Six Ways To Network With Fellow Brokers

Your bustling independent brokerage is a testament to how hard you’ve worked to be known as an expert in your local real estate market. Still, it’s hard to keep up with new real estate laws, tax changes and the ever forward march of technology and digital strategies while running your daily brokerage operations. You can’t expect to know everything. That’s where having a solid support network of other brokers and real estate experts can really help. In fact, a Real Trends study indicates that independent brokers without a network do less in sales than brokerages affiliated with their larger franchised competitors who have broker networks (8.7 percent versus 10 percent or more of total sales transaction volume).

Your Broker Network Helps You Grow

As a broker, connecting with others is an integral part of running a real estate operation. Having a tuned-in network of peers and industry partners to depend on is an invaluable asset when you need to keep up-to-date, seek expert answers, or require help problem solving. You may even find a mentor to help coach you toward better efficiency and a more rewarding, balanced life.

These associations can also increase sales when you show your own knowledge and trustworthiness. Buyers and sellers may be referred to your brokerage and exclusive listings shared for faster sales.

Broker Networking Strategies

Independent brokers all face similar challenges that can be resolved together on national, regional or local levels. Different networking strategies get different results. Try a mix of these four ways to associate with other independent brokers and real estate partners and build your broker network:

• Use your Active Rain profile (or start one) to ask and respond to questions posted by managing brokers. Read and comment on blogs of other brokers to build rapport or blog to share information you’ve learned.
• Join groups on LinkedIn, Facebook or other social networking sites or start your own group just for independent brokers. Be active in responding to others, so you’ll get responses to your questions.
• Attend functions of local real estate, mortgage or other industry-specific groups to associate with influencers and exchange contact information.
• Attend national trade shows and conferences to meet independent brokers, start discussions and develop relationships.
• Join a relocation council or group to receive the benefit of relocation leads and referrals.

Overall, broker networking is a challenge for the independent. This is where being part of an established national brand can give you a leg up. The right affiliation allows you to simply plug in and offers a sixth way to build a support network. Weichert affiliate Brokers for instance, enjoy a built-in broker network  that connects them to hundreds of affiliates across the country.  They enjoy regional and national opportunities to meet both virtually and face to face through events like our “Saw Session” workshops, regional Broker Council Meetings, Management Academies and national conferences, not to mention active Facebook discussion groups and advisory meetings. Plus, Weichert Workforce Mobility, our top-rated relocation company, offers affiliates the opportunity to qualify for relocation leads. Because we foster a community of support and sharing, members are very comfortable just even picking up the phone or emailing one-on-one to get advice, share ideas, bounce things around and share referrals. The family-like support that brokers receive as part of the Weichert system is one of the biggest reasons affiliates join us and stay with us.

Get Expert Advice

When you just don’t have the time to be an expert in every part of running your brokerage, having a network of peers and industry experts can be invaluable. But don’t just take our word for it, see what Weichert Affiliate Julie Fugate has to say about having comprehensive support..

Don’t feel like you have to go it alone. You can still run your own business while benefiting from an affiliation with a larger system. Learn more at weichertfranchise.com or call 877-957-9692.

Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/six-ways-network-fellow-brokers/

Build Your Business, Let Your Agents Sell Listings

Running a real estate brokerage is a rewarding business. You can do things your way from choosing a name and a location, training and mentoring a team, and driving your marketing.  You know you’ll never forget the excitement you felt when your sign was hung outside your brokerage for the first time. You made the transition from motivated sales associate to independent business owner and with that, comes a necessary shift in your thinking, and your actions.

The Salesperson Within

Most of the independent brokers we talk to were excellent sales associates. It’s why they made the move to being a broker. But a few years in, too many of them are still actively selling their own listings on a day to day basis. If this describes you, you have to know that you’re limiting your brokerage growth by continuing to actively sell. Before you hung your sign, the inner manager in you should have begun to change your focus from selling, to the process of managing. This means recruiting both experienced and promising new agents, and figuring out how to make them successful. Sure, it’s hard to break away from selling homes. After all, your sales prowess paid your bills all these years, but now it’s time to use your expertise to help other agents succeed and increase your bottom line. Salaried or contracted specialized administrative employees can help ease your work load and move you away from directly working with buyers and sellers to focusing on increasing agent transactions.

