Should I list homes or work with buyers? I say you should do whichever one suits you best. I know, for years the “experts” have said, “You’ve got to list to last.” But I say that just isn’t true! Do whichever you’re best at. Continue Reading…
It’s a bad idea. Here’s why. It comes down to “cost per lead”. I’ll show you. Let’s take a typical market where the average sale price is $206,500 and the average commission side is 2.6%. That means that the average Gross Commission Income (GCI) is $5,369. According to real estate “experts” an agent should budget 20% of GCI for marketing. I’ve even heard numbers as high as 25%! (Incidentally, the rest of the entire business world budgets less than 10% of revenue for marketing, but what do they know?) Continue Reading…
Show me an agent with a six-figure income and I’ll show you an agent with a business plan. I know what you’re thinking… “But I don’t have the time to write a comprehensive business plan.”
Well, now you do! Introducing our brand new Business Planning Calculator. Build your very own comprehensive business plan in less than 5 minutes. No kidding. I’ll show you. But first, let’s talk just a minute about planning. Continue Reading…
Let’s face it — we all know that much of what we spend our marketing dollars on is a complete waste of money. And what’s worse is our advertising amounts to the single biggest expense we have as agents — as much as 20% of GCI or gross commission income! That means if you gross $100,000 a year in commissions, you are likely spending up to $20,000 a year in advertising. Continue Reading…
Make your own leads and stop depending on lead vendors, your broker, or your friends! A recent survey of nearly half a million veteran agents revealed that the number one concern facing agents today is having enough customers. This is further compounded by the recent decline in the national housing market. Meanwhile some agents are having their best days ever, making more in a month than most agents make in a year. So what is so different about these agents? Simple — they’ve quit depending on everyone else.
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
Pipeline-i® Virtual Office is an innovative technology designed by agents, for agents that empowers you to generate more customers than you can possibly handle, all for less than a cup of Starbucks a day. The Pipeline-i® Virtual Office technology package includes integrated lead capture with our LCM® Web Gateway, our LCM® Phone Gateway technologies, our Agent SimpleSite®, and unlimited personal business coaching.
Check out what you get with Pipeline-i® Virtual Office…
We became a leader in the technology industry by making simple tools for real estate professionals. Our tools are unique because they’re designed by agents, for agents. That means they meet agents’ practical needs, but more importantly, they’re also simple - designed to learn in five minutes or less. Our core technology package Pipeline Virtual Office includes exactly what every agent needs to thrive in real estate.
So what are agents saying?
“FavoriteAgent Rocks! I have been with them for a little over three years. No problems- no downtime- and they are there if you need them! I stopped doing floor duty, open houses (unless the seller wants me to) and farming to capture buyers and sellers because this program works!”
Tom Bruno
Albuquerque, NM
“Favorite Agent is the reason that I am where I am today. Without hearing about FavoriteAgent.com, I would still be using the old traditional ways of doing business that aren’t very efficient. It has enlightened me on the importance of the internet and has drastically changed the way I have been doing business over the last two years for the better. Everything is internet based and has been very good for our business. Pipeline Virtual Office is an exceptionally cost effective way to make and manage leads. We have been very happy with our results. If you’re looking to increase your business, I would definitely recommend FavoriteAgent.com.”
Randy Roach
Phoenix, AZ
“As a new agent, I was broke and ready to quit real estate after 4 months due to the lack of business. Then I found the FavoriteAgent.com lead capture technology [Pipeline Virtual Office], and my business has never been the same. (I’ve used their systems for the past two years.) When I started with them, I was a rookie agent and had only sold one home. After my first full year with them, I was named the top producer in my company of 21 agents (for 2006 and again in 2007), and was ranked in the top 3% of all the agents in my MLS. All the other agents in our region are saying 2007 was the slowest year they’ve seen, but I’ve had more business than I could handle. So much that I recently hired a full time administrative assistant and started my own team. FavoriteAgent.com helped me solve the “no-business” problem! Thanks guys!”
Jason Jarstfer
Radcliff, KY
“I actually came across Favorite Agent while doing floor duty reading Broker Agent News, and it had an article Matt Jones wrote for the magazine telling how he was able to do 100+ listings in his first calendar year. Whoa! That got my attention. I found out he used a lead capture gateway [now called Pipeline Virtual Office] and that he was continually studying and changing it to make it work better.
