PRETEC

Many articles and comments have been made in reference to Saul Klein’s recent White Paper on the MLS 5.0 concept. It is very well detailed and comprehensive when it comes to presenting a vision of what we as Realtors need to prepare for in the future.

Danilo Bogdanovic made some great points in his post today on Agent Genius that challenges some of the content of Saul’s White Paper. I think this is healthy and the purpose of throwing this out to the visionaries of our industry.

Some may criticize Saul’s points, not understanding that the purpose of this presentation is to open up the dialogue for developing a plan vs. being reactive like we have with the whole mortgage fiasco, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the foreclosure boom we seem to be stuck with for the next couple of years. The unfortunate part is that the broker/owners who need to be smack dab in the middle of these kinds of conversations are struggling to cut costs, deplete inventory, and keep their doors open.

The other unfortunate fact is that most real estate brokers and agents are not spending the time and effort, when it comes to grasping web2, blogging, portals or the future of MLS changes, let alone decide what we need for the future.  We are a changing industry, that needs to be re-educated, starting at the top it needs to be fully supported by the broker/owners.  Let’s hope they’re not cutting their training and education budgets, if anything, right now would be a good time to throw out the newspaper print and put it all back into educating your assets. (Agents) We have many people to learn from including the two gentleman above. Have you started your Future plan yet?

“Expect the Best” Mike

As a real estate agent, mortgage originator, appraiser, home inspector or any other ancillary type business you have an opportunity to differentiate your services by posting articles, listings and other interesting information for buyers and sellers on the Internet, by Blogging. Here are three places to investigate and get started. Get a FREE Blog from Active Rain ,  RealTown Blog or Realtor.com.

ActiveRain is a free online community for real estate professionals designed to help them promote and grow their business. ActiveRain also features what’s called Localism which narrows your post right down to the neighborhood or community you are posting about. It’s a great site to network with other real estate agents around the country also.

Blogging provides you with the perfect vehicle to promote yourself and your community. Best of all, it is simple to set up and provides you with incredible flexibility. Get started today! If you’re an active blogger, visit the RealTown Community, BlogTalk.  No tool is better suited for making a powerful online presence than a Real Estate Blog powered by RealTown.

“Let’s Talk Real Estate is The Official Blog of REALTOR.com, launched in July of 2007 to help REALTORS share their local expertise and make quality connections with home buyers and sellers. You can Join this exclusive community of thousands of actively blogging REALTORS who are already noticing an increase in seller and buyer inquiries from posts on their FREE Featured Blogs. Realtor.com says and many of us can confirm that Blogging energizes your potential client base, builds relationships, and expands your referral networks.

So, Here you are, Three great places to start. Hope you enjoy and feel free to contact me with any questions you may have, I use all three for posting, however, I only recommend you start out with one.

“Expect the Best” Mike

As a real estate trainer and consultant, I’m available to assist you in all your marketing plans, technology, and taking your real estate career to the next level. Contact me if you’re interested in hiring a personal coach and consultant to help develop your business.

Recruiting takes discipline, persistence, and a strong commitment from the broker and manager in order to build the organization with quality sales associates. Here are nineteen activities to implement; however, notice number nineteen is to keep adding to the list. (Send me your comments)

1. Develop aggressive Recruiting campaign of existing agents from other companies.

2. Set up a pipeline for contact tracking

3. An activity plan (what are you going to do today to recruit)

4. Attend all Board of Realtor Functions and events (work the crowd)

5. Have Company Material to be displayed properly in interview areas

6. Set up an email prospecting campaign

7. Have all your agents keep 3 of your cards in their purse/wallet to hand out to peers

8. Invite prospective agents to your special meetings

9. Letters to co-op agents sent out monthly

10. Letters to new agents joining Board of Realtors - track them

11. List of Your company Benefits vs. others

12. Pending sale co-op agents (thanks for selling our listing)

13. Position yourself as the alternative broker

14. Recruit plan should be focused on middle quartile type agents

15. Send out: Just for your information on events, articles I thought would be of interest to you.

16. Send flyer’s to all recruit prospects on: See who has joined us- Tell 20 on recruiting?

17. Visit competitor’s open houses

18. Setup telephone scripts (what to say)

19. Add to this list, until you reach 50 activities

Notice, I never mentioned any technology. Recruiting is about building relationships one agent at a time. Once you get the appointment you can give them nineteen points on how you and your company can help take their career to the next level. Start working on a technology & Internet list, before you have your next sit down interview. You may be asking, what are those points? That’s another post, but you can get started on that by subscribing to this Blog and reading previous posts.

“Expect the Best” Mike

As a real estate trainer and consultant, I’m available to assist you in all your marketing plans, technology, and taking your real estate career to the next level. Contact me if you’re interested in hiring a personal coach and consultant to help develop your business.

Giving your sellers top exposure requires hard work, time, and dedication. One of the most important things you as a Realtor can do is to become knowledgeable of how and where, to place your listings on the Internet. Knowledge and expertise of this comes from taking courses and doing activities like ePRO, Webographers and Blogging, proper keyword insertions and having great content. These are just a few of the many things that a real estate agent needs to add to their MUST DO LIST!

1. Get a Domain name to Brand Your business
2. Brand your Email Address to eliminate yourname @yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc. for business
3. Set up a FREE Point2Agent Website to try 6 months, then switch to Professional version.
4. Get a FREE ActiveRain Blog, post articles about your listings, community, and events
5. Use Postlets, SawITOnLine, Craigslist to make professional looking brochures to post on your Blogs
6. Place your Profile FREE on the following sites: Zillow, Trulia, RealTown, ActiveRain, RealEstateOpen Marketers, Inmanwiki, Yahoo, Googlebase, RealSeeker, YouTube, Hubpages, Squidoo, and many more.
7. Join LinkedIn, FaceBook, and other Social Networking Groups to place a Profile and expose your name, business and listings.
8. Get every photo of every listing on Flickr.com with tags words, links back to the property information on your site.
9. Post links of your listings, Blog articles etc on Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed and many others
10. Take the 3 Hour Session offered by Mike and encourage your Broker or Association to BOOK IT TODAY! Signup for PRETEC

“Expect the Best” Mike

As a real estate trainer and consultant, I’m available to assist you in all your marketing plans, technology, and taking your real estate career to the next level. Contact me if you’re interested in hiring a personal coach and consultant to help develop your business.

RISMedia recently ran a 5 part series of articles on Broker/Agent Communication that would be very appropriate for all large and small companies to take to heart during these turbulent times that we as a real estate industry are experiencing. Each hyperlink will take you to the article for your opportunity to pick up tips and information that may help improve the attitude, productivity and teamwork in your company or office. 

P.J. Martin-Smith, Senior Vice President of Marketing, ERA Franchise Systems LLC
Aiming for great communication between brokers and agents would seem to be a given in every real estate office. But what can brokers do to improve communication, and what’s the payoff for brokers who do?
Perhaps the biggest initial payoff of communicating effectively is in setting expectations-a key component of a successful recruitment and retention program. Brokers who can consistently communicate their business objectives and clearly enumerate the tools that they offer to help agents meet their sales goals have taken the first giant step toward hiring and keeping top talent.

Mark Willis CEO, Keller Williams Realty, Inc.  - To make our agents partners, first, we have to open our books. Sharing the financials of our brokerages sets a standard of trust that puts us on the same side of the table with our agents-working toward increased productivity and profit. When we communicate about how to move the business forward, especially in today’s market, we are saying to our agents, “I