It All Starts With Lots of Buyer Leads — How Do I Get Them?

WHAT’S IN THIS INSTALLMENT?

1. BECOMING THE TOP BUYER AGENT IN YOUR MARKET
2. WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?
3. IT ALL STARTS WITH MAKING YOUR OWN LEADS! LOTS OF LEADS!
4. HOW A LEAD CAPTURE GATEWAY DIFFERS FROM A WEBSITE

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO BECOME THE TOP BUYER AGENT IN YOUR MARKET?

What a great question! If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, you’re already on your way. You’ve shown that you’re interested in mastering the buyer side of our business. And you’ve acknowledged that you are competitive. You’ve shown your desire to become the best at something, so you’re not interested in mediocrity.

What if I told you that the difference between a struggling agent and a mega-producing agent is tiny? What if I told you that most agents I’ve met have within them the potential to become top agents?

“Okay, Matt,” you’re probably thinking, “if it’s so easy, then why are most agents struggling today?”

I believe they struggle because of fear. Fear of believing that they can be great agents. Fear of trying something that they’ve never tried before. Fear of investing in their own business. Fear of what other agents or their broker might think of them. Fear of going for it. But that can stop today. As you begin to read this seven-part series, I want you to consider that, in all likelihood, you already have the ability to become a mega-producing buyer agent. You simply need some help pointing yourself in the right direction. Well, that and you need to face your own fears.

How do I know? Because I nearly failed in real estate — and I nearly quit the business because I was working extremely hard and making extremely little money. Thankfully, I didn’t quit. Instead, I went on to sell dozens of properties over the next few months. During my first calendar year I did $6.4 million in volume in a market where the average sale price was $101,000. Now five short years later, I’ve grown my personal team to over 100 agents, while helping to open four additional offices in our area. At the same time our technology division has grown to over 12,000 agent partners worldwide, I’ve authored three books and over a dozen articles that have been featured in industry trade publications, and our company has been profiled by CNN’s Pulse on America as well as Radio America Network’s Equity Strategies. And I promise you, I’m just a regular guy. If I can do it, I know that most of you who are reading this can do it
too. No kidding.

In this series I’m going to tell you exactly what I’ve learned to do — the step-by-step process. If you follow it and follow it step-by-step, I know it will work for you as well. Before I get into the actual steps, however, I want to share with you the true story of one of our newer agents. His name is Dave Hurt.

Dave came to us one day looking for a way to make a few extra dollars and take the pressure off the family budget. He was a full-time soldier working as an instructor at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He came and discussed the income possibilities of doing real estate part-time, and we strongly encouraged him to give it a try. Well, to make a long story short, Dave signed up for the pre-license training, got his real estate license, and began working as a part-time agent with our company. Unlike many agents, however, Dave actually DID what we taught him to do. And you know what happened? He followed our plan, step-by-step, and by the end of his first year we’d paid him over $300,000 in commissions. Obviously, he grossed well over that amount. Last month ,we paid him over $50,000 — I know because I signed the checks. I will be the first to admit that we’re very proud of Dave — proud because he is a perfect example of what a
regular guy can do given the right direction, and the will to succeed.

Let me ask you a couple of questions. Do you think Dave is a genius? A one in a million freak of nature? Dave will tell you, “Absolutely not!” He’ll be the first to say that he’s just an ordinary guy, much like I am. But he did two simple things. First and most importantly, he realized he could do it! Then he took the same exact procedure I used, and he implemented it step-by-step. I know it sounds too good to be true, but it’s not. And if you ask me, I say THAT IS genius. Why would Dave want to re-invent the wheel when he could plug into an already successful methodology?

When CNN came out to feature our company last year, they did it because they saw we were doing real estate a whole new way. And that new way is why we’re having tremendous growth in a time that many agents are struggling. So let me ask you another question: could this be you in a few short months? I think it could be. In fact, I know it could be. If you truly want it to be you, if you’re reading this and dreaming “What if it could be me?” let’s make that dream come true. Somebody has to sell those houses in your market. Why shouldn’t it be you? I say it should be you! So here’s what we’re going to do.

Over the next few days, you’ll receive the entire series by email, one session per day. Every day I’m going to challenge you to take action to become that mega-producing buyer agent. You too can sell two houses every week, maybe even more. You really can. My father used to say, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” The same is true with this email seminar! I can lead you to the information, but I can’t make you become a mega-producer. That’s completely up to you. I urge you to take responsibility for your own success. Let’s agree right now that you’re going to give this approach a try. What have you got to lose?

