone that wathed 15 seconds or more of your video ad but didn’t get in contact.
This is why it’s so important to start advertising earlier rather than later on Facebook – because even if your campaign is a complete failure – you’re still getting data and are able to build custom audiences of people that at least decided to give your ad a little bit of attention – and then retarget those audiences!
Ad Variations – Utilise Facebook’s AI Machine
You must understand the Facebook AI machine. Facebook doesn’t have ‘editors’ per se – like a magazine – who decide – on a human level what should be shown and what shouldn’t. Instead what is shown on Facebook is determined by the “algorithm” – and those that understand how to work within the algorithm – and give it what it needs are rewarded and win – those that work against it lose tens of thousands of dollars and are run off Facebook.
So what is the secret?
I’m going to tell you now – the secret is – you need to give the algorithm as much data points as possible so it can work with you to optimise your relevancy score. What do I mean? I mean if you have an ad – you can create 5 text variations – and 5 image variations – and combine all the different combinations into 25 separate ads and then let the algorithm do the rest!
Most people just create one ad – sit back and then see it fail and then create another ad and try that. You want to avoid this.
Keep them on Facebook – Messenger Ads
The final way to not buck the Zuck – is to keep people on Facebook and avoid external links! Most ads you see are trying to navigate users away from Facebook to a landing page – however you don’t need to let people leave Facebook to get their details and start a conversation and sell your service – especially if you’re a real estate agent.
Facebook incentivises and rewards advertisers who create ads that keep users on the Facebook platform instead of navigating away from it – and this makes sense of course – the longer people stay on Facebook the better.
But it’s not just a benefit for Facebook – using tools such as ad to Messenger and Lead Ads you can increase the amount of leads you receive by removing the friction that a landing page creates. This is because instead of getting the user to type in all their details – their name, phone number etc. you can have Facebook pre-populate this information for you – and the less your prospect has to work the more likely you are to receive more information.
Oh – and if you get someone to get in contact with you through a Messenger ad you don’t just get their name or email – you get their life! You can do all kinds of research on the prospect before you even reach out to them – this is all valuable information for follow up – so take advantage of this!
6. Put Yourself Last, But Do Put Yourself – and Give the Deets
Many companies start their advertising talking about themselves and (obviously) – how great they are. They go about this in different ways but more or less the message is always similar – we are amazing – you should definitely work with us – we will do the best job possible.
The problem is there’s nothing you can really say in this regard – about your company that will be taken seriously or be welcomed. People on Facebook are not looking to learn more about your business.
But no matter what you say – or what value you can give outside of saying “We’re awesome” – you are going to have to say who you are – because that’s going to show as your profile when you post an ad – so when you do mention yourself you need to do these two things to avoid the most common mistake real estate agents make.
Firstly – put your phone number in the ad! Facebook has no policy against having your phone number in the ad itself – forget about your big flashy logo and instead include a phone number.
And – secondly when you do mention yourself make sure you include a photo of the actual agent or person inside your company. Make it personal. I see a lot of ads by real estate agencies where they have a photo of some building and then their logo in the bottom right hand corner – listen nobody cares about your logo or a building or house – unless it benefits them.
However if you are going to include info about yourself then make sure you give a direct mobile number at least – so people know how to call a REAL person.
Again – I want to stress this – nobody is impressed by big logos or big brands saying how big and important they are on Facebook. You’re pretty much the company equivalent of the guy who posts on Facebook to say how he has too many friends and he’s about to unfriend some – it comes off as douchy and does not fit the culture of what Facebook is.
Keep in mind I’m talking about leads – some may say this is not the best way to build a “brand” but you’re not on Facebook to build a brand – you’re on Facebook to get leads and position yourself afterwards.
Now I’m going to show you how to put all these tacts in the next section.
Practical Case Study: Behind the Scenes of a Successful Facebook Ad Strategy – How the 1% of Real Estate Agents Do it Differently
So now – hearing what works and what doesn’t is great. But let’s actually go behind the scenes of an agent who is putting all of these strategies together and is making a killing on Facebook.
Anyway let’s go through the anatomy of a successful ad.
Let’s look at 2 ad variations so we can figure out why they work:
Ad Variation #1:
Now why is this ad so great? Let’s see how it conforms to the model that we discussed:
Emoji Time
You can see the finger used for the bullet points. This is eye catching and creates a more friendlier and casual outlook – much more than these big blocks of text that nobody is going to read.
Also you’ll notice that there’s really no big block of text. The ad is getting straight to the point – with a real estate agent you don’t need to have a ten page story – people get the idea – you sell homes.
Real Localised Value
Here the agent Remy is showing the prospect what was achieved with a home that was just sold and offering to show them the price if they click ‘Learn More’. You’ll also see there’s a street name and a suburb name – now imagine if you live in this area – this agent has positioned himself perfectly, very quickly with numbered statistics – which is always important – he didn’t start with “I’m a great agent that’s focused on results” – he gave numbers – and numbers on a very specific piece of property.
Now the value here comes in because imagine you live in this area and you see this property sold on Cambridge Street – you’re going to say “Oh, I know that street – that’s just up the road right? I’m curious how much that property sold for – sure let me know.”
This is localised value – people want to know what homes sell for. He didn’t give out a report like “How to sell properties for more” or anything else – he’s giving unique knowledge that only he has – there’s no one who is looking to sell their home who is not curious about how much other homes are selling for – and this is very fresh information.
Notice the agent says “just sold” – in other words this information is probably not even in the public registrar yet. It’s fresh!
Facebook is not a Magazine Concept
Not using Facebook as a magazine – in this case this agent Remy could have just used a single photo but he didn’t – because Facebook is NOT a magazine. You’ll notice he used an image gallery ad – and he uses an identical ad but uses a video instead – here is the ad with the video:
Now you’ll notice in this ad the creative and even the images used are exactly the same – the only difference is that in this case rather than using an image gallery ad Remy has taken the gallery and used a simple video program to create a video that cycles through the images – by the way – lots of tools online to do this – it’s not that hard – you don’t need a professional sales team.
The reason this is smart on Remy’s part is that he is feeding the Facebook algorithm with different variations of his ad and allowing the algorithm to determine which ad to use and when to optimise his results – which in this case is to get people to start a conversation by clicking ‘Learn More’.
Putting yourself last
You’ll notice in the video at the very end Remy puts his personal details including his mobile number – and he does this in the second to last ad on the Gallery. This is a great way to get those direct calls – I can imagine myself saying “You know what let me call this agent direct and ask him how much that price is” – and once your ad has opened up that conversation your Facebook ad campaign has done its job – now it’s your ob as an agent to either book an appointment, call back or start a follow up sequence.
By the way I can tell you that with this type of ad you’re going to get enquiries from people who may not be looking to sell their home for another 6 months – you may even get enquiries from just curious people – but you’re going to be casting the largest possible net.
When you start an ad – as a real estate agent with something like “Look at how amazing we are, we can sell your home, we are the local experts” or whatever generic thing you want to say the only enquiries you’re going to get are people who are looking to sell their home right now – if someone is looking to sell their home later they may raise their eyebrow and consider you in the future – the old “awareness” and “top of mind” that many advertisers talk about – but I’m sure you’d rather be creating contact with these people and having a follow up strategy – because there’s no better way to stay top of mind then actually speaking to someone and calling them back.
Click to Messenger Ad
Finally I want to stress – and this is not shown in my demonstrations but this ad is a ‘Click to Messenger Ads’ – which means that when someone clicks on ‘Learn More’ they start a conversation with the company through Messenger and are taken through a multi step questionnaire to qualify themselves as a valuable lead.
If you are a real estate agent – stop using landing pages. An ad to messenger allows you to get all the information you need from a client and also allows the client to autatomically fill in details like their phone number and email with one click – eliminating friction in your lead generation process.
Also you can see when your prospect has read your message and you can easily follow them up with new information as necessary and keep yourself top of mind – but really you should be getting on the phone with the prospect as soon as possible!
Summary
In this blog I went over the most common mistakes that you see real estate agencies making – along with how to fix those problems – and finally we ended with a real case study of an agent that is getting extremely good results from Facebook – and I know this from first hand knowledge.
