This Week:
How to Corner The Market on Listings

Dear Friend,

This week I’m coming to you live from Chicago.  We just got here on the weekend.  We’re fixing to do the main event today on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then fly back to Toronto.  So I’m pretty excited about that. 

Now last week if you tuned in, we were talking about how to target a market – how to choose a specific target market, and this week I said that we would talk about how to corner the market on listings. 

That’s what I want to talk about this week.  When you first start thinking about targeting a market – let’s use the townhouse example that we used last week … what we’ve got to do first is realise what we’re working with.  You know, even when there’s a ten percent turnover rate, which is sometimes rare, that still means that 90% of the people who we’re trying to communicate with are completely uninterested in us.  They have no interest whatsoever.  They’re not thinking about selling their house; they’re not interested in selling their house; it’s not on their radar – they’re going about their life.

What our goal is, is to find that six or seven or ten percent of the people who are thinking about selling their house at just the right time.  Now you probably are aware of this but you know that people don’t just wake up one morning and decide “Honey, let’s sell the house”, call a realtor, put up a sign, right away.  It happens very sort of slowly.  People go through a process of making a decision that “You know what, I think we need a bigger house”, or “I sure would like to get into this particular new sub-division”, or “You know, we’re having the baby and we’re going to need more room”, or “We’re making more money now, we can afford a bigger house”.  There’s lots of reasons why people decide to move and the examples I’m giving might be applicable to townhouses but the real motivation that people have starts months ahead of when they actually take any action on this.  So, their step one is to realise what we’re working with and realise that we’re really only trying to attract the seven or the ten percent of the people who are actually going to sell their house in the next twelve months ‘cause that’s where our opportunity is.

Number two, we want to choose to focus on getting rich versus getting famous.  You know I’ve talked about this quite a bit and you know one of the biggest things that we have to do is fight the urge to make your marketing all about you.  You know, we want people to know that we are the new specialist in town; that we’re the townhouse specialists.  Deansellstownhomes.com. You know that our natural tendency is to want to get the word out and let everybody know who we are.  You know it’s funny because I often at the main event do an exercise where I give people a choice – I say “If I give you a choice of you know, let’s imagine the audience represents a 500 home townhouse sub-division and if I gave you a choice of coming up here on stage letting people know who you are and help you get the word out about you, everybody in the audience would know who you are, or I gave you the chance of sitting down, remaining in your seat and I would bring you a list and on that list would be the names, the addresses and the telephone numbers of the fifty people who own those town homes who are going to sell in the next twelve months.”  That would be much more valuable to you.  You know, most people end up choosing the envelope because they realise that it’s far more valuable for you to know who they are than it is for them to know who you are - especially at the beginning.  You know what we want to focus on is that they’re not looking to choose a realtor right now; they’re not looking to make a decision based on a postcard or based on anything that they see, because right now they’re just starting the process.  You know, if we have the opportunity to get them to raise their hand – what we really want to do is focus on what they want.

And that’s number three, is focus on what those seven percent really want to know.  What triggers everything for them? You know, what triggers them selling their house?  What’s the first question when they’re thinking about that process?  Even if they’re thinking about buying a bigger house that’s probably on their mind; they’re probably trying to decide where it is they’re going to move and that’s often a great place to start but as far as selling their house goes, the first question that they have is … what?  What’s my house worth?  That’s the most basic question that starts the process.  That is the thing that is on people’s minds.  They have a speculative idea of what their house might be worth.  They have a, you know, they have a hear-say idea of what their house might be worth from what other people are saying and what they see other properties listed for in the newspaper and what they hear other people got, but they’re really not specifically clear on what their house might be worth and that is a big motivation.  And that’s what we really want to focus on is offering people the opportunity to really find out what their house is worth.  That’s why in our “Getting Listings” program the thing that we focus on first is offering people – and I want you to get the psychology of this, because it’s very different.  It’s gone through an evolutionary process, this “Getting Listings” program.  For years I’ve been trying to crack the listing code and you know, we used to offer people the opportunity to find out how much their house is worth for free over the phone, which was a popular offer and it worked but it wasn’t quite as good as when we moved to find how much your River Oaks home is worth for free over the phone.  And even that wasn’t as good as what we finally have settled on here, which is the Free May 2008 Report on Georgetown Townhouse prices. 

Now the reason that I believe that that offer is so successful is because it’s not committing them to anything.  It’s not committing them – they’re not feeling this sense of obligation like they’re feeling if they were calling to find out and get a specific price on their house.  Now we’re going to offer them that and they’re going to take advantage of that offer, but the most responsive offer, the most initially responsible thing we’ve found is offering them the report on the local prices – recency.  And so when people call for that, you know, once they’ve raised their hand, we’ve got to realise that that’s just the first step.  You know, even after they’ve raised their hand, it’s still not about you.  You know, we want to kind of focus on making it easy for them to get what they really want.  Now according to NAR, home buyers – home sellers, sorry – typically want four big things.  They want help pricing their house; they want to know what fix ups they can do to their house to get the top price; they want help finding a buyer and they want help with their paperwork.  They want somebody to help them with all of the details – all the transactional details and that’s really what we’re doing is helping people find all four of those things.  Now when you’re … I want to encourage you to, if you haven’t already started, is to get started with the “Getting Listings” program.  You’ve seen all the results that people are getting on the message board; you’re seeing that, you know, really people are calling up and saying “Hey, when can you come and sell my home?”  I just put a post up on my [name] 08:42 .com, which showed all of the results that were happening from the message board and it’s always very encouraging, you know it’s always very encouraging to see that people are getting results.  Now if you’re not started with that program yet that’s what I really want to encourage you to do today.  Now I’m just going to give you a tour of what is available for you in the “Getting Listings” program because it truly is the very best thing that I’ve ever developed for getting listings. 