You CAN become the dominant buyer agent in your market if you do what I did, and I’ll show you how. We have agents using this “new way” in markets from Florida to Washington. From New York to California. Small markets and large markets. Buyers’ markets and sellers’ markets. Our system works virtually everywhere that the agent has the courage to apply it. In fact, if you have questions, we’ll be happy to help you answer them. At the end of the emails I’ll always include our contact information.

So print out the sessions, and take the time to read and study the material. This process could be the most profitable thing you’ve ever done. At the least, it will open your eyes to a buyer approach that you’ve never heard before. And it will help you to increase your earnings while our entire industry suffers from a downward trend in sales due to the sub-prime mortgage mess and the overheating of several regional markets. And there’s one last thing I would like to mention before we dive into the first session:

WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?

I assume that you’re intelligent and therefore naturally suspicious — so you may be wondering why, if I truly have such a great buyer seminar, I’m giving it away free on the Internet instead of teaching it across the country and selling our materials. I would certainly ask that question, and I would expect anyone of reasonable intelligence to ask it as well.

Well, the answer is simple. If you like my approach — if it makes sense to you, and you decide you want to implement it for yourself — then you’re going to need to build or purchase some simple technology. My approach is not all about technology, but the technology is critical if you want to have the same kind of success that I’ve had, and that many of our agents have had. And my company happens to sell that technology, so we would appreciate your at least considering our solution if you decide that it’s a good approach for you.

Make no mistake: I developed this technology for my own use, not to sell to agents. But as my real estate practice grew and began to receive national attention, I was continually asked if we could provide the same technology to other agents. After saying “No” for nearly a year, I reluctantly agreed to license it to a limited number of agents, but only if I felt that they would use it to build their businesses.

The fact is that we turn away many more agents than we sell to. So don’t expect a call from our sales department — we don’t have one. If you become interested in our technology, you’ll have to call us. And if you ultimately choose to build or buy this technology from another place, we won’t have any hard feelings.

Finally, aside from our technology, another way that I might benefit is through book sales. Maybe you really like my approach and would like to purchase my materials in book form to keep or pass on to another agent. So far I’ve written and released three books: LCM: The Secret to Success in the New Age of Real Estate; The Ultimate Listing Presentation; and Traffic: How to Sell Fast and Net More. We would certainly welcome your purchase on Amazon.com or from your favorite major book retailer.

But, okay, enough of what’s in it for me. Let’s get started making you money.

HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

Recently we surveyed more than 481,000 REALTORS® with an average of 12.1 years in the business. You know what their number-one need was? More buyers. You know why? The average agent in America works with only 22.3 leads a month. If you want to make more income, you need more customers. But why not just buy leads? After all, we all get those calls from lead generation companies promising us the best. The reason is because experienced agents don’t trust lead vendors for their business. Many of us have tried them and found their leads to be expensive and of poor quality, so most of us have resigned ourselves to getting our own leads.

And what’s the best way to get leads? The best way — actually the only way that real mega-producing agent get leads — is to put in place a system to continually produce your own leads. You need to build a virtual lead-generating machine so that you don’t spend most of your productive time out “beating the bushes” for the next transaction. To be a top producing agent you need to have a continual source of business. A source that sends you business every single day, day in and day out. And a source that doesn’t take half of your productive time to work.

IT ALL STARTS WITH MAKING YOUR OWN LEADS

Anyone who’s been in real estate for any length of time knows that this business is becoming a business of extremes. Either you have more business than you can handle, or you struggle to pay the bills. There is no middle ground. And it’s getting worse every year. Soon you’ll either have a large real estate team, or you’ll work for one. It’s called consolidation, and it’s happening everywhere. All the traditional ways of getting business are becoming less and less effective, and many veteran agents are getting frustrated to the point of wanting to leave the business.

But what if I told you that you could easily get 2 or 3 new inbound buyer leads every single day? What if you were able to generate 10-15 new leads every week, week in and week out? Leads who are not only interested in buying a home, but also, in many cases, have a home to sell as well? Would that make it easier to become a top producing agent? Would that make it easier to sell two homes every week? Well, I can only speak for myself: I solved my lead problem, and that’s exactly why I sold so many houses. It was really that simple.

Let me ask you another question: when you’re desperate for a sale, don’t you think the customer can tell? Of course he can. And if your buyer leads are few and far between, you can’t help communicating that sense of need. Desperation is alienating. Eventually the buyer will leave to find another agent, one who will work at his pace. Probably one who has more business than he can handle, and manages to communicate that sense of “I don’t need your business but would be happy to help you.” And I see good agents losing the few customers they have to agents who are not nearly as good, simply because the buyer sensed that frantic desperation.

