You can survive in this real estate market

I was recently sent this list via email of things to do to survive in this current real estate market. I tried to find it posted somewhere on the net with no luck. I don't know who wrote this list, if it was you, please let me know and I will be happy to give you credit. Not everyone in the new home industry can abide by everything on this list, but its a good list to consider.

10 Things You Have to do to Survive in Real Estate Right Now

1) You have to get and stay positive
You have to see the opportunities! You have to stay motivated now. You have to think good, clean, powerful thoughts. You have to stay away from negative people. You are going to see some pretty tough things happening in the real estate industry. An all out, and unified negative media blitz is underway on housing. YOU have to stay positive. It will continue for many months to come. You will see real estate companies biting the dust, merging, failing. YOU have to stay positive.

Tensions are running high. People are scared. Angry. Confused. Uncertain. Apprehensive. Your co-workers are, your Broker or Sales Manager would have to be clueless not to be chewing their nails a little right now too. YOU have to stay positive.

You will see massive job losses throughout the entire housing sector, from loggers to construction workers, to retailers, to finance, people are losing their jobs. YOU have to stay positive. How you get your motivation matters little to me, but now is the time to get back to it. And I cannot tell you how serious I am about this attitude thing. It is the foundation. Everything emits from it. YOU have to be positive every day, and that will take some concentration.

2) You have to get and stay focused
You can't just wander through the day, now you have to plan and execute. You have to break your physical work cycle and find a different, more effective process. You have to work on those things that further your goals and eliminate time wasting and meaningless activities and motions. You have to learn to say, "no!" You have to learn to keep your mind of "finishing" the transactions you're on and working on those transactions that have a high probability of closing in your pipeline.

3) You have to get and stay competitive
One of the things I have always kind of felt bad about in my career is that we are hired, literally, to help a company and its agents take business away from other companies and other agents. Companies don't hire us to continue to get what they have been getting, they hire us to get what they haven't been getting. And the only way-let me say that again in a more emphatic way-the ONLY WAY we can help them take business away from their competitors is to get them in a far more competitive mode. And if you're going to be successful in this business now, and in the near future, you need to really think this through. HOW are you going to be more competitive? WHAT are you going to do that is different? All of them, all of the who, what, why, when, where and how have to be covered now. YOU have to be better in salable, identifiable, and meaningful ways.

4) You have to get and stay creative
You can't do more of what's not working. You have to think! You have to think about what the consumer wants. Not what you want. You will get what you want when you help enough other people get what they want. (Zig Ziglar). But none of that will happen in the old school way. You need new ways to do old jobs. It's just that simple my friend. You have to come up with a truly better way of doing business because your way isn't working.

5) You have to get and stay smart
You have to work with the "haves" now. You have no choice about this. You have to work with buyers who have down payments, and 700+ credit scores, and jobs. And if they don't, you have to walk. This is not the time to be a bleeding-heart, help everybody out, agent. You're in a tough market, you're going to have to toughen-up if you're going to be successful in it. That means rules, with few or no exceptions.

6) You have to get and stay picky
You have to take listings that will sell and walk away from those that won't. You have to find sellers who really want to sell, enough to cooperate with you in every way, and they have to live in a home that is salable, and that home has to be in the price ranges that are selling-or walk away. You're going to have to take better listings, not just more listings.

7) You have to get and stay involved
Now, buyers are nervous about the financial side of buying a house. Stop sending them to the lender first. Sit down with people, talk to them straight about finances, credit, down payments, monthly payments, assets, liabilities, income, debt, all of it. Then, based on your determination, send them to a lender who can help them. But stop saying to people, "have you seen a lender yet?" two minutes after you meet them. Work with people, solve their problems. You'll get paid.
8) You have to get and stay realistic
The market is going to be tough for a while, work harder and smarter. You are now as much in the finance business as you are the real estate business. If you need to learn more about finance, do so, now. In everything you do you have to ask yourself, "does this make sense?" The new, post credit crunch economy will require mostly that things make sense.