This blog should be the blue print for your online strategy when it comes to generating seller leads on Facebook. While the strategies outlined in this blog work great for appraisal appointments the same principles apply for property management leads – just remember – real localised value is the key!
My hope is that I’ve given you some ideas, inspiration and confidence to try this yourself – and remember take action on these concepts. Go and advertise on Facebook. Even if you spend just $1,000 – there’s no minimum ad spend on Facebook.
You can get started for as little as $50 – all though don’t expect big results for that – but the moral of the story is take action because every month you don’t advertise on Facebook is another month you are losing data with what works and what doesn’t work – as well as another month you fail to build a custom audience of your future customers.
https://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/fb_featured.jpeg7201280KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2021-06-26 08:37:412021-11-25 11:55:316 Mistakes 99% Of Real Estate Agents Make When Advertising on Facebook (+ Case Study of how the 1% of Top Real Estate Agents do Facebook Differently)
From the many real estate agency owners I speak with I hear stuff like this all the time
“We know our website needs improvement – it’s always under consideration – but we’ve had our site redone three years ago. What difference is a new redesign going to make?”
“We’ve spoken to digital agencies – and I’m sure they’re good – but they don’t understand real estate – it’s different to many other businesses they work with.”
“Sure Kosta, you have some great concepts and ideas – but I don’t know if I have the energy to undertake a whole redesign of my online presence. I know it’s important – but so are other things and I have to allocate my time to what’s important.”
Look – updating or creating a new website is not fun.
You have to sit down and talk about what every bit of colour is going to be, recreate potentially hundreds of inner pages – not to mention setup a listing sync with your current real estate portal –
Link everything up with your CRM – sometimes deal with your previous online provider.
Stress about whether you’re going to lose your Google rankings if you make changes.
Not to mention the hours you have to invest into the project, and the stress.
And even after all that then the failure rate for web development projects is between 30 – 70% (literally over 30% of web projects don’t even get completed and launched) and that’s not to speak about projects that get completed but don’t result in any additional leads- those are some scary stats – and it’s no wonder why most real estate agencies stay with their same bad design year after year. Even when they know their website is leaking tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.
But what if all those problems could be avoided?
Well that’s what the Real Estate Landing Page Accelerator – which I’ll just call RELPA is here to fix.
In short RELPA allows you to implement the cutting edge real estate appraisal acquisition techniques on your website to blow up your appraisal leads – while keeping your existing website and technology – and allowing you to go live and start increasing appraisal appointments in as little as two weeks.
It’s a number of pages that – when added to your website work together to ensure your website does what it needs to do – and that’s get more real estate appointments!
Previous
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And these pages can be styled to the look and feel of your WordPress website and integrated with your Crm systems.
So what exactly makes RELPA different to all the other ‘real estate templates’ you’ve seen around?
Let’s get started!
Real Estate Testimonial Software
Position Yourself as the First Choice
Not only do 78% of people start their search for a real estate agent online – but also prospects are going to read third party non-biased reviews in making their decision. Wouldn’t you?
Let’s see what makes RELPA different.
Here is the review section on the new landing page:
You will note that there is also an individual review page accessible from the top menu
And here is the individual review page:
This is designed to get you appraisal appointments – let me show you how that’s done.
Live Google Reviews
One Click Social Proof Pull
The Google review app will be able to pull live reviews from your Google Places page (even if you have multiple places with multiple reviews) and have them aggregated on your Reviews page – so the user can scroll through and read your Google reviews without leaving the website.
What’s more every Google review will have the Google logo which will allow the user to click and go directly to that individual review – to add trust and instill confidence in your prospect.
Rate My Agent Integration
Get Your Best RateMyAgent Reviews
The review page has a link to RateMyAgent – to immediately build trust. However the review page will allow us to put your most powerful RateMyAgent reviews first – because what is the point of having powerful reviews if they are stuck and not viewable by the client.
Just imagine reading 2 reviews from 2 separate real estate agents – one says that you did a great job, and your competitor’s review says they sold the house way above reserve.
Which agent would you pick?
The Review page will allow you to add individual RateMyAgent reviews so you can have your 3 most stand out reviews and control which reviews the user sees.
Google Review Ordering
Strategical Seller Authority Positioning
Ordering reviews means we can now place the most important Google reviews at the top – ensuring that you control what reviews the prospect sees – the ones that will influence your prospect to make a decision.
We can order these on the front page and on the inner review page.
73% of consumers read six or fewer reviews before making a decision
Vendasta
Because let’s be honest your customer isn’t going to read every single one of your reviews – and if you have a 50/50 split of tenant and seller reviews you want to ensure that the seller reviews are highlighted on your home page if this is where your revenue comes from and is your ultimate goal.
Review Headlines
Differentiate Yourself With Results
Review headlines are going to make a huge impact on the effectiveness of your testimonials.
Let’s say someone leaves a testimonial for a home you sold for them at $30,000 above the reserve. The testimonial may mention that they were very happy with the sale but does not mention the specific number of how high above the sale price you were able to sell their home for.
This information is very important – rather than asking them to change their review – you can now add a headline to your reviews which calls out the most important part of the review – which for sellers is most commonly how high above reserve price you were able to sell a property.
Think about it – when someone sees the review section they’re not going to go and read every single review – but they will quickly read the headline. This is your opportunity to position yourself explicitly as someone who gets their clients the best bang for their buck and is the clear choice for them to book an appointment with.
Keep in mind that even if your competitor has just as many reviews as you do – by ordering them by most important and using a call out headline it’s going to make you look like the clear choice – and since most sellers only meet with one real estate agent and at maximum 2 – being shortlisted based on this is going to make a big difference in your bottom line at the end of the year.
Multi Step Forms
Avoid Abandonment, Increase Form Completion
Multi step forms can get up to 300% more conversions. – Venture Harbour
We need to speak about Market Appraisal forms on real estate websites. They are woefully under optimised – and considering it’s the most important part of a website not focusing on this would be a big disservice to your bottom line.
The real estate landing page accelerator fixes a lot of issues and optimises your website for maximum Market Appraisal conversions – let’s discuss what it does.
The reason that a multi step form can increase your conversion rate by up to 300% is because people can really not be bothered to fill in forms – especially long forms.
The solution may be to include a very short form – but then you are left with not enough information to qualify the prospect and end up only answering enquiries and not moving the process to the next stage.
Having a short form may lead to more enquiries – but you are left with no information to follow up with and provide value and no ability to qualify your leads – leading you to spend energy following up leads that are not motivated and unqualified.
Increase your conversions by taking advantage of the multi step features – the form starts with a king only one question – the prospect’s address – so there is minimal commitment to proceed to the next stage.
Address Auto Suggest
Increase conversions by 30% and get accurate client data backed by Google
The Market appraisal form comes with an address auto suggest – allowing your prospect to quickly enter their address details and have Google help them pick the right address.
This makes the form easier to fill in increasing conversion rates and increases the amount of accurate data.
Also – interesting fact – did you know the longest suburb name in Australia is ‘Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya’ – can you imagine a prospect having to type that in? With the address auto suggest you don’t have to worry about creating a negative user experience for prospects with long street and suburb names.
Market Appraisal Benefits Section
Sellers will take action when you give them a reason
If the user resists filling in their address to get started there is a benefit section which outlines why they would want to proceed – a feature that is sorely lacking from most real estate websites.
The vast majority of market appraisal forms I find on real estate websites don’t even say why someone should fill out the form in the first place – they just assume the prospect knows why they would need to do this and does not need to be educated – or any effort made to differentiate a market appraisal from other real estate agents.
This template fixes this with a market appraisal benefit section – while this may seem like a minor thing – this is actually a big deal. Giving a person a reason and outlining the benefits of taking an action is a big improvement over just telling them to take an action.
Also if the user scrolls down that means they’re second guessing starting the form process – the benefits section will resolve this.
Sales Lifecycle Shortening Questions
Ask the Right Questions to Frame Your First Follow Up to your Advantage
It’s not just about having a multi step form – it’s about asking the right questions. And what are the right questions?