But what if you received 10-15 buyer leads every week? Would you appear less frantic? Would you convey a totally different message? The message that the buyer needs you more than you need him? Of course you would. And when you combine that relaxed attitude with an incredibly innovative buyer approach (you’ll see what I mean in the future installments), you’ll find yourself swamped with new buyers. I know from experience. You’ll become irresistible! But if the buyer leads aren’t there, you just can’t convey the same “take-it-or-leave-it” subliminal message to your customers. So it is absolutely critical for you to solve the buyer-lead problem first. That’s the bottom line — it all begins with solving the lead problem.

NO, I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT BUYING LEADS

Many agents believe that lead vendors have ruined our industry. I disagree. Don’t get me wrong: they’ve made it tougher to survive, but they’ve really done us a favor. Without them, most agents would’ve never realized that our customers were moving to the Internet. And for those who are unwilling to learn how to capture business effectively from the Internet, the lead vendors do serve as a valuable, albeit expensive, safety net and source of business.

It’s not only possible; it’s probable that you can get the majority of your business from the Internet today. The average agent using our technology generates nearly 100 buyer leads every month! They don’t depend on lead vendors for their business. Instead, they make their own leads, as many as they need, and they do it at a much lower cost and with a much higher quality. They’ve taken their success into their own hands.

HOW DO YOU CAPTURE A TYPICAL REAL ESTATE CUSTOMER?

Today, as many as 92% of all home buyers begin their quests on the Internet. Many of them begin by going to a search engine like Google to search for homes or REALTORS®. Then they choose a link to a real estate website and visit the website of that REALTOR®, hoping to find help in their search. The overwhelming majority of these real estate customers are looking for home searches. If they don’t find a good, easy-to-use home search, they will generally move on to another website.

That seems pretty easy. Just get a website with an IDX home search. Heck, you probably have one already. But here’s where we come to the first problem. If that website is a “typical” real estate website, only a small number of visitors will fill out a guest registration form and identify themselves — generally only about 1%. What this means is that, out of every thousand visitors, you, the website owner, will actually capture only about ten leads. The capture is extremely inefficient because real estate websites are not designed for capturing, but rather giving out information.

So what’s the problem? Well, Internet traffic costs money. Either through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or through search engine optimization (SEO), the website owner is able to list his website on the search engines so that it is displayed whenever a customer does a real estate search. Pay-per-click advertising often costs several dollars per visitor, while search engine optimization costs several thousand dollars up front and needs to be continually managed in order to keep the site ranking high.

Now, when you calculate the high cost of traffic with the low capture rate (1%) of real estate websites, your cost per lead is extremely high, usually well over $100 per lead. This is why many agents, even those with websites, choose to purchase leads from vendors rather than make their own. Lead generation companies often charge $50 and up for leads, and many times they sell the same lead to multiple agents. Some vendors charge as much as 30% of the closed transaction, resulting in lead costs of thousands of dollars. To make matters even worse, not only are those leads expensive, but often the quality is poor as well.

This is the very problem that caused me to begin to look for a better way of capturing online customers. When we couldn’t find an effective solution, we had to develop our own technology, the LCM gateway, or Lead Capture Module. Instead of having the inefficiencies inherent in even the best real estate websites — websites designed around delivering information, the LCM gateway was designed to do only one thing: to capture Internet traffic. Rather than having a capture rate of 1% or less, as with typical websites, the LCM gateway captures as much as 30% of all visitors, thus bringing the cost per lead down to as little as $3. More importantly, the quality of lead is much higher than the quality of the leads supplied by lead vendors.

I can remember buying leads from companies such as HouseValues, HomeGain, and Service Magic. I remember getting the same lead that had been sold to three other agents, and I remember getting some “leads” that had only a name and an email address. I remember a high number of bogus leads. The situation was frustrating, but I was desperate. That’s why I decided to learn how to make my own leads. Now we generate all our own leads using our technology — as many as two thousand good leads every single month! Is it any wonder that we’ve grown so fast? And there’s no reason you can’t grow this fast as well. What it comes down to is having the customers.

Let me give you an example. In Eagle, Idaho, we have an agent partner named Kyle Wilson. As a relatively new agent, Kyle worked for Silverhawk Realty and had closed a very respectable 25 transactions by his second year. Since he began using our LCM gateway technology, though, he has grown a team of thirty agents and is looking at expanding to other markets. Kyle will do hundreds of real estate transactions this year, and now he’s one of the biggest producers in Idaho. He has become the dominant player in his market, and the only thing slowing his growth is his ability to recruit and train more agents. What a success story!