So I had to at least give it a try. I found out you didn’t just join a company you joined a family. At Favorite Agent, all the way from the President to Customer Service, they actually cared about my success. They really take the time to give an agent that’s stuck some coaching advice. This is so good because you get a chance to talk with someone who’s actually done it and is talking with many agents from around the world daily, so you get ideas that others are just not doing. With Favorite Agent I’ve been able to make it through the slowing real estate market because I have the one problem every agent wished they had: TOO MANY LEADS! (Help! I can’t keep up! ;-).
Joseph Ignat, P.A.
Tampa, FLP.S. If you want some stats, I personally give Favorite Agent credit for 22 transactions in the year and a half I’ve been with them.”
“Before I was introduced to the FavoriteAgent.com technology I was a struggling agent closing, on average, one deal a month. I was driving some pay per click traffic to a standard, template real estate website and closing a few deals as a result. At the time this was the best marketing system I had found because I could at least generate leads somewhat consistently. Little did I know that I was paying way too much per lead and per deal because I didn’t understand how important it was too have a lead capture system in place. As a result I was spending a lot to make a little.
When I heard about the FavoriteAgent.com lead capture technology and integrated database [Pipeline Virtual Office] I was skeptical. They told me if I replaced my current website technology with their LCM Gateway, that I would increase my capture rate from 1 customer out of 100 visitors to 25-30 out of 100! After several phone calls with the helpful staff, I took the leap of faith and purchased the system. Within two days of directing Internet traffic to my FavoriteAgent.com LCM Gateway, my lead count exploded. I was spending the same ad dollars but now I was generating 25-30 times more leads than before. After cutting my ad dollars way back so I could keep up with the leads, I decided to start building a team of agents to multiply myself.
With our team, we closed 126 transactions in 2006 and 130 in 2007, which was a “slow market” according to the so-called experts. And we did it at a fraction of the advertising dollars we would have spent using traditional marketing methods. In fact, 7 of the 10 top producers in our company of 150 agents used this system to build their successful businesses. When I started, I knew nothing about Internet marketing, lead generation, lead capture, pay per click, Google AdWords or anything before I began to research it myself. FavoriteAgent.com made it so simple with their systems, training and customer service that anyone can learn the concepts and get their Internet business up and running within a few days. Needless to say, I highly recommend this system to anyone serious about increasing their transaction volume while decreasing their current marketing budget.”
Kyle Wilson
Boise, Idaho
“Pipeline Virtual Office is the number one reason I have had success in real estate. I was able to jump feet first into a competitive market and not only write deals for customers immediately but shorten the real estate learning curve that cripples most agents. FavoriteAgent.com is for any agent who is serious about success!”
Terry Richards
Boise, Idaho
“That’s right I’m an agent, but I’m also the President and CEO of FavoriteAgent.com. We have agents all over the world using Pipeline Virtual Office to make their own leads for as little as $3 each. Our typical agent spends only about $250 in advertising and makes between 80-90 leads. Sign up today and I’ll pay your $1,000 activation fee for you. How cool is that? So go ahead and sign up today and start making your own leads tomorrow!”
Matt Jones
President/CEO
FavoriteAgent.com
How much does Pipeline Virtual Office cost? The complete Pipeline Virtual Office technology package costs only $550/month, with a 2-year contract. To learn more about our pricing, click here.
Why is Pipeline Virtual Office so cheap? Good question. For a slick website, a state-of-the-art lead capture, a contact manager, and personal business training, agents might expect to pay up to $1500/month.
Today an agent can get our full technology package for less than the price of your lunch each day! You’ll have to agree that any agent that’s truly serious about his or her career can make that size of an investment, especially considering you can save 50% by committing to a two-year contract.
Online marketing? What’s that?
It’s the wave of the future, but don’t worry, you don’t need to be an expert. The average online marketing campaign takes about 15 minutes to set up. It’s so easy your mom could do it. So why is it important? Because even armed with the best lead capture technology on the market, if nobody visits your website, you can’t capture them.
How much does advertising cost? The best part is online marketing is scalable to your budget. You can spend as much or as little as you want. And there are no lengthy contracts, so you can stop and start your campaign when you want. Our average agent spends only $250/month on advertising.