Well the right questions are the ones that are going to help you qualify the prospect and give you the information to move to the next stage as quickly as possible.
The multi step form on the RE landing page accelerator is optimised to ask just the right amount of questions.
Firstly – it asks for the address
Then it asks for Name, Email and Phone Number – pretty standard questions
Finally it asks for when the prospect wants to sell and the prospect’s relationship to the property.
You don’t want to drive half way across town only to find out the property you’re appraising is for the owner’s son who just happened to mention at one point he may be thinking of selling and now the son is wasting everyone real estate agent’s time getting various appraisals to choose the right one.
And if someone is just kicking tyres and is not motivated to sell – you want to know that too – so you can prioritise that lead correctly. There is a big difference between someone who is looking to sell in the next 6 months and someone who is looking to sell IMMEDIATELY due to circumstances and is highly motivated.
I would trust you would treat those two sellers very differently.
Asking the right questions and presenting them in the correct way sets the tone for the rest of your sales journey with the customer – you owe it to yourself to get this right to save yourself headaches down the line.
Multi Agent Booking Form
Qualified Appointments on Auto-pilot
The most important part of booking an appointment is – actually booking the appointment right? Having to go back and forth trying to lock down a time between yourself and the home seller can be a stressful process.
Sometimes a seller can screw you around – telling you they’ll get back to you or being slow in response – leaving you in a situation where you’re unsure about whether the home appraisal will happen at all.
And even if it does you’ve wasted weeks trying to lock down a time that works.
Well now the booking form is completely integrated into your website as part of the multi step form – the prospect can enter their details and then book a time that works for them.
They can even choose whether to have the appointment on the phone, your office or at their address (you can remove and add options as required). Perhaps your prospect just wants an initial consultation over the phone first.
The user can choose the terms on which they will meet with you, and you can also increase or decrease the amount of choices available to the user to suit your needs. The great thing is – even if the user abandons the form at the booking stage you still have their details to follow up and find out what made them leave.
The best thing about the booking form is that it can be integrated to work either just for yourself or a staff of 10, 20 or more and integrate with all their calendars – think of the amount of time this would save.
Installation of this will also include integrating this booking system into your own real estate agency along with your staff and their calendar.
Abandonment Prevention
Stop 68% of your Prospects Abandoning your Form
Hypothetical question – what if someone enters their address – but then they leave? What should happen?
In a traditional form if a prospect chose to leave the website half way through your Market Appraisal page half way through – guess what – all that content is gone.
With the in-built form abandonment feature you can ensure that you get all the details from a prospect’s enquiry. So for example if someone only enters in their address and then decides to leave – and that address just happens to be in an area where you’ve done a letterbox drop – well guess what – you’ve just prioritised your follow up.
Allow follow ups of abandoned forms
Again I want to stress that this is not a replacement for your manual follow up – instead this landing page accelerator product is meant to turbo-charge what you’re all ready doing – including cold door knocking for properties in the area you’re listing in – after all it’s not a digital vs. non-digital world – we can do both at the same time.
Capture the data from abandoned forms and use that as a reason to follow up and find out why they left the form – and if this even brings in just one additional home sale listing agreement per year – it would be worth it don’t you agree?
Footer Call to Action
Ask for the appointment at the right time
The RELPA system will also add a call to action to the footer of your pages – so for example if a user clicks on your Reviews page and scrolls to the bottom of that page – you’re in the perfect position to ask for the user to take the next step – the call to action block will be visible on all pages and will allow the user to either request a call back or move to the next step.
Placing a call to action in the footer of your pages an increase conversions by up to 304% based on research conducted by protocol80.com
Call Back Feature
Increase self respect by asking for a minimal commitment
You may notice one thing that’s missing on this landing page is a contact form. That’s because this accelerator landing page does not have one.
Why is that?
Well do you want to be getting enquiries about what your commission rate is – and general questions which just waste your time.
RELPA works on the assumption that you want to get on the phone with the prospect as soon as possible – now if the prospect chooses to not book an appraisal appointment the only other option they have is to request a call back.
Surely you would agree that you would rather speak to prospects on the phone to address and dig in to any potential issues that they have and qualify them right there and then – that way you’ll know exactly where you are with any prospect once you hang up the phone.
By the way if a prospect is not willing to get on the phone and speak with you – then you can rest assured that’s because they’re just price shopping trying to get the lowest commission rate and you don’t want to deal with prospects like that in the first place.
Below you can see the Request Callback Form.
Ease of Use
Spend More Time Selling, Less time Web Managing
If you’ve read up to this point then you either probably have considered updating your online presence to maximise your appraisal leads and what I have told you about the RE landing page accelerator makes sense.
But let’s be honest – if you’re like most real estate agents you’ve probably experienced web site updates/redesigns as painstaking processes that take months to complete and sink a lot of time.
So I want to show you why this landing page is going to make your life so much easier.
KISS Engine
Gain control of your online presence
The Keep It Simple Stupid engine – otherwise known as Elementor – is the easiest page builder ever made for WordPress. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you wanted to update a part of your website but were limited then you can say hello to freedom.
The WYSIWYG KISS engine is so easy you never have to wait on a web developer to make changes again.
With Elementor’s KISS engine all you have to do to edit any section of the page in the future is simply click on what you want to edit… and edit it. It’s truly WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) – this editor is so simple most clients after using it for a couple of hours feel confident enough that they no longer need a web developer for every minor change.
Which is exactly what I aim for – I want your freedom.
WordPress Integration
If It Ain’t Broke, Why Change It?
Now sure – a great engine is great – but there’s no point if this landing page can’t be integrated with your current WordPress website. Because after all you still want to keep various features of your old website like your inner pages – as well as your listing integration and things of that nature.
Well the good news is that if you like you current website you can keep your current website. You don’t have to make a choice of either/or.
The landing page can be adapted to your company.
Because I will integrate your landing page into your website and match the style/look and feel of the landing page to match your brand. Not only that I can also fix your website styles to better match the landing page and vice versa.
This allows you to start getting results right away – have your website looking good and you don’t need to wait for your entire website to get remade – which could take 6 months or more.
As part of the integration of your new website I will update the header and footer to match the landing page.
Highest ROI
The Single Greatest Thing You Can Do For Your Online Presence
Let’s be real – the most popular part of your website is going to be your landing page – so optimising this page to get you the results you want is going to be the highest ROI activity you can do.
Also by having a framework to work on which is all ready complete you can have your landing page up and running in less than 2 weeks – now if doing this nets you just one additional client a month, hell even one additional client per year it would be worth it right?
Keep in mind once this system is implemented it will continue to pay dividends for as long as it is online – and will work to boost your other offline prospecting activities.
By the way – I haven’t even gotten into the copy of this landing page – which I will assist you in implementing to ensure that your agency’s message is on point with your target market and differentiates you from just another real estate agency – which many times is the strongest part of the conversion – this has just been a focus on
If you’ve been meaning to convert your real estate website to an appraisal appointment generating machine – but have been unsure of whether doing so will yield you results – or have been hesitant due to the time commitment I highly suggest giving RELPA a spin – at the moment I’m offering to install this for free on your website to ensure that the landing page works.
From the many real estate agency owners I speak with I hear stuff like this all the time
“We know our website needs improvement – it’s always under consideration – but we’ve had our site redone three years ago. What difference is a new redesign going to make?”
“We’ve spoken to digital agencies – and I’m sure they’re good – but they don’t understand real estate – it’s different to many other businesses they work with.”
“Sure Kosta, you have some great concepts and ideas – but I don’t know if I have the energy to undertake a whole redesign of my online presence. I know it’s important – but so are other things and I have to allocate my time to what’s important.”
Look – updating or creating a new website is not fun.
You have to sit down and talk about what every bit of colour is going to be, recreate potentially hundreds of inner pages – not to mention setup a listing sync with your current real estate portal –
Link everything up with your CRM – sometimes deal with your previous online provider.
Stress about whether you’re going to lose your Google rankings if you make changes.
Not to mention the hours you have to invest into the project, and the stress.