9) You have to get and stay visionary
This will fix itself eventually. And housing will become a stronger economic force with a more solid foundation, which will add up to even better things. There will be far fewer active agents you'll actually have to compete with, big companies will grow in terms of the number of licensees that call them home, but their structure is suicidal in this market. Smaller is the new bigger and Broker/Owners will have a very hard time making this paradigm shift, they are so stuck on "body count" - their vision has to change, or they will go under, that's all there is to it.

10) Most importantly, you have to get started
Enough of the dull-witted, ambiguous speculation as to why all this happened. Figuring out why your buyer can't get a loan won't earn you a commission. Now it's about working on what will work, and getting started. What has happened, has happened, now what are YOU going to do about it. You have to get started at least thinking about these things. Sorting them out, prioritizing them and getting rolling in the new real estate economy.

Can't be found on Google!

Have you ever been frustrated with not being found on Google?

There are a lot of reasons why you may not be found.

One thing to consider, is your site completely designed with images or programmed all in flash? If it is, you will probably have a hard time getting Google to index your website.





Look at the image above, imagine it being a website.
You can read the text, but because of the way it was created google can't read it and does not know what to index in its database. As far as Google is concerned, it it simply an image and it will probably be ignored. If Google can't read the image, the text on the image will not help you get indexed. Text like this above should be entered as text and not shown as an image.

Other factors contribute to being indexed, this is just one thing to consider when having your website designed and built.

Training classes for New Home Marketing

Are you a MIRM? The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and the National Sales and Marketing Council (NSMC) offer several classes to assist new home sales and marketing professionals. With successful completion, you can get designations like MIRM.

The Member, Institute of Residential Marketing (MIRM) designation is the fourth and most prestigious designation given by the Institute of Residential Marketing. The MIRM is the top-level achievement for professionals in new home marketing.

Get access to the IRM directory here www.nahb.org/mirm

There are 4 classes required to get the MIRM, all are offered at the upcoming International Builders Show in Orlando in February 2007. www.buildersshow.com

Hits and Visits - What do you want?

Do you understand your tracking reports?

Do you want hits? Do you want visitors? Once you get the visitors, do they stay on your site or just generate one page view and leave? Does your tracking reports accurately show you that information?

When you visited this page, you generated 1 site visit to this page, you show up as 1 Unique Visitor (UU) in the Traffic Log File. You generated 1 page view in the traffic log file. If you see the 7 images below, you generated 7 hits on the server just for those images, add all the images in the header, the page itself, and you will probably get over 20 hits just for this one page view.

If you come back to this page at a later date, you will probably show up as a repeat visitor, unless you are using a dyamic IP address like those used by the dial-up service America Online, then I will probably incorrectly assume you to be a Unique Visitor. With special software I can drop a cookie on your site and then I would be able to tell if you had been here before.

Depending on how you have your browser set-up, you may or may not generate the additional 20 plus hits on a repeat visit, if all of these images are in your temporary Internet Folder when you come back, the 7 images below may not need to be reloaded from the server, thus I would not see the additional hits logged to the traffic log.

Now the next time, your webmaster says you are really getting the hits, ask him how many visitors you are getting.

Should you bid on PPC ads?

PPC stands for Pay Per Click - You pay every time someone clicks over to your website from your ad.

A lot of home builders and new home community developments are showing up on google adwords and yahoo sponsored search. I am often asked is it worth it? "Is it worth it to pay $1 for a site visitor to my website selling new homes in a specific community?"

With all marketing expense decisions, you need to know the numbers. What is your cost per website visit? How many visits does it take to get a lead? How many leads does it take to get a traffic unit to the model? How many traffic units does it take to get a sale?

Let's say you paid $1000 to get 1000 visitors to your website and 10 of those people filled out a lead form and let's assume your on site agent was able to get 2 of those people to the model and 1 of them bought a new home from you. If the sale price of the home was $150000. Then you spent $1000 to get a sale...that's less than 1% of the sales price. I know a lot of builders that would gladly pay only 1% to sell out their subdivision. Many of them are spending a lot more than 1% on advertising costs.