Hi. My name is Matt Jones, and I’m the president and CEO of FavoriteAgent.com… but I’m also the managing broker of our local real estate firm, and I personally manage about 70 agents every day. Joining a real estate company, whether you are considering a move, or joining for your first time, is a very important decision and one that you should make carefully and deliberately. So why should you join FavoriteAgent.com (or any company for that matter)? What a great question!
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
To be perfectly honest, we didn’t know the answer so we conducted a survey. And after asking nearly half a million real estate professionals, we discovered that it really comes down to just five reasons why agents choose one brokerage over another, and we believe that our company excels in all five. See what you think.
Join FavoriteAgent.com and you’ll immediately solve the number one problem facing agents today: not enough customers. Our agents have exclusive access to our lead capture technology, enabling them to produce as many customer leads as they want to work. Our typical agent only spends about $250 in advertising and yet generates about 80-90 customer leads ever month!
Today most agents spend a small fortune on tools. Not at FavoriteAgent.com. Our agents get their very own state-of-the-art LCM Web Gateway lead capture technology, their own LCM Phone Gateway lead capture technology, their own personal Agent SimpleSite website, their own integrated client management software, and Virtual Assistant application. They also get the most powerful Virtual Office real estate platform available today, complete with hundreds of training articles, videos, calculators, business planning modules and much, much more. Our technology bundle costs over $1,100 per month to license it directly, and yet our agents get it all for free!
Many companies talk about training. FavoriteAgent.com actually does training. I’m a nationally syndicated author of real estate training material with well over a hundred articles and four books to my credit. More than 90,000 agents have taken my training either online or at one of our National Agent Summit training events, learning how to succeed in this new age of real estate, and I’m personally active in coaching and training our agents.
At the end of the day, the only thing you have to sell is your time. That’s why FavoriteAgent.com doesn’t waste it with useless sales meetings, caravans, floor duty, or non-productive company meetings. Our company empowers our agents to be productive while maintaining the support, community, and structure that many agents crave.
Ask most agents how much they make and they won’t have a clue. It depends on whether it’s a cross-sale or in-house sale. New or existing. January or December. Most company commission plans are a virtual shell game. The FavoriteAgent.com Agent Compensation Plan is probably the simplest and most generous you’ve ever seen. Here it is: Every single agent pays a 50% split on their first transaction with the company. That’s to offset all the administrative costs in adding a new agent to the company. But after that, all agents keep a minimum of 80%.
Now, there are two ways any agent can make 90%! First, by being a top producer. If any agent completes four or more transactions in a thirty-day period, he is paid 90%. Or make 90% by recruiting. If any agent recruits five other agents to join your company, his commission is increased to 90%. And that’s 90% commission with with no office rent, no transaction fees, no administrative fees, no nickel and dime fees, period.
Interested in learning more or arranging a discreet interview? Click here and fill out the simple online application and someone will contact you.
Imagine starting your very own real estate brokerage. I know what you’re thinking:
“But I don’t have the $20,000 for a franchise fee, or the $10,000 for a lease deposit and and first month’s lease payment. For that matter, I don’t have the $50,000 it will cost me to buy the desks, tables, chairs, fax machine, copy machine, and all the endless stuff that I need to get things started. And even if I had the $80,000 in hard start-up costs, and another $100,000 available for operating capital, I can’t begin to afford the advertising campaign that will be required to recruit agents and to let the public know I exist.”
So instead, you resign yourself to continue to schlep houses until you drop. Riding in cars with buyers. One frustrating transaction after another. Not that you mind making new friends, but enduring the daily grind of chasing from deal to deal gets old. Let’s be honest. You have ambitions to get out of the trenches and you have vision for how things might be. There has to be more than this. Right?
Well I have some great news! There is more! So much more! I’m going to show you how you can own your own Virtual Office brokerage, and how you can do it inexpensively. I’ll show you how you can recruit agents, train them, and manage them better than in a traditional model company. Most importantly, I’m going to show you how you can make more money in the process — a lot more money.
What’s more, in this model you can be up and running in days, not weeks or even months. You don’t have to be able to ride out a long start-up period with yet another big slice of your hard-earned savings. And what’s even better is that this model is thriving during the current depressed housing market. Sounds too good to be true, right? It’s not.