And even after all that then the failure rate for web development projects is between 30 – 70% (literally over 30% of web projects don’t even get completed and launched) and that’s not to speak about projects that get completed but don’t result in any additional leads- those are some scary stats – and it’s no wonder why most real estate agencies stay with their same bad design year after year. Even when they know their website is leaking tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.
But what if all those problems could be avoided?
Well that’s what the Real Estate Landing Page Accelerator – which I’ll just call RELPA is here to fix.
In short RELPA allows you to implement the cutting edge real estate appraisal acquisition techniques on your website to blow up your appraisal leads – while keeping your existing website and technology – and allowing you to go live and start increasing appraisal appointments in as little as two weeks.
It’s a number of pages that – when added to your website work together to ensure your website does what it needs to do – and that’s get more real estate appointments!
And these pages can be styled to the look and feel of your WordPress website and integrated with your Crm systems.
So what exactly makes RELPA different to all the other ‘real estate templates’ you’ve seen around?
Let’s get started!
Real Estate Testimonial Software
Position Yourself as the First Choice
Not only do 78% of people start their search for a real estate agent online – but also prospects are going to read third party non-biased reviews in making their decision. Wouldn’t you?
Let’s see what makes RELPA different.
Here is the review section on the new landing page:
You will note that there is also an individual review page accessible from the top menu
And here is the individual review page:
This is designed to get you appraisal appointments – let me show you how that’s done.
Live Google Reviews
One Click Social Proof Pull
The Google review app will be able to pull live reviews from your Google Places page (even if you have multiple places with multiple reviews) and have them aggregated on your Reviews page – so the user can scroll through and read your Google reviews without leaving the website.
What’s more every Google review will have the Google logo which will allow the user to click and go directly to that individual review – to add trust and instill confidence in your prospect.
Rate My Agent Integration
Get Your Best RateMyAgent Reviews
The review page has a link to RateMyAgent – to immediately build trust. However the review page will allow us to put your most powerful RateMyAgent reviews first – because what is the point of having powerful reviews if they are stuck and not viewable by the client.
Just imagine reading 2 reviews from 2 separate real estate agents – one says that you did a great job, and your competitor’s review says they sold the house way above reserve.
Which agent would you pick?
The Review page will allow you to add individual RateMyAgent reviews so you can have your 3 most stand out reviews and control which reviews the user sees.
Google Review Ordering
Strategical Seller Authority Positioning
Ordering reviews means we can now place the most important Google reviews at the top – ensuring that you control what reviews the prospect sees – the ones that will influence your prospect to make a decision.
We can order these on the front page and on the inner review page.
73% of consumers read six or fewer reviews before making a decision
Vendasta
Because let’s be honest your customer isn’t going to read every single one of your reviews – and if you have a 50/50 split of tenant and seller reviews you want to ensure that the seller reviews are highlighted on your home page if this is where your revenue comes from and is your ultimate goal.
Review Headlines
Differentiate Yourself With Results
Review headlines are going to make a huge impact on the effectiveness of your testimonials.
Let’s say someone leaves a testimonial for a home you sold for them at $30,000 above the reserve. The testimonial may mention that they were very happy with the sale but does not mention the specific number of how high above the sale price you were able to sell their home for.
This information is very important – rather than asking them to change their review – you can now add a headline to your reviews which calls out the most important part of the review – which for sellers is most commonly how high above reserve price you were able to sell a property.
Think about it – when someone sees the review section they’re not going to go and read every single review – but they will quickly read the headline. This is your opportunity to position yourself explicitly as someone who gets their clients the best bang for their buck and is the clear choice for them to book an appointment with.
Keep in mind that even if your competitor has just as many reviews as you do – by ordering them by most important and using a call out headline it’s going to make you look like the clear choice – and since most sellers only meet with one real estate agent and at maximum 2 – being shortlisted based on this is going to make a big difference in your bottom line at the end of the year.
Multi Step Forms
Avoid Abandonment, Increase Form Completion
Multi step forms can get up to 300% more conversions. – Venture Harbour
We need to speak about Market Appraisal forms on real estate websites. They are woefully under optimised – and considering it’s the most important part of a website not focusing on this would be a big disservice to your bottom line.
The real estate landing page accelerator fixes a lot of issues and optimises your website for maximum Market Appraisal conversions – let’s discuss what it does.
The reason that a multi step form can increase your conversion rate by up to 300% is because people can really not be bothered to fill in forms – especially long forms.
The solution may be to include a very short form – but then you are left with not enough information to qualify the prospect and end up only answering enquiries and not moving the process to the next stage.
Having a short form may lead to more enquiries – but you are left with no information to follow up with and provide value and no ability to qualify your leads – leading you to spend energy following up leads that are not motivated and unqualified.
Increase your conversions by taking advantage of the multi step features – the form starts with a king only one question – the prospect’s address – so there is minimal commitment to proceed to the next stage.
Address Auto Suggest
Increase conversions by 30% and get accurate client data backed by Google
The Market appraisal form comes with an address auto suggest – allowing your prospect to quickly enter their address details and have Google help them pick the right address.
This makes the form easier to fill in increasing conversion rates and increases the amount of accurate data.
Also – interesting fact – did you know the longest suburb name in Australia is ‘Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya’ – can you imagine a prospect having to type that in? With the address auto suggest you don’t have to worry about creating a negative user experience for prospects with long street and suburb names.
Market Appraisal Benefits Section
Sellers will take action when you give them a reason
If the user resists filling in their address to get started there is a benefit section which outlines why they would want to proceed – a feature that is sorely lacking from most real estate websites.
The vast majority of market appraisal forms I find on real estate websites don’t even say why someone should fill out the form in the first place – they just assume the prospect knows why they would need to do this and does not need to be educated – or any effort made to differentiate a market appraisal from other real estate agents.
This template fixes this with a market appraisal benefit section – while this may seem like a minor thing – this is actually a big deal. Giving a person a reason and outlining the benefits of taking an action is a big improvement over just telling them to take an action.
Also if the user scrolls down that means they’re second guessing starting the form process – the benefits section will resolve this.
Sales Lifecycle Shortening Questions
Ask the Right Questions to Frame Your First Follow Up to your Advantage
It’s not just about having a multi step form – it’s about asking the right questions. And what are the right questions?
Well the right questions are the ones that are going to help you qualify the prospect and give you the information to move to the next stage as quickly as possible.
The multi step form on the RE landing page accelerator is optimised to ask just the right amount of questions.
Firstly – it asks for the address
Then it asks for Name, Email and Phone Number – pretty standard questions
Finally it asks for when the prospect wants to sell and the prospect’s relationship to the property.
You don’t want to drive half way across town only to find out the property you’re appraising is for the owner’s son who just happened to mention at one point he may be thinking of selling and now the son is wasting everyone real estate agent’s time getting various appraisals to choose the right one.
And if someone is just kicking tyres and is not motivated to sell – you want to know that too – so you can prioritise that lead correctly. There is a big difference between someone who is looking to sell in the next 6 months and someone who is looking to sell IMMEDIATELY due to circumstances and is highly motivated.
I would trust you would treat those two sellers very differently.
Asking the right questions and presenting them in the correct way sets the tone for the rest of your sales journey with the customer – you owe it to yourself to get this right to save yourself headaches down the line.
Multi Agent Booking Form
Qualified Appointments on Auto-pilot
The most important part of booking an appointment is – actually booking the appointment right? Having to go back and forth trying to lock down a time between yourself and the home seller can be a stressful process.
Sometimes a seller can screw you around – telling you they’ll get back to you or being slow in response – leaving you in a situation where you’re unsure about whether the home appraisal will happen at all.
And even if it does you’ve wasted weeks trying to lock down a time that works.
Well now the booking form is completely integrated into your website as part of the multi step form – the prospect can enter their details and then book a time that works for them.
They can even choose whether to have the appointment on the phone, your office or at their address (you can remove and add options as required). Perhaps your prospect just wants an initial consultation over the phone first.
The user can choose the terms on which they will meet with you, and you can also increase or decrease the amount of choices available to the user to suit your needs. The great thing is – even if the user abandons the form at the booking stage you still have their details to follow up and find out what made them leave.