So let me ask you a couple of questions. Did Kyle suddenly get smarter? Did he start working twice as hard? No. The fact is that Kyle is a sharp and talented guy. We simply provided the tools and helped point him in the right direction. He created the success. And that success could just as easily be yours. Why not? Do you work hard? Are you smart? If you answered yes to those questions, not only could it be you, it should be you! Why not?!

HOW A LEAD CAPTURE GATEWAY DIFFERS FROM A WEBSITE.

Now let’s imagine. Just like the example above, a real estate customer goes to a search engine and clicks on a link to find properties. But unlike the previous example, this time the customer is diverted to the lead capture (or LCM) gateway technology. The gateway is designed to capture a maximum number of visitors, so instead of capturing only about one percent of the visitors to your site, you’re now capturing as many as 30%. The first time through the gateway, the user has to register to use your website. From then on, he or she can come and go freely without ever re-registering. The procedure is simple and effective.

Why does the lead capture gateway work so much better than the registration forms on most real estate websites? Why couldn’t you just put a registration form in the customer path and receive the same results? Well, you would probably receive much better results than you receive now. We’ve seen agents take their site conversion up to the 5% range just by doing that one thing. However, the LCM gateway is specifically designed to maximize lead capture, while web forms are not.

Lead capture is a science. Everything about our gateway is tested and modified in real time to maximize lead capture. As I type this seminar, we’re testing three distinct versions of our LCM gateway, all in real time. What we continue to learn is that every subtle nuance makes a difference — from font face, to font size, to font colors, to page background, to icons, to server side scripts, to PHP, Java, and CGI client side scripts, to form validation, to everything. What worked well last year is not working as well this year, as Internet shopping habits change with the maturity of the Internet.

For example, several months ago we experimented with changing one phrase on the LCM gateway landing page. We tried several different versions over a period of a month or so, with over 50,000 unique visitors, and we learned that one particular offer consistently pulled nearly 3% better than another. Some of the differences were visible, while others had to do with the processing of the online form. Since we began in 2004, we’ve changed the way the gateway goes about processing mail three times, every time improving conversion and the number of leads captured for our agent partners.

The typical website, even when all the registration forms are enabled, has site capture rate (CR) only in the range of 1-2%. Even the best and most expensive sites only capture about 6-8%, making any REAL lead capture on the website both impractical and expensive. Conversion rates (or capture rates) continue to decline as more and more people are bidding up the cost of Internet advertising. But with the addition of an LCM gateway in the customer path, website lead capture is not only practical; it’s probably the cheapest form of marketing available. In our market, we capture some leads for less than $1 per lead, and we produce our most expensive Internet leads for under $5 each! With lead costs that low, we can afford to make more than we could ever use, and having more leads than we can work gives us room to grow. It means recruiting and team building. It means increasing our market share.

But every agent is different. Some have no interest in building a large team; others do. We have one partner agent who creates thousands of leads every month, does the initial follow-up, and then hands off warm leads to other agents in his market for a referral. He no longer works with customers directly but manages his own private relocation company! How you choose to work your business is entirely up to you. But with lots of customers, you have lots of options.

So how well are you tapping the largest of all markets — the Internet? Do you have efficient lead capture on your website? If you don’t, the first step to becoming a dominant real estate agent is having too many customers. You really have to start there. Everything else is second to that. Today, the lead vendors are spending lots of money tapping the Internet; and if you’re going to compete with them, you’re going to have to have technology that puts you on the same level. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself depending on lead vendors for much of your business. Call us today at (800) 708-7705 extension 7100, and we can help you find the technology you need.

SO WHAT’S NEXT?

In the next installment, we’ll discuss building your business plan. How many transactions do you need to do? How many leads will you need to do those transactions? How can you know exactly what to do with your days in order to make sure that your plan is achieved? All these questions will be answered in the next installment, so you won’t want to miss it. I’ll also tell you my story — how I went from a single agent to leading a team of over 100 people in a few short years.

In the mean time, if you don’t have efficient lead capture in place, you need to start there. Call us and let’s talk about your lead capture. Our number is (800) 708-7705 extension 7100. There’s never going to be a better time to start than right now.

Finally, let me renew my commitment to you. If you invest your time in reading this seminar and then — more importantly — in applying what I show you, your business will never be the same again. This is my sincere promise. It’s my greatest honor to be able to play a small part in your success. Thanks again for reading.

For more information about FavoriteAgent.com, call us toll free at (800) 708-7705 extension 7100 or visit our website at http://FavoriteAgent.com.

Matt Jones
REALTOR®, BROKER
President/CEO
FavoriteAgent.com