You could open your own Virtual Office brokerage with us and never miss a transaction. I want you to imagine being the person in the plan I’m about to lay out for you. It could very well be you, and the entire transition could take place in a few days. You’ll see. I know you have your doubts, so we’ll just call you Thomas (as in doubting Thomas). Okay, Tom. Here is your plan:
Day 1. Getting everything in place. A building, a managing broker, and your Virtual Office technology platform.
Now it’s been a pretty busy morning, so go ahead and treat yourself to a nice relaxing lunch. While you’re having lunch, let’s think about your company name. Have you decided on a name yet? Well, with our Virtual Office license, you get to use the FavoriteAgent.com nationally recognized trade name, and immediately associate with nearly 20,000 other real estate professionals across the globe. We have agents in all 50 states, in every province of Canada, as well as Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Let’s see: “FavoriteAgent.com Premier Properties” has a nice ring to it. Perfect!
OK. Lunch is over. It’s time to think about a few logistics. You need to order some business cards and yard signs. No big deal. Our corporate office has all the art work ready to send to the printer and sign company. Oh, and don’t forget to make sure your voice mail has your new company name on the recording. Now log into your MLS and download the email addresses for all the area agents and start focusing on a list of possible recruits. Don’t worry, recruiting will be easy.
Here’s what I mean: Recruiting always comes down to your value proposition to the agent. And what you have to offer them is so much better than everything else out there, hiring agents will be a snap. Here is your value proposition in a nutshell. You give them freedom, better tools, and more money. What more could they possibly want?
Freedom because your agents don’t have to waste half their productive time pulling floor duty, sitting in sales meetings, driving to caravan houses, or any of the other traditional agent busy-work. With FavoriteAgent.com they have none of that. Freedom is huge to a productive agent.
Like any of the national franchises, your agents will each pay 10% of gross commission to FavoriteAgent.com corporate. But unlike those other national companies, with FavoriteAgent.com they actually get something tangible for their money. Instead of paying a franchise royalty to use a national name, they are paying a technology license fee. That technology license fee buys them everything they need to operate a Virtual Office real estate practice. Here’s what I mean.
Each agent gets his very own LCM web gateway, his own LCM phone gateway (both are state-of-the-art lead capture technologies), his own personal website, his own integrated contact management software, his own virtual assistant and mobile applications. They also get the most powerful Virtual Office real estate platform available today, complete with hundreds of training articles, videos, calculators, business planning modules and much, much more. Our technology bundle would cost each agent over $1,100 per month if they were to license it directly.
Now remember, as the broker-owner, running a typical 30-agent office, FavoriteAgent.com will be providing your company with nearly $35,000 per month in Virtual Office technology. You’ll also be happy to know that all of your agent accounting is included in that licensing fee, so you won’t have to spend your money to hire a bookkeeper to run your brokerage, or shut the office down the entire office for the month of January to get all the agent 1099’s sent out.
But besides all the freedom and all the tools, you’re going to attract your agents the old fashioned way — you’re going to pay them well! The FavoriteAgent.com Agent Compensation Plan is probably the simplest and most generous you’ve ever seen. Here it is: Every single agent pays a 50% split on their first transaction with the company. That’s to offset all the administrative costs in adding a new agent to the company. But after that, all active agents keep a minimum of 80%. To remain active with the company, an agent only has to complete one transaction a quarter, or, they can work full-time in real estate. Now, there are two ways an agent can make 90%! First, by being a top producer. If an agent completes four or more transactions in a thirty-day period, he is paid 90%. Or they can make 90% by recruiting. If an agent recruits five other agents to join your company, his commission is increased to 90%.
And that’s 90% commission with with no office rent, no transaction fees, no administrative fees, no nickel and dime fees, period. So, how easy do you think it is to attract agents when you can give them freedom, you can give them a state-of-the-art technology platform and the ability to forever solve their lead problems, and you can pay them 90%?
Believe me, it can’t get any easier. OK, enough about recruiting. It’s been a tough day but well worth the time invested. Go ahead and take the evening off and get some sleep. You’re going to need it. Tomorrow’s going to be really busy!