The Case for Letting Go

Many brokers mistakenly believe that they can’t stop selling or they won’t have the revenue to continue their operations or sustain their own income level. Inevitably this feeling is really due to another issue: you don’t believe your staff is able to do it as successfully as you. While this may even be true, if you want your brokerage to continue to succeed and grow, you need to invest in addressing that issue, not out meeting sellers to get listings. Train your agents to sell like you do, recruit new agents, and resist the temptation to slide back to old ways. Do that and everyone will reap the benefits and financial reward.

In fact, non-selling brokers typically earn more than those that continue to sell after opening their own brokerage. National Association of Realtors member profile for 2015 showed that managing brokers who solely took charge of their brokerage earned a median annual salary of $102,200 as opposed to $86,400 for brokers who also were in the field listing homes and/or working with buyers.

Handle Business Details

Think back to when you were working for another brokerage as a salesperson. How do you think everything ran so smoothly? Through the broker’s hard work on the various day-to-day activities of running the brokerage as a business. Or maybe it didn’t run smoothly, because the broker was too focused on their own selling or not invested in developing their agents.

Similarly, your mindset should only be on overseeing business details, such as continuing to foster your business and your brand to help agents get a leg up on the competition and your brokerage keep its integrity and sorecuieputation, among a slew of other operational tasks. If you are overwhelmed with the sheer number of tasks involved in managing your own brokerage and need a roadmap, you can consider an affiliation with a national real estate brand like Weichert. Our affiliates have the advantage of a blueprint for running a successful real estate brokerage, complemented with many broker tools to help handle business operations, marketing, recruiting and training that points you to the activities you should be working on for success.

Build A Better Life

When your entire brokerage is run seamlessly as a business, you are making a better life, not just for you and your family, but for all your agents. A successful brokerage means you can confidently take the family on vacation, knowing that the systems and people you’ve put in place will handle affairs while you are away.

Weichert has helped hundreds of brokers build the business of their dreams, contact us today at 877-567-3350 or online at http://weichertfranchise.com.

Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/real-estate-agent-recruiting/build-business-let-agents-sell-listings/

Is Your Website Converting Visitors To Leads?

Leads are the backbone of your brokerage. Good leads keep existing agents productive and are a draw for new agents. With 92 percent of buyers using the internet in their home search, according to NAR, brokers using smart website visitor conversion methods have a competitive edge in the cultivation and generation of leads for their teams.

Website Traffic to Leads

Let’s say you’ve been diligent about your advertising and your team is actively working multiple social media channels to promote their listings and your brokerage. You are monitoring your website analytics and you can see a healthy rise in website traffic from your efforts. While you may be getting website visitors, how many visitors complete your contact form or, better yet, directly contact you by picking up the phone or sending an email?

Converting visitors to real contacts through your brokerage website is one of the most cost-effective methods of generating leads. In digital marketing, we look at the ratio of unique website visitors to contacts, over a period of time, and we call that your “conversion rate”.  Too many brokers leave money on the table by focusing exclusively on advertising, and not the more subtle art of optimizing your website’s conversion rate.

Steps To A Better Conversion Rate

Increasing and optimizing your conversion rate isn’t rocket science. In fact, in most cases it’s just applied common sense. But done correctly you will build a better conversion rate and help ensure a steady flow of clients by using a few tried and true website marketing principles:

• Calls To Action – Studies show that simply asking someone to contact you on a webpage, can increase your overall conversion rate 1-2%. Make sure you ask people to contact you on every page in context appropriate ways that are highly visible.
• Micro-Conversions – If they are not ready to speak to a realtor, offer them another way to stay in touch. “Sign up for alerts about this property”, or “Download our ebook on local schools”, or “Home Wish List”, “Report on recently sold nearby properties” etc. These “micro-conversions” may not lead directly to a sale today, but any interaction that allows you to capture their name and email, builds your ability to market in the future.
• Create a pop-up capture form on your landing page after leads have been viewing your website for 1-2 minutes.
• Change the calls to action on your website forms every three months to determine which wording performs better.
• Analytics – Keep track of your website traffic and form completions and regularly analyze the conversion rate of visitors to leads to see where and how they convert. Make sure all the leads are being followed up on.
• Ensure your contact information on all pages is easy to find and click on for quick communication. Modern websites lock the phone number of the brokerage in the header, so it is always visible to those who want immediate and direct agent contact.
• Humanize the non-MLS pages of your website where possible through pictures, stories, blogs, and talk about community events, being careful to stay away from text heavy pages where possible.

Finally, always remember that when you get that contact, you need to be ultra-responsive. Think minutes and hours, not days. The digital world is one of instant gratification, if not by you, then it will be by your competitors.