The problem is the limited availability of searches and the bid strategy. Sometimes it is very hard to get 1000 quality visitors to your website for $1000 looking for the your product or new home. It may cost you $2000, you may have a location or product that is not in demand. Picking the right keyword phrase is a big challenge.

If you are building condos in atlanta, simply bidding on the word 'condos' may not be cost effective. 'condos in atlanta' may be be too expensive. Bid on the keyword phrase 'new homes flowery branch' and you could probably get traffic for only $0.50 a click, but with so few people searching that phrase, it would probably take you an entire year to get 1000 people to click on your ad.

How about 'Intown atlanta condos'? You will probably get good quality traffic to your website, but if the search is only being performed 200 times a month, you can't rely on the search engine to help you sell many homes. With the scenario above, it would take you 5 months to get 1 sale.

My recommendation is to get someone to help you with this type of marketing. It is not a waste of time or money and could get you some incremental sales at a very effective cost.

In the Beginning...Consider Internet Marketing

Are you involved in the marketing of new home communities? Unless you are bound to a certain name of the subdivision or project, my recommendation is to think about Internet Marketing of your project before you lock into a name.

Generic names or often used names are going to be hard to get your site to come up in the search engines. Often used names are probably already registered so getting a good domain name will prove difficult.

Do a google search for the community name and see what comes up. Most website design firms try to stay away from Guaranteed Results on Search Engine rankings. Some general good practices and proper planning should make it pretty easy to get your website to come up on the page for the community name.

Example Searches on Google; Talley Street Lofts - Carpenter Village

Everyone should be on your Marketing Team!

I speak to a lot of people in the new home industry; sales managers, sales agents, production builders, custom builders, community developers, ad agencies, advertising companies and of course the marketing directors. Most of them will say its the marketing director's job to get traffic to the model so that everyone else can do their job. Its good to have someone in that role, but really is it not everyone's job to help generate traffic? Without interest in the product, no one has a job.

If you are selling new homes, I trust that you have a web presence. Your company probably has a website to provide information about the homes for sale. Is the website address easy to remember? Does everyone in your company know the domain? A few years ago, I recall that I couldn't find a builder on the web by search so I called a builder's main office and asked if they had a website. The person that answered the phone said "I think so, but I don't remember the website address" . Do you see how this could be a problem?

Everything you do should have the website address on it, everyone in your company should know the domain name of where your website is located on the World Wide Web. It should be on your voice mails, your print ads, your email signatures. You don't get a chance to have face time with every single prospect that may be in the market for a new home. Make sure everyone in your company is doing all they can to get people to your website.

Is your Website Search Engine Friendly?

You may not even know that your website was supposed to be friends with the search engines. If you want prospects to easily find you when they go to search engines, like Yahoo, Google, and MSN, then your site needs to be optimized. These search engines rank your website and the pages within your site based on a changing set of criteria. Knowing exactly what they are looking for is quite often very difficult, and often an ongoing activity.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of adding code and tags to a website with the goal of achieving a high rank on a search engine search results page when a prospect uses specific terms or phrases to find what they are looking for. Being search engine friendly is simply having a site that the search engines can find and index based on their own criteria.

There are typically 2 types of results on the main search engines; paid results and organic results. Getting listed at the top of the paid results is easy….pay more money than anyone else for that keyword phrase. Getting listed at the top of the organic results is not impossible as some Website and Internet Marketing companies claim. It could sometimes be cost prohibitive to spend the time and money it takes to achieve a top ranking.

There are some steps that you should take to make sure that your site is search engine friendly. One of the most important things you can do is to make sure each page within your website has a title that reflects the content of the page AND matches the search engine phrase you want to found when a prospect does a search. This is only one small and easy technique to get a higher ranking, but to get consistent results, you need to have an expert help you improve or maintain your rankings.