The best thing about the booking form is that it can be integrated to work either just for yourself or a staff of 10, 20 or more and integrate with all their calendars – think of the amount of time this would save.
Installation of this will also include integrating this booking system into your own real estate agency along with your staff and their calendar.
Abandonment Prevention
Stop 68% of your Prospects Abandoning your Form
Hypothetical question – what if someone enters their address – but then they leave? What should happen?
In a traditional form if a prospect chose to leave the website half way through your Market Appraisal page half way through – guess what – all that content is gone.
With the in-built form abandonment feature you can ensure that you get all the details from a prospect’s enquiry. So for example if someone only enters in their address and then decides to leave – and that address just happens to be in an area where you’ve done a letterbox drop – well guess what – you’ve just prioritised your follow up.
Allow follow ups of abandoned forms
Again I want to stress that this is not a replacement for your manual follow up – instead this landing page accelerator product is meant to turbo-charge what you’re all ready doing – including cold door knocking for properties in the area you’re listing in – after all it’s not a digital vs. non-digital world – we can do both at the same time.
Capture the data from abandoned forms and use that as a reason to follow up and find out why they left the form – and if this even brings in just one additional home sale listing agreement per year – it would be worth it don’t you agree?
Footer Call to Action
Ask for the appointment at the right time
The RELPA system will also add a call to action to the footer of your pages – so for example if a user clicks on your Reviews page and scrolls to the bottom of that page – you’re in the perfect position to ask for the user to take the next step – the call to action block will be visible on all pages and will allow the user to either request a call back or move to the next step.
Placing a call to action in the footer of your pages an increase conversions by up to 304% based on research conducted by protocol80.com
Call Back Feature
Increase self respect by asking for a minimal commitment
You may notice one thing that’s missing on this landing page is a contact form. That’s because this accelerator landing page does not have one.
Why is that?
Well do you want to be getting enquiries about what your commission rate is – and general questions which just waste your time.
RELPA works on the assumption that you want to get on the phone with the prospect as soon as possible – now if the prospect chooses to not book an appraisal appointment the only other option they have is to request a call back.
Surely you would agree that you would rather speak to prospects on the phone to address and dig in to any potential issues that they have and qualify them right there and then – that way you’ll know exactly where you are with any prospect once you hang up the phone.
By the way if a prospect is not willing to get on the phone and speak with you – then you can rest assured that’s because they’re just price shopping trying to get the lowest commission rate and you don’t want to deal with prospects like that in the first place.
Below you can see the Request Callback Form.
Ease of Use
Spend More Time Selling, Less time Web Managing
If you’ve read up to this point then you either probably have considered updating your online presence to maximise your appraisal leads and what I have told you about the RE landing page accelerator makes sense.
But let’s be honest – if you’re like most real estate agents you’ve probably experienced web site updates/redesigns as painstaking processes that take months to complete and sink a lot of time.
So I want to show you why this landing page is going to make your life so much easier.
KISS Engine
Gain control of your online presence
The Keep It Simple Stupid engine – otherwise known as Elementor – is the easiest page builder ever made for WordPress. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you wanted to update a part of your website but were limited then you can say hello to freedom.
The WYSIWYG KISS engine is so easy you never have to wait on a web developer to make changes again.
With Elementor’s KISS engine all you have to do to edit any section of the page in the future is simply click on what you want to edit… and edit it. It’s truly WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) – this editor is so simple most clients after using it for a couple of hours feel confident enough that they no longer need a web developer for every minor change.
Which is exactly what I aim for – I want your freedom.
WordPress Integration
If It Ain’t Broke, Why Change It?
Now sure – a great engine is great – but there’s no point if this landing page can’t be integrated with your current WordPress website. Because after all you still want to keep various features of your old website like your inner pages – as well as your listing integration and things of that nature.
Well the good news is that if you like you current website you can keep your current website. You don’t have to make a choice of either/or.
The landing page can be adapted to your company.
Because I will integrate your landing page into your website and match the style/look and feel of the landing page to match your brand. Not only that I can also fix your website styles to better match the landing page and vice versa.
This allows you to start getting results right away – have your website looking good and you don’t need to wait for your entire website to get remade – which could take 6 months or more.
As part of the integration of your new website I will update the header and footer to match the landing page.
Highest ROI
The Single Greatest Thing You Can Do For Your Online Presence
Let’s be real – the most popular part of your website is going to be your landing page – so optimising this page to get you the results you want is going to be the highest ROI activity you can do.
Also by having a framework to work on which is all ready complete you can have your landing page up and running in less than 2 weeks – now if doing this nets you just one additional client a month, hell even one additional client per year it would be worth it right?
Keep in mind once this system is implemented it will continue to pay dividends for as long as it is online – and will work to boost your other offline prospecting activities.
By the way – I haven’t even gotten into the copy of this landing page – which I will assist you in implementing to ensure that your agency’s message is on point with your target market and differentiates you from just another real estate agency – which many times is the strongest part of the conversion – this has just been a focus on
If you’ve been meaning to convert your real estate website to an appraisal appointment generating machine – but have been unsure of whether doing so will yield you results – or have been hesitant due to the time commitment I highly suggest giving RELPA a spin – at the moment I’m offering to install this for free on your website to ensure that the landing page works.
https://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/product_launch.jpg7201280KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2021-03-16 05:06:082021-04-07 11:50:35Introducing: Head Studio’s Real Estate Landing Page Accelerator Product – 3X Your Appraisal Appointments in 2 Weeks
In all my time of auditing real estate websites for conversion improvements there is only one website that I have audited where I simply said ‘there is nothing that can be improved on this site’.
Just like with anything in life – in order to improve we should learn from the best – so in this blog we discuss what the best real estate agency is doing right with their online presence and how you can sky rocket your own conversion rates by copying what is all ready working.
Upside does everything correctly when it comes to ROI (return on investment a.k.a most seller listing appointments booked).
Here I will show you exactly what they do right and how you can incorporate it into your website.
You don’t need to spend $100K+ on a website like Upside – these are elements that any real estate agent can apply on their agency site right now.
1. Create the connection and grab attention
Unlike the majority of real estate agent’s homepages – which begin their websites with photos of properties -they’ve sold or are currently selling-, or local city buildings and skyscrapers Upside sets the tone of their website with a smiling staff member wearing professional attire and looking directly at the website visitor.
The reason Upside does this is to create an immediate and personal connection with the prospect.
Being in the service industry – Upside understands that their value doesn’t come from the properties they sell but the personal service they provide.
Everyone wants to deal with a friendly, professional real estate agent that gets results – and real estate agencies are really about the people and right off the bat Upside differentiates themselves int his manner.
2. A strong UVP
For most real estate agents their UVP (unique value proposition or headline) are extremely generic and interchangeable with other real estate agents.
While a headline like “Discover Your Coming Home Feeling” or “We Help You Find Your Dream Home” sound good on the surface and are better than simply saying “Welcome”, in reality they say nothing about a real estate agent and what makes them unique.
Can we all agree that no website should ever need to say “Welcome to [company name]” – people know they are on your website – you should get to the point as quickly as possible about why they should do business with you.Some don’t even have a UVP instead simply having their logo take up the space where their headline/UVP would be. Clients don’t care about your logo – they want to know how you can help them.
Upside’s Unique Value Proposition headline is quick, to the point and establishes the tone for the rest of their website copy about why people should choose them.
With Upside their unique value proposition is quick, to the point and establishes the tone for the rest of their landing page of why people want to work with them.
Upside’s UVP gets straight to the point of why someone would want to sell their home with them. Notice the sub headline fleshing out and building upon the initial headline.
You don’t have to be unique to have a UVP – the important thing is to be different in the mind of the prospect . Most real estate agents – if asked if they have hidden costs will answer that they don’t – yet Upside is the only agency that specifically claims this which gives the customer confidence and builds trust – and fits in with Upside’s focus on saving the client money.
3. One Main Powerful Call to Action (Do You Know What You Want? Then Ask For It!)
Most real estate websites have a property search as their primary call to action on their home page:
This is the wrong approach for two reasons.
