The Biggest Regret of Most Top Producing Agents
Are you ready to hire an assistant for your business? In Steve Kantor’s book, Billion Dollar Agent: Lessons Learned, almost every agent who had sold over a billion dollars of property had the same regret. Can you guess what it was?
They all wished that they had hired their first assistant much earlier in their career.
As a rule of thumb, you generally need one assistant for every 50 deals you do. If you do 100 deals, your first two hires would be administrative assistants. When you’re doing over 100 deals and your administrative support is solid, that’s when you’re ready to hire a buyer’s agent, but not before then!
The advice above has been solid for many years but guess what? Almost all the administrative tasks that you need to do today can be accomplished using AI. At $20 per month for the premium version of ChatGPT, now is the time to take the big leap and start using AI.
It’s Time to Rewrite Your Marketing Materials
Here’s a great way to upgrade all your marketing materials that will definitely help you to generate more leads.
- The first step is to print out a copy of all your marketing materials, whether it’s postcards, a newsletter, your website, social media ads, etc.
- Next, take a red marker and circle each time you use the word, “I” in the ad copy.
- Now go back and use a different color marker to highlight how many times you use the “you.”
If you’re like most agents, you will have a lot more “I” language than “you” language.
The secret to generating more leads from your marketing efforts is to be focused on your customer, not on you and your accomplishments. The simplest way to do this is to shift from using the word “I” to using the word “you.”
Always remember to stay focused on the question that matters most to your clients: “What’s in it for me?”
Have a great week and remember to check out #3 below with some excerpts from this week’s Investor Scoop newsletter.
The Cost of Taking One Percentage Point Off of Your Commission
The most common reason agents reduce their commissions is they are unable to show how their services will help the seller net more, even if they list at a full commission, as compared to agents who cut their commissions to get the deal.
If you’re working in a market where listings are selling quickly with multiple offers, you may be tempted to cave on your commission because the market is so strong. Don’t do it and here’s why. The fall out rate, rather than being 10 percent, which is typical, can be as high as 40 percent or more when there is a multiple offer. The reason? When people pay over asking in a bidding war, they often get cold feet later.
If you need some additional motivation, here’s how much you’re leaving on the table by lowering your commission from six to five percent. Assume you take 15 listings per year at an average sales price of $300,000 and that you’re on an 80-20 split.
- At a five percent commission (2.5 percent on the listing side), your commission will be $90,000.
- At six percent (3 percent on the listing side) your commission would be $108,000.
- The difference between five and six percent costs you a whopping $18,000!
An Easy Way to Do Multiple Deals
In any market, 5-10 percent of the owners either live outside the area or are holding property as an investment. Here’s a great way to take advantage of this situation.
Check the tax rolls to identify owners whose tax billing address is different from the address of the property. Another great source can be the title companies since they can supply you with a list of out-of-area
owners. In many cases, someone who is holding a house for an investment has other properties as well. Since the typical investor does 1-2 investment transactions per year, these owners will transact 10-20 times more often than residential sellers who are currently moving once every ten years
Also be sure to check out our new 1-4-unit investor focused sister publication, The Investor Scoop. Check out some of our top posts from last week in #3 below.
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Should You Put Your Listing Addresses on Your Advertising?
Here’s a quick question for you—when you post your listings online, do you include the address? In the past, it’s been standard practice for many agents to leave the address off of their listings so that people will contact them to get the information.
Some recent research from Zillow shows what happens when a listing does not have an address when it is posted online in an ad, open house, video, etc. 
- Consumers skip over listings that don’t have the address.
- By leaving off the address, you don’t allow various geo-location mapping programs to help people find their way to your listing.
- This also means your listings do not display properly on many of the mapping-based types of software that consumers constantly use.
So, put your addresses on your listings. Failing to do so can cost you a substantial number of potential client leads, especially considering how important geo-mapping services have become to buyers searching for properties.
Also be sure to check out our new 1-4-unit investor focused sister publication, The Investor Scoop that has great tips on how to manage your money, have a great real estate business from top national speakers and experts, and how to get started investing in real estate with as little as $100.
To receive The Investor Scoop daily at no cost, click here.