Recently I’ve received several emails about some of the ads for our LCM gateway.  Here is an example from just one ad we’ve been running:

IMPORTANT: LAST CHANCE TO GET LCM!

In the coming weeks, I will be closing the availability of LCM Success to the agent public.  Only coaching students will have access to my lead capture technology.  I will be announcing more about these changes shortly, but I wanted to let my readers know before the opportunity closes.

Apparently, the ads caused quite a bit of confusion, and that was certainly not our intention.  So I thought it would be a good idea to clarify what we are doing, and hopefully, this open letter will help everyone understand exactly what’s changing with regard to our LCM gateway technology.

In case you are new to our family, let me start at the beginning.  I began as a new agent in June of 2002 and spent my first three months doing all the things the “experts” told me to do.  I took the 100 series of the GRI training.  I began “farming” an area of 1500 homes.  I sat as much duty as I could talk my way into.  I worked a sphere of influence of 180+ friends and family asking for referrals.  I sat builder model homes.

Guess what?  None of it worked.  I was ready to give up.  Almost did.  Thankfully, I decided to try one last thing:  It occurred to me that every industry had been changed by the Internet, and I had a hunch that real estate was no exception.  So I set out to capture business from the web, and when I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I built my own technology.  I didn’t want to be a geek.  It just happened that way.

And you know what?  My business exploded!  Soon I was hiring agents to help me handle the overflow of business.  As word got around, I was approached by many agents from across the country asking me to help them build the same technology.  I spent hours and hours on the phone with agents trying to help them build their version of my early LCM, but predictably, they had very limited results.  News flash: Agents don’t want to be geeks!

Finally one day it dawned on me that maybe I could just build the technology for them and simply license it to them like software.  I asked a number of those agents and they said. “PLEASE!  I don’t want to be a geek.  I just want customers.”  So in June of 2004, our technology business was born.

We never intended to make a killing in technology.  The plan was to help agents and at least break even, since I already had a successful real estate practice.  In fact, we turned down offers from two venture capital firms who wanted to take us public.  (Lately, I’ve been wondering how smart that was!)  I digress.  The point is that I didn’t want to be a typical real estate technology company.

That’s why we chose to license our LCM gateway technology at embarrassingly low prices, right from the start.  That’s why we gave away a client manager to thousands of agents.  Even after we added lots of features to our LCM, we eventually raised the price only modestly, but we continued to look for ways to keep the cost down as low as possible.  Remember, I’m still an agent and broker, running a local real estate company.

In fact, it was because agents today are struggling just to survive, and we really wanted to do our best to help out, that we slashed our prices and began licensing our technology for half what it was in 2004 even though it does much, much more than it did back then.  When we made that bold move, we began licensing our LCM faster than every before helping countless agents weather this economy.  Anyway, I’ve shared all that to say this:

Because our objective has always been to at least break even on our technology licensing we had to make some tough choices.  Many would-be technology users licensed the LCM and spent lots of time with our coaching staff, only to never use the tool and then quit a few months later, leaving us with a financial loss on those licenses.  Frankly, it was very frustrating, knowing they were so close and yet so far away.  I eventually made the tough decision that something had to change.

I decided that instead of continuing to license our technology at or near cost, only to have agents waste our time and not use it, we’d fundamentally change the way we made our tools available to agents.  I decided we’d make the tools only available to agents who we’d personally worked with and who we felt would follow through and actually use the tools.  But, instead of charging for the technology, we’d charge for our coaching and make all of our systems available to them for free.

Agents who wanted to benefit from our lead generation systems, could pay us for the ongoing training and accountability, and have unlimited direct access to our coaching staff and to me.  By requiring them to become one of our coaching students, we could make sure that they would learn our systems and get enough training to be successful with our technology.

We also decided that unless an agent was willing to make that sort of commitment, we could not afford to license our LCM technology to them.  That one simple change should save us countless hours in wasted training and ultimately keep us from losing money on our technology.  Think of it like this:  It’s much like pre-qualifying a buyer before showing him a lot of houses.  I’m sure you know how frustrating it can be if you’ve ever made that mistake.

So, to clarify our new policy, we will begin taking new coaching students very soon.  We anticipate a monthly fee for unlimited coaching to be somewhere under $100 per month, and that will include all of our technologies free of charge, and direct access to our coaching staff and to me.  We are still working on the website that will explain our new and improved lead generation coaching system.

Finally, the good news is that anyone who licenses our technology before that time, will be grandfathered into our new offering receiving our new offering at our old prices.  So, if you’ve ever been on the fence, considering jumping in, do it quickly and you won’t be subject to any new pricing.  Thank you for your continued reading and your understanding.

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Matt Jones is the founder and CEO of FavoriteAgent.com, nationally syndicated columnist, broker, and best selling author of LCM: The Secret to Success in the New Age of Real Estate, The Ultimate Listing Presentation, Traffic: How to Sell Fast and Net More, Becoming a Mega-Producer, The Science of Online Marketing, 10 Steps to Real Estate Success, 20 Questions: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Real Estate but Were Afraid to Ask, The Virtual Office Model, Max-Bang!, and The NEW Ultimate Listing Presentation. Jones' North Carolina-based company has been profiled by major media outlets as an innovator and a pioneer in the industry, and CNN's Pulse on America claimed FavoriteAgent.com is "changing the way real estate is being done in America." This article is syndicated in the following locations: iTunes, YouTube, Stitcher Radio, BlogMattBlog.com, RealBlogging.com, NewsGeni.us, TheCommissionCheck.com, RevampedAgent.com, and now Amazon Kindle.