Firstly – most internet users do the research phase of buying a property on major internet portals like realestate.com.au and domain.com.au – competing with these websites is next to impossible.
Secondly – a property search on your home page is targeting home buyers – not sellers. Since most real estate agencies make the bulk of their revenue through seller listings.
So why would you focus on buyers on your home page when your main revenue source is sellers?
Instead of attempting to target sellers with property search you should be targeting home buyers with an appraisal appointment call to action.
Upside’s call to action is clear – there’s no mistaking what they want the prospect to do – it’s right there in bright orange.
Upside’s home page speaks directly to the buyer and asks for minimum commitment and piques the prospect’s curiosity with a bright ‘Get Started’ button – to take the prospect to the next step in the sales journey and begin the process of booking an appraisal appointment.
Soon the prospect is asked to book an appraisal appointment with the professionally attired man smiling at them – and they see a very small form that’s not asking for anything other than their property address and they think “Why not – this seems quite easy let’s see how this goes” – and now they are on the path to becoming a listing.
This multi step form is different from the Market Appraisal pages that most real estate agencies have as it is asking only a few questions to take the prospect to the next stage.
4. Client focused copy
The purpose of your website copy (copy is the text on your website) – is to communicate to the prospect how you can help them and persuade them to take action.
Most real estate agents don’t pass the “so what” or “why should I care” test by talking about things the client has no interest in such as how long they’ve been in business, their company history and other un-necessary things – especially on the About Us page.
Upside side steps this all together by getting right to the point – even on their ‘About Us’ section of their home page they dive straight into the big question – “Why Sell With Us?” – after all that’s what the client is asking.
Every piece of your website copy should be entered around the prospect’s wants and needs – and play its role in moving the client to the next stage of the selling process.
5. A calculator that actually makes sense
Most real estate websites have calculators on their ‘Resources’ or ‘Tools’ page – such as a mortgage calculator for example.
Unfortunately most real estate agents use calculators on their website incorrectly because if a client is looking for a calculator or to conduct research they will not do it on your website. Domain.com.au invests a lot of money into a whole plethora of tools to help prospects calculate their mortgage payments and other information.
Most home buyers begin their home buyers journey – including using these calculators before they even get to your website.
However you can make use of a calculator by using it as a tool to show the prospect exactly how much money they stand to save or make by choosing your real estate agency.
Check out the genius way Upside has incorporated a calculator into their website.
Upside’s calculator passes the “what’s in it for me” text by giving the prospect the most vital information – how much they themselves would save using Upside – using an adjustable slider.
The slider then also states exactly how this number is arrived at with the fine print.
When using a calculator make sure it relates directly to your prospect’s needs/wants and make it serve the purpose of persuading the client to take the next step.
6. Testimonials Done Right
Because clients these days are more sceptical than ever about what businesses say testimonials are a powerful form of third party social proof (just like Real Estate Awards or appearances on major television or radio stations) – which lend a stamp of approval to your business.
Prospects won’t even bother to put you on their short list if your website doesn’t exude trust – yet most real estate agents do testimonials incorrectly.
Because prospects will do their own independent research on your business using a third party tool like RateMyAgent.com you should make this third party information available on your home page.
While Upside’s testimonials section is not perfect – as they don’t have a dedicated Testimonial page or pull any of their fantastic Google Reviews to display alongside their RateMyAgent.com reviews they do three things very well.
Firstly – they make use of the RateMyAgent brand as they understand testimonials need to be third party verified to be relevant to the customer – as otherwise anyone could put any review on their website – not only do they use the RateMyAgent logo but they also link directly to their RateMyAgent.com page.
Secondly Upside uses photos with people in them – as humans respond much better to faces. This is in contrast to most real estate agents who use photos of the property that was sold as their testimonial which drastically decreases click through and recall rates.
Finally every review is result specific and speaks to their client’s needs and UVP (unique value proposition) by stating how much the client saved in fees.
Even if your UVP is not based on price you could still use this technique by stating how much a property was sold at $x above asking price – focusing on how much more money you put in a prospect’s pocket and highlighting these testimonials on your home page.
Summary
Studying what your competition is doing right is important for inspiration. In this blog I have broken down a leading real estate agency when it comes to having a strong internet presence – Upside – and showed you exactly what they do and how you can replicate it for yourself.
Making a strong first impression by using the right photos on their header – calling attention to their call to action and having a strong headline immediately connects Upside’s message to the prospect.
Then the various sections on their home page like their savings calculator, their strong copy and their testimonials section with third party verification tools helps to strengthen and persuade their prospect to take the next step – just in case they weren’t convinced all ready.
Upside’s website works because all the elements work together to achieve a common purpose – get the prospect to engage – using all of these elements together is the most powerful – start from the sections of your website prospects are most likely to visit and see – which is the top of your home page – and then work your way down.
https://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/upside_realty_original.jpg7201280KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2021-01-31 05:09:152021-03-05 03:35:185 Secret Strategies Upside Realty Uses to Turn their Website into an Appraisal Appointment Generating Machine
How your market appraisal and contact forms are setup is integral in moving your prospects to the next stage of setting up an appraisal appointment – however most real estate agencies are doing contact forms incorrectly.
The form is a very integral part of your website.
Besides the obvious of non working forms – from my research of real estate companies I have found 5 critical conversion killing issues with real estate forms – these are not being clear with what the client will receive, not having a call to action, -not u- having too many fields and not utilising a multi step form, not asking the right questions – or asking the wrong ones and finally and failing to utilise an appointment booking form.
Forms are critical to your business so let’s go to the first issue.
1. Be Clear about what the Client Will Receive
our Market Appraisal form should make it clear why the prospect would want to fill it out. If you provide information to your prospects – is it better or different to what they can find themselves on realestate.com.au?
Many real estate agencies don’t even bother saying why someone would want to fill out their form or what they will receive for it.
The site above assumes that the client knows what a market appraisal report is, what it contains and why the prospect would want it.
2. If you want your form filled out – then ask the client to do it and tell them what they would get
Many real estate agents hide their forms in the ‘Selling’ drop down without calling attention to it on the home page.
The Market Appraisal page is hidden deep within the site – there is no mention of it on the home page. It’s hidden in the ‘Selling’ section of their menu.
A real estate agency’s revenue is directly related to how many property appraisal appointments they can book – which means the main focus and call to action in your menu and home page should be to get the prospect to book a Home Appraisal Appointment.
Your form should not be hidden in a drop down or be put AFTER the Buying tab.
In this example the call to action is very clear as soon as the user lands on the website. By the way having a ‘Get Started’ button is a great way to request minimal commitment to move the prospect along their selling journey with you.
3. Don’t Feed Me the Whole Enchilada at Once (How to Ask for a Little Bit at a Time)
Coming out the gate with 31 questions on your form overwhelms customers and massively decreases your conversion rate.
Most Market Appraisal forms – have a lot of questions which demoralise prospects – and the way to fix this and ensure you still get the information you need from your prospects is with a multi step form.
This Upside form is simply asking for the prospect’s property address. From here the user is taken on a journey – entering more bite sized pieces as they go along. – I’ve included the entire funnel below:Step 1Step 2Step 3Step 4Step 5Step 6
By feeding your prospect bite sized questions makes the process of entering their details manageable – a prospect looking at the funnel below would probably say “Hey why not, let me put my address in and see what happens”. The prospect is now curious what the next step will bring and filling out the form piques their curiosity and makes the sales journey seem like an adventure.
Should the prospect choose to leave your website before filling out the entire multi step form you will have enough details to initiate a follow up procedure should you wish to.
This is impossible with a one page form – where if the prospect leaves you don’t even know that they existed and you can guarantee you’ve lost that lead.
4. Ask the Right Questions (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Choosing what questions to ask on your property appraisal form is a balancing act.
You don’t want to ask too few questions and not have enough information to qualify the lead and follow up correctly.
The client is now directing the shots – perhaps asking the questions – and you don’t have any information to take this to the next stage. You are left with simply answering the client’s questions and then hoping that the client then agrees to go to the next stage.