Lead the Way on Conversions

To win in real estate, you’ve got to do it all. In the digital case that means both getting the website traffic, and getting the contact from either a form, a phone call or an email. The more website visits turn into actual leads, the more the cost of creating and maintaining your site and buying advertising, pays for itself with increased sales for your agents. Don’t neglect the last piece of the puzzle, convert!
If you don’t have the type of resources outlined above to put into your website, you can still effectively take advantage of online consumer traffic by aligning yourself with someone who does. At Weichert, we make a significant investment in our website, Weichert.com and have the resources to continually optimize its results.  Our digital advertising and marketing strategy drives over 3 million visitors to weichert.com every month*, making it one of the top independent brokerage sites in the country and continually driving leads to our call center to connect with agents.  It’s one of our key benefits to our affiliates. To learn more about how this could fit into your business plan, go to weichertfranchise.com or call our team today at 877-567-3350.

*Google Analytics, January 2017

Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/real-estate-broker-marketing/website-converting-visitors-leads/

Top Ways to Increase Warm Leads

Three decades ago, potential clients were reached by print advertising, mailings and landline phone calls, or by going door to door. Leads took a lot of time and investment and there was no real way of targeting the people most interested in what you had to offer. While those older methods are still used, technology is leading the way as digital lead generation methods take over in ways that were previously unthought of. In today’s digital world, you can connect with potential clients while they are at home or work, in the gym or anywhere; they are frequently online using both desktop and mobile advertising strategies. While some of these strategies won’t cost you much money, they will all cost you some time, but the payoff can be significant because you are spending money on the people who have the most interest in what you have to offer. Here’s a few strategies for driving warm leads in the digital age.

Free Digital Advertisements

Using these “free” strategies, real estate professionals can cast a wider net for their properties, and your brand.

1. Craigslist – Craigslist can have a fantastic reach for housing promotion especially at the lower end of the market. Make sure your ad stands out and that you repost regularly at a frequency that reflects the population density of your market. In a busy metro market your ads will disappear in about 5 days, but if you post too frequently you’ll get flagged as a spammer. Also don’t forget that Craigslist has a “services” section where you can create a compelling ad for your brokerage as well.
2. LinkedIn – If you’re going to focus on using free networking sites to connect with buyers, LinkedIn should probably be in your top three or four. Almost all the top agents work FaceBook, Instagram and Twitter, but many omit LinkedIn as a source of warm lead generation. Here is a great article from LinkedIn Pulse that talks about how to use LinkedIn for real estate lead generation.
3. Facebook/Instagram – While real estate professionals are almost all heavily posting in Facebook, many neglect simple low-cost paid advertising extensions to Facebook that will greatly increase the reach of your listing. Every broker and agent should have some monthly budget set aside for targeted Facebook advertising and the boosting of posts about your listings. A couple hundred dollars a month is enough to get started, but large brokerages in urban areas will often spend thousands promoting their brand and their listings to remain competitive.

Paid Real Estate Advertising -Pay Per Click and Remarketing

While these are both paid strategies, they are really central to real estate marketing operations in the modern brokerage. Google AdWords, while widely used, has become quite expensive and so the addition of remarketing can have the effect of delivering you a lower cost per lead, and more leads that are really “warm”.  These strategies will drive interested parties to your website where they can use the MLS search to further locate homes.  Once they are doing this you have a good chance that it will be your team that gets the call when they see something they like.

If they don’t contact you on their first visit to your website, remarketing will ensure that they are reminded of their interest in your listing as they travel around the Internet.  Only people who have visited your website at least once will see these ads and since they’ve already shown an interest, the chances are much higher that they will contact you the second time around.  In Google, the cost of remarketing clicks is usually much less than AdWords clicks and so this has the effect of driving down your overall cost per warm lead.

Winning the Warm Lead Game

More than most people, real estate agents understand that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to meet a prince. Having an active lead funnel is key to that and your leads have to come from as many sources as you have time and resources to cultivate. It’s one of the reasons why a brand like Weichert invests so much money in lead generation and a call center that scrubs those leads even further to only pass the most qualified ones on to the agent. Not only does this take some of the financial burden of advertising off the broker’s shoulders, but the complexities of modern digital advertising are handled by experts to your benefit and the leads your agents receive are only the most likely to lead to a transaction. You can read more about our lead network operations at https://www.weichertfranchise.com/real-estate-lead-generation/ or by calling the Weichert Franchise Team today at 877-567-3350.

Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/top-ways-increase-warm-leads/