2.
How to Maximize Your Follow-Up on
Listings Ahhh...the
coveted listing. Having a great number
of listings often means a solid
opportunity for you to make great money.
But how do you handle your owners when
weeks or months down the road you still
haven't moved their property? If you're
like many agents, you may tend to avoid
your owners instead of continually
staying in communication with them.
After all it can feel embarrassing when
you've convinced the owners that you
were the best agent they could hire to
market their property, and the property
is still sitting on the market.
The
root of the problem can often be that
you've never designed a systematic
approach for consistent follow-up with
your owners after you've obtained
listings from them. As agents it's easy
to hope that we'll move our properties
quickly after we list them, such that
ongoing communication with our owners
about why nothing has happened won't be
necessary. But in reality, we all
experience having listings that stay on
the market for much longer than we
originally anticipated.
Here's
the solution:
Design
a system for follow-up and communication
with your owners to utilize whenever you
sign new listings with them. And utilize
the same system with every owner whose
property you've listed, too. For
example, immediately after you obtain a
new listing, you might want to send out
a "thank you" letter to your
owners. One week after you've obtained
the listing, you may want to send out a
letter telling them you've put a sign on
the property and that you've also put it
in the multiple. Maybe two weeks after
this you can tell your owners about any
advertising you're doing to market their
property. And then two weeks later, you
can tell them who the property has been
presented to and who has taken a tour of
it. You might even include feedback that
people have given on why the property
wasn't the right one for them
personally. This could definitely help
you if you feel it's time to negotiate a
reduction in the asking price.
The
point is you want to be in regular
communication with your owners when
you've listed their properties, and not
have them feel like you're ignoring
them. If it becomes necessary to extend
your listing with them, you'll be more
likely to have them agree to this if
you've been in regular communication
with them. If they hardly ever hear from
you, it's easy for them to conclude that
you haven't been doing anything to
market their property for them. And if
they get to the point where they feel
this way, almost any one of your
competitors will now seem like a better
choice to list their property with with
than you.
So
structure a program of how you can
follow-up with your owners every 1-2
weeks or so throughout the duration of
your listing. Sometimes your follow-up
may consist of written letters to your
owners, sometimes it may be a phone
call, or sometimes it might even be an
E-mail. But the point is to stay in
communication with them. You may even
want to have a checklist you follow for
every week during the listing period of
each property. The checklist will then
be exactly the same for every property
you have listed. All that will matter is
how many weeks you are into the listing
period for each property, and what the
appropriate communication is to make to
your owners on each particular property
that week.
You
could even consider having part of your
follow-up campaign on each property
delivered by an E-mail drip campaign.
Just program the individual follow-up
messages into the campaign in advance,
and begin the drip campaign whenever you
obtain a new listing. The system will
personalize each E-mail message to your
individual owners according to how
you've already entered their personal
information.
Once
you design a system of weekly or
bi-weekly follow-up, you then know what
follow-up you need to do every week on
each one of your listings. Ideally
you'll have your assistant or virtual
assistant take care of all of this for
you, too. This way your follow-up gets
done on schedule, your owners feel that
you're in good communication with them,
and you're focusing more of your time
and energy on continually creating new
business.
In
closing, oftentimes the problems we face
as real estate agents can be resolved by
putting a system in place to handle the
situation effectively. Once you do this
with your follow-up on listings, you'll
feel better, you'll be in better
relationship with your owners, and
you'll be in a much better position to
extend your listings whenever this is
necessary.
Click
here if you'd like more information
on my one-on-one real estate coaching
program. One-on-one coaching is
available for both real estate agents
and company management.
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