On the other hand you also don’t want to have a form with too many irrelevant questions that scare prospects away.
This form is asking way too many questions – and even though not all of these questions are required in order to proceed the client does not know this and instead simply sees a very intimidating form. Despite asking so many questions few of these questions will help the real estate agent close the sale and irrelevant – and only serve to make doing business with them more difficult.
The purpose of the market appraisal form is to qualify the client and to give
The real estate agent enough information to close the sale smoothly and professionally – more questions can always be asked on the initial appointment.
Rather than asking questions about the property – which you can discover yourself with minimal research you should instead ask the following:
When are you looking to sell?
What is your relationship with the property?
These are the questions that will help you make the decision to see if this client is qualified.
5. If you want appointments – make them easier to book (The Appointment Form)
A real estate agent’s revenue is directly traced back to the amount of seller listing appointments they book – since setting appointments is such an integral part of your business – shouldn’t you do everything possible to make it easier for your potential prospects to book them?
Rather than playing the embarrassing game of phone or email tag to pin down an appointment – why not let your website handle this for you?
An online booking form will allow the client to choose a time to speak to you through an online scheduling form – this scheduling application will automatically present available times to your prospect that don’t clash with other events on your Calendar.
Upside.com.au has a custom made scheduling calendar which automatically assigns you to the schedule of the agent closest to you based on the property address you enter.
There are many off the shelf scheduling solutions available such as Calendly – which I use myself and which has many options such as automatic redirect after a user books an appointment.
The best thing about an online scheduler is that you can email the link to the home seller where they can choose a date and time – this greatly speeds up the process and makes it very clear to you when a prospect is not serious and is wasting your time.
This is because with traditional email tag a prospect can evade you and say they are “really busy” right now – or ask you to call them back in a week. With the schedule link the prospect can simply make a time which works for them at any point in the future – so the “too busy”excuse is eliminated.
While you may not have the Scheduling form on your website – you can integrate it into your sales process and how you deal with new enquiries – and it can speed up the sales journey considerably.
Summary
If you are looking at optimising your forms to increase your enquiries then the steps outlined in this blog will help you achieve that goal.
You need to understand what the purpose of not only your forms is, but your website and your business. If booking seller appraisal forms is your website’s purpose then make sure that you include a visible call to action to your most important form (the Market Appraisal form).
When the user lands on your form you should tell them why they should make the effort and what they will receive for filling out the form – and you need to ask the correct questions.
Remember the purpose of the form is to book the appraisal appointment and to assist you in closing the deal and becoming an exclusive seller for the prospect’s property – every question you ask should assist you with doing this – and any un-necessary questions should be stripped.
When it comes to speeding up the process and creating great user experience – implementing a scheduling form in your sales process will ensure that you are not left playing phone tag, annoying the client with follow ups for an appointment and losing your power in negotiations.
https://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/5_forms-1.jpg7201280KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2021-01-31 04:38:402021-03-05 07:29:335 Ways to Optimise Your Real Estate Forms to Increase Conversions (by Up to 185%)
78% of people start their search for a real estate agent on the internet – and social proof in the form of testimonials weighs very heavily into their decision in picking an agent to book an appraisal appointment.
Most real estate agents are taking their most valuable asset – what their customers say about them and completely mis using it – presenting testimonials incorrectly and failing to get the most juice out of them – and losing 65% potential home sellers along the way.
In this blog I talk about the top 4 biggest mistakes that real estate websites make when it comes to testimonials.
Step #1: Don’t Hide Your Testimonials
Home sellers will do third party research on your agency before they choose to work with you – why not make it easy for them and showcase your testimonials.
Many real estate agencies hide their testimonials deep in their website.
Many real estate agencies hide their testimonials in the ‘Selling’ or ‘About’ drop down.
Many sellers will not check your ‘About Us’ page as most customers simply don’t care about your company and are more interested in how you can help them sell their home quickly at the highest rate – having the Testimonials hidden in the About Us menu reduces the possibility that they will be seen.
You should never rely on a client to “investigate” your website to find the information that will help them become a customer.
Even if you have 100 testimonials and your competitor only has 5 – if your testimonials are hidden and theirs are clearly visible they will appear more reputable to the client. It is about the prospect’s perception – not reality.
You should have your best testimonials somewhere on your front page. Secondly if you have enough to warrant it – you should have a separate page for your testimonials – the Testimonials page should be a top level page – and in fact it should really be right next to the ‘Home’ link in the top header bar.
If you have enough testimonials they should have their own top level page
If you check your Analytics – you would find that -almost- ALL your future clients will visit your Testimonials page during their sales journey.
ou want the most important information available to clients in an easy to find place – especially testimonials.
Step #2: Use Photos of People (People Want Stories Not Houses)
People respond more to photos of people than they do photos of houses.
When real estate agents use a photo to accompany their testimonial – they use a photo of a home. Sometimes they even mention the address of the home.
Here is one example:
When real estate agents use a photo to accompany their testimonial – they use a photo of a home.
People respond well to faces, to stories and -to- the human element. And whenever you can – use a photo (or even a video if possible) of your past customers.
This is an easy way to differentiate yourself, increase the effectiveness of your testimonials and makes you more momorable and increases trust.
Bonus Tip: You can get the photo of your previous customers by searching for them on LinkedIn or Facebook.
Customers would much rather you used a photo of their face than a photo and address of their property due to privacy.
Using photos of your past customers in their testimonials will differentiate you, increase your client’s trust and make you more memorable during the initial research phase of the home owner’s selling journey.
Step #3: Use the Customer’s Full Name
Using an abbreviation (not using the full last name) on your testimonial decreases its effectiveness and makes customers cynical about the testimonial’s authenticity.
There is no last name and no photo – this testimonial looks untrustworthy in the customer’s eyes.While anonymous testimonials are acceptable on RateMyAgent.com this is because they are independently verified and the RateMyAgent brand is trusted and not incentivised to create inauthentic testimonials.
As a real estate agent your testimonials will not be as trusted as RateMyAgent.com – so ensure that last names are included.
Your customers know that your website is not RateMyAgent however including a last name will build their trust.
Step #4: Use Third Party Verification
There are two kinds of third party testimonial verification – these are Google Reviews and RateMyAgent.com.
If you type [real estate agent + reviews] into Google you will see the following:
RateMyAgent and Google Reviews are the most popular third party testimonial verification tools.
On the right is the Google Places page which will show the real estate’s average google rating – this is very prominent.
RateMyAgent will be in the top 3 results as it’s a popular real estate agency review site in Australia.
Since most sellers start their search on Google it’s important that you have a presence on these two websites.
When you place testimonials on your website without including a third party verification link it is less effective and prospects will be -more- cynical to their authenticity.When showing your reviews make sure to provide a link to RateMyAgent like Upside does above.
Another method is to have a Google testimonial widget to ensure prospects don’t leave your website:
A Google widget pulls in reviews from your Google MyBusiness account and shows them on your website. Customers can click through to the individual reviews to verify their authenticity.
In fact I use this on my own website. The idea behind this is that people can click through and see the review on Google – which immediately creates trust while staying on your website.
Another powerful widget is a summary review verification widget like these:
Add this to the top of your home page to build immediate trust quicker.
In summary if you have a presence with Google Reviews and Rate My Agent – make sure you make it known!
Bonus Tip: if you are looking to build your Google reviews you can send clients a direct link in an email which will take them to the ‘Post New Review’ page on your Google My Places tab. You can find this by trying to post a review on your page and then copy/pasting that URL into an email link.
Summary
Research has shown that testimonials increase conversions by an average of 34% on sales pages and 380% on higher ticket items.
Your testimonials are your most prized marketing asset – so make sure they are displayed prominently, include customer photos and a last name and are independently verified so that they do their job of building trust and increasing your appraisal booking rates.
https://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/4_steps_testimonial.jpg7201280KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2021-01-31 04:10:592021-02-14 11:01:074 Ways to Increase Your Appraisal Appointments 65% by Using Your your Real Estate Testimonials Effectively
Technical problems on real estate websites make your real estate agency look cheap and incompetent.