Day 2. Today you have your initial coaching session with FavoriteAgent.com. It will take about an hour, and during that hour you’re going to learn how to set up and manage your online advertising. By the end of the day, you’ll have a steady supply of new leads coming into your own Virtual Office contact manager. Don’t worry, if you forget something, the coaching staff is always there to answer any questions you may have. Now it’s time to do your homework.
The coaching staff is going to suggest that you take an hour to make sure that everything is set up just like you want it, and to learn your way around the Virtual Office software. They’ll also tell you to import all your contacts into your software. While you’re at it, why don’t you go ahead and email the customer service department your list of local real estate agents, complete with the phone numbers, fax numbers, and email addresses. You know, the ones that you downloaded yesterday. Within an hour or so, they’ll have them all in your contact manager and ready to use. Was that easy or what?!
Day 3. Now it’s time to actually start recruiting agents. Better check your Pipeline. Oh my! You have seven new leads waiting to be called. Sure, you continue to practice real estate while you build your team, but now you get to keep 90% of your commissions instead of giving over a third to your old broker. Now you can spend less time drumming up business too, because it is coming to you faster than you can handle it. Now you can actually think about building your business by recruiting. Maybe you already are a broker and have agents working for you, or maybe you are just starting from scratch. Either way, using techniques we’ll show you, you should be able to recruit 30 agents in less than 90 days.
Now let’s look at a realistic scenario comparing this model to the traditional model. Let’s say you recruit 30 agents over the next few months, and those agents average one single transaction per month. Here is how your income looks:
Remember, in the traditional model, your cash outlay is nearly $200,000 and your risk is very high. At that level, your return on investment is minimal and you have basically bought a job. Unless you can live on a $43,200 income, you are going to have no choice but to sell houses every day and compete with your agents.
In the virtual model, you’d make $214,812 on the revenue produced by one virtual office of 30 agents. Let’s say you continued to grow that office, adding 30 agents a year for the next five years. You’d be making $1,388,016, and it would all be profit! Your company will be a virtual real estate money-making machine and you’ll have very little, if any, stress. Your agents will make more money, and your customers will be better served. You’ll have the benefit of a national brand and state-of-the-art technology, and you’ll own a business valued at roughly seven times EBITDA, Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization, or nearly $10 million.
Contrast that to the traditional alternative where you would likely still be leveraged to the hilt in your one brokerage of 30 agents, taking on a huge risk of capital, and working with diminishing margins as agents continue to demand more and more money and brokerage commissions continue to erode. Suppose you wanted to expand. You’d have to reinvest more capital to get and equip a larger facility. And you’d have to add staff. Your risk would continue to escalate with every expansion, and unless you’re a rare agent, you’d still be selling houses and own a business nobody would buy.
Day 4. Now comes the fun part… all you do from your fourth day on is make money. Now how cool is that! To view our Virtual Office Team Leader Compensation Plan, click here.
Well I hope that helps you understand exactly how I’d recommend you open your own virtual office. It’s simple, and our company pays all the Virtual Office expenses for those qualifying agents who have big dreams but small balances. We’ll hold your hand every step of the way, and help you become successful. The only thing standing between you and a very enjoyable and rewarding life is your own fear to act.
Interested in learning more or arranging a discreet interview? Click here and fill out the simple online application and someone will contact you.So, contact us, and we’ll help you get started doing real estate this new way!
I want to tell you a story about an amazing agent I know. His name is Michael Perna. Michael’s a full-time student, working on his graduate degree, so he’s only working in real estate part-time. That’s tough enough. But Michael is working in arguably the worst real estate market in the country — Detroit, Michigan. If you think parts of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida have it bad, let me share a little of Detroit’s market stats: Continue Reading…
First I’d like to commend you for sticking with me through the previous six installments. We’ve covered a lot of ground, and hopefully you’ve been able to take something of value away from each article. Now we finally come to the end. We’ve discussed lots of topics, from technology to advertising. From theory to practical application. Now it’s time to help you assemble your own online marketing plan and what specific steps you need to take to put your newly formed strategy into action. So let’s get started. Continue Reading…
In the last installment, I discussed website basics. I intentionally left off one part of the typical website: the capture mechanism or gateway. Some call it the form or registration page, but whatever you call it, it is the most important part of your site. As far as I’m concerned, it is more important than the website itself. Yes, I really said that. Let me repeat myself: It is more important than the website. Continue Reading…
Powered by eShop v.4