Now we start out … we talk about all five of the necessary components of a complete listing program.  So, number one is getting listing leads.  Now I’ve shared with you a little bit about our concept there of getting people to just raise their hand and tell you “Hey I’m much more likely to sell my house than somebody who didn’t ask for this report”, and you know, you’ll find that what you’re doing is generating this pool of people who you know are likely to sell their house in the next twelve months.  That’s a pretty big advantage.  That’s like having that list of all of the names of the people who are going to sell their house.  Now, not everybody who asks for the report will sell their house.  Some of them maybe curious about what their house is worth, maybe for refinance purposes; some of them may just be curious, but a good portion of them are going to be curious because they’re going to be selling their house. 

So once we’ve gotten people to raise their hand, tell you that they’re thinking about selling their house, step two is getting listing appointments.  Now in order to do that we’ve created twelve Top Dollar newsletters for you which is a complete one year follow up program which educates people all about things they can do to get a higher price for their house; to prepare their house for sale; give them ideas and tips on what kinds of things get the highest return on those investments.  We’ve got a customisable book for you that you send out to people who have raised their hand, called “How to Sell Your House for Top Dollar Fast” and that’s a booklet that you send out along with one of your Top Dollar newsletters and a cover letter that I’ve already written, and in addition to that we’ve written twelve cover letters that go with the “Get the Top Dollar” newsletters so you really just are putting all the pieces together and each month, after somebody raises their hand, we continue to follow up with them  until they call you and say “Hey when can you come over and list my house?” and that’s literally what they do say.  Now along the way we’ll be making special offers so that people will have an opportunity for you to help them prepare their house for the market; offering them our room by room review, for them to find out how much their house is worth with our Pin Point Price Analysis and the silent market where they may be able to match their house to one of the buyers that you already have.

Number three is getting listings.  So once we get the listing leads; once we get a listing appointment the next thing we need is to get listings and there’s a lot of tools available for you – some fantastic dialogue tools that Joe has developed for us with … to help us get five star listings.  Now that’s all we’re really looking for in this process.  If we can get five star listings and those are people who are motivated to move; willing to price at market value; willing to stage the house to show its best; removing all the marketing obstacles – you know, marketing obstacles meaning the dogs or the clutter or the restrictive showing hours or “we’ve got to be there for people to see the house”; any of those things are obstacles and people who are five star sellers are willing to remove those obstacles.

And then number five is that they’re willing to help.  They’re willing to get involved and help you find a buyer.  If we can find five star sellers like that, our job would be a lot easier.  The biggest hassles in our business is when we take listings that are not five star sellers; people who are not motivated or not willing to price the house; or not willing to stage it – who place all these marketing obstacles in our way and are not at all willing to help.  That’s a big frustration.  So that’s where we overcome all of those obstacles in Section three of “Getting Listings”.  Now Section four is about getting listings sold.  And listings are a liability until they’re sold.  So what we focus on is what needs to happen to get your listings sold.  We’ve got a book for you included in your “Getting Listings” materials called “37 Ways to Sell Your Listings in Less Time for More Money in any Market” and there’s strategy after strategy after strategy of ways to find your own buyer.  See, the reality is that your biggest opportunity when you get a listing is not to put a sign up, put your feet up and let somebody from the MLS sell it; the big opportunity you have and the mindset that is the winning mindset is to think that you are in a race to find your own buyer for that listing.  You know, number one is you’ll make more money if you sell your own listings and you’ve got a great opportunity to do that because you have complete access to the property; you’re the one who’s the most motivated to find a buyer for that property.  You know the good news is if you do find your own buyer you’ll be replacing your seller with your own buyer who is, years from now, going to be another seller.  So we’re setting this up for long term domination there.  And then finally Section five of the Getting Listings program is about creating a waiting list for buyers who are looking to buy homes in that area.  And, you know, next week we’re going to talk about how to corner the market on buyers for your specific target market and the reality is that you don’t need listings to start finding buyers.  You know, I often tell people to start in parallel; start the Getting Listings program and start the Finding Buyers program at the same time, so that you are … while you are finding people who are thinking about selling their house, you’re finding people who are thinking about buying a house in that area and it makes your job so much easier if you can just match people up.

So that’s it for this week.  I can’t encourage you enough to get involved in the “Getting Listings” program.  It truly is the easiest way to start dominating a specific target market and then tune in next week and we’ll talk about how to corner the market on buyers for your target audience.

Thanks for tuning in and I will see you next time.