Clients can forgive a website that is not flashy – but when things are broken that will reflect on how users see your brand – just like a dirty or unkempt office, arriving late to an appointment or unfriendly staff – technical issues add up to contributing to a prospect choosing not to do business with you.
Unlike a dirty office or unfriendly staff though – you will never even know they are the cause of lost business because clients will click away without a word.
Technical issues always boil down to 5 things –
slow websites caused by sliders
missing security certificates
incomplete tags
broken headers
broken forms
Unlike in person – on the internet there is nothing stopping a client from clicking away from your website and heading over to a competitor – there is no objection handling to be done – you will not even know you were being considered in the first place.
1. Big Sliders and Little Big Images (Slow Websites)
Website speed is more than just not making the client wait around for your website to load – much more importantly it directly affects your Google rankings.
Fixing slow websites have led to an increase of 36% for clients I have worked with.
Kosta Kondratenko
Most real estate companies don’t audit and test their website speed during handoff from a developer and actually believe their website performs generally well without being aware of just how much optimisation potential there is and the different it’ll make to their organic traffic and user experience.
There are two main reasons for a slow real estate website –
un-necessary sliders and
unoptimised property images
Un-necessary sliders
Many real estate sites have a slider at the top of their homepage with up to 7 images – all of which need to be loaded before the website can be displayed.
Sliders also offer no practical benefit because no customer is going to sit through a website slider – the attention span of the typical prospects is less than 3 seconds. They either click and scroll to what they’re looking to achieve – or they leave.
This website has 3 large sliders.
Finally sliders decrease your appraisal appointment booking rates because they diffuse the focus and give the client too many options to click on – leading the prospect to become overwhelmed and taking them off the critical path to become a customer.
Sliders also decrease the amount of leads your website receives because they diffuse the focus and give the client too many options to click on – which means you lose the critical path that the user needs to take to become a customer.
Unoptimised Property Images
Many ‘properties recently sold’ or ‘recently listed’ sections on real estate websites can contain many listings and the images for these listings are not optimised – instead they load the large version of the property listing images which is the equivalent of loading all your real estate listings at once.
Here we have 4 supposedly thumbnail images – however when I check the source of these images you will see they are actually huge and not optimised for this sectionThis image is over 250KB – much larger than it needs to be. Now imagine having 20 property listings in a slider on the home page.
Clients with slower or mobile connections will have to wait longer for your home page to load and Google will penalise and put your site at the bottom of results if you have unoptimised thumbnail images.
2. Missing Security Certificates
Security certificates (also known as SSL Certificates) allow your browser to certify that a website is safe. These security certificates are responsible for putting a green padlock or ‘Not Secure’ message in your browser address bar.
So how do you think the client will feel when they come across a website like this.
While the client may not know what an SSL certificate is or what it means – it just makes your brand look cheap. If the first thing you see before your business name is ‘Not Secure’ what kind of first impression are you building with the client?
When your prospect sees ‘Not Secure’ as the first thing when landing on your homepage you immediately start off on the wrong foot and lose their trust.
The good news is you can easily fix this issue by calling your reputable website hosting company and getting an SSL certificate installed for free.
If your hosting provider attempts to charge you for an SSL then that should be a red flag – as most reputable hosts provide one for free these days.
3. Incomplete Google tags
Missing title and description tags destroy your brand message and makes you look unprofessional on your Google listings when prospects are searching for you on Google.
Even if you can appear in a prospect’s relevant search results your brand will be devalued immediately and will lead to low confidence in the prospect’s belief that you can sell their home.
How can you sell a prospect’s home using the internet when you can’t make your listing appear properly on Google?
Below is an example of a real estate’s Google listing when no Google tags are present.
The example above is a real estate’s Google listing when no Google tags are present. The two issues with this Google listing are:
No Title – since there is no title tag on the website Google defaults to having the website’s URL again -in the title-. Not good – in fact it’s no coincidence that this company doesn’t come up for their own branded keyword.
No Description – underneath the title you can see Google lifts the top menu text – this is because the website has no description tag – which Google looks for first to find out what it should put in the description field on its search results.
If you don’t have this description tag then it’s up to Google to choose what to show there – and Google doesn’t always make the best decision in these matters. In this case Google just shows the first readable text it sees – which happens to be the menu items since menus are usually the first text that a website renders.
ou wouldn’t create a mailbox drop with just your website URL and a list of menu items as that would make a horrible impression – so why do it on your Google listing?
Adding a title and description tag with your company name and tagline will ensure prospects know exactly what you are about and your UVP (unique value proposition) – to help you differentiate yourself, capture their attention and increase the click through rate.
The important thing is that when clients search for you on Google that it looks correct and is not broken and leaving a bad first impression.
4. Headers – Broken Menus and Humongous Spacers
Headers are the the top section of your website that houses your navigation menu items (Home, About Us – those kinds of links) and perhaps your phone number and social media links.
The two most common issues with real estate website headers are being too big and having unexpected and confusing navigation.
Here we have a header that takes up nearly half of the screen – and leaves the rest of the content barely visible.
It’s frustrating for the user to navigate your website and find the information they need when an un-necessarily large header is in their way – which leads to the client being annoyed by your brand.
The other issue to do with headers is unexpected and confusing navigation.
This website looks slick from first glance – but where is the top menu. If you look over to the right you’ll see 3 lines that when clicked bring up the menu.People used to seeing a menu at the top of the page – no matter how slick it is. Also the popup menu lists the address and direct email on the left – another unconventional place to put this information.
Do not arrange your website navigation in unconventional ways – for example by having the user need to click a navigation button to view the menu like in the example above.
Attempting to be artistic by differentiating your navigation only adds to prospect’s confusion – and leads to prospects having difficulty in finding the information they are after – which is the last thing you want and leads to prospects being annoyed with your brand.
Difficult navigation usually happens when companies try to arrange their menus in a non conventional way. Perhaps due to inexperience or artistic reasons they try to make headers different from everyone else.
Unfortunately this is the type of differentiation that you DO NOT want for your company.
On a website you should have items in places where people expect for ease of use and to avoid confusion. The last thing you want is for people to not be able to find the information they want because they’re confused about where to go.
A common issue I see is menus like in the example above where the user has to click a navigation button to view the menu. Other times a whole section of menu items are hidden unless the user does something to reveal them – you must never underestimate how easy it is for prospects to get confused by your navigation.
Even if the prospect figures out how to use your menu they are all ready in a state of annoyance (and perhaps feeling a little stupid) that they couldn’t find what they were looking for – and everything you say will be tainted by this.
5. The Hidden Broken Form
Forms are essential in moving the client to the next stage of listing their home with you.
The two main technical issues that I see with online real estate forms that stop this from happening are
Non-asynchronous form processing and
Non-required fields
An asynchronous form is able to process the client’s inputs with minimum delay and not having to reload the page. This makes the form quicker to process and provides a better user experience.
An example of an asynchronous form
The second issue is required fields. A non required field in a form means an input that is not necessary to complete in order to submit the form.
When you don’t make certain fields required – like a phone number for example – this sinks your conversion rates because now prospects can send you questions without giving you their contact number which makes it impossible to follow up with the prospect to qualify them and move them to the next stage.
The three required fields you should always ask the client are:
Their phone number
Their property address
When they plan to sell
If a client is unwilling to leave you the following information they are unlikely to list their home with you either.
Upside does not allow you to leave an online message without a phone number – they only provide a Callback Form. The phone number is always required.
Summary
Slow websites, missing security certificates, unoptimised forms and broken menus are the most common real estate technical issues.
Fixing these issues will allow you to increase your appraisal bookings and charge higher commissions – as you will be seen as a premium service and a company that is easy to deal with – after all if your website is a breeze to use then your ability to hunt down home buyers and sell your prospect’s home must be just as efficient.
https://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/5_technical_problems.jpg7201280KostaKondratenkohttp://headstudios.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/hs_logo_updated-1.pngKostaKondratenko2021-01-31 03:42:262021-02-21 05:31:415 Ways to Stop Home Buyers Abandon your Website by Fixing these 5 Critical Technical Problems
