On the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast today we're talking with Siyamak Sasani from Ottawa, Canada. We had a really great conversation, and I knew it was going to be a great conversation when it started... "Dean, I want you to treat me like a blank sheet of paper and write the plan for me"!
Siyamak's a newer agent within the last couple of years. He's in a great market, he's a very personable guy and he's got lots of great business experiences. He has all the confidence in the world. He's already had some success, so he's off to a good start.
We talked about how to establish his Getting Listings program, plan his listing multipliers and we focused on orchestrating referrals from his top 150.
He's a guy who understands, as a businessman, he has to prepare for the growth of his business and he can't be the one cog that is running the whole show. So establishing the proper support, the proper help, and the systems that are going to help with his growth.
Links:
GoGoAgent.com
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Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep038
Dean: Here we go. Siyamak?
Siyamak: Yes, Dean Jackson. How are you doing?
Dean: Here we go, Siyamak Sasani. I know how to say your name, it's perfect.
Siyamak: You are one of few.
Dean: Well, thank you for dialing back with me. We were having some technical difficulty there. That’ll be good to kind of reset. Luckily, we had it very early on. Let's start from the beginning and maybe tell us the Siyamak Sasani story and then, let's pick a jumping-off point to kind of build a plan for going forward for you.
Siyamak: Excellent, I look forward to it. First of all, thank you for having me. It's a great honor and pleasure. I've been in workforce since I was very young and I've done a lot of things. I put myself through med school and after that we came to Canada. I worked from landscaping to insurance to telemarketing to pizza delivery to taxi driving to mobile application development-
Dean: Wow.
Siyamak: Mobile marketing. Went from Vancouver to Halifax to Sydney to Ottawa less than three years ago. I license here. I go with that. I got my license last year. I had few transactions last year. I did well to some extent. This year, I closed seven deals already. I have two listings that I'm using to market and to also run some of the programs that I'm planning to do through your system.
Dean: I love it, yeah.
Siyamak: One listing is 500k, the other one is 1.2 million, okay?
Dean: That will give us an opportunity to kind of jump off here, but when you um look at this what's been your kind of approach so far to building your business? You mentioned to me you've gone through a lot of trial and error to try and get to the right shit.
Siyamak: That's true. So far, I used a lot of social networking and marketing, a lot of working on the community. Although I'm new here, but relatively in a short time, I have a lot of friends and people from the Middle East and that part of the world. I speak Arabic, I speak Farsi fluently, so that helps a lot to connect-
Dean: Oh wow.
Siyamak: That part of the globe. I used Facebook primarily, phone calling, some cold calling at the beginning, knocked door to door. I've done going to social activities during my work out. After that recently, these three, four last houses were done through recommendation. People recommended me to their clients, to their friends.
Dean: That feels good, doesn't it?
Siyamak: It feels fantastic. Even the expensive, a million dollar house was, I received a call one day. The gentleman said, “I'd like you to come and list my house,” out of blue.
Dean: I love that.
Siyamak: How does he get my name, said, “Mr. So-and-so recommended you?” I don't know Mr. So-and-so. Then, I asked him, how did he? He said, “You sold the house across from his house and he liked your style.” I said, “Please thank him for me.”
Dean: That's beautiful, yeah. That's a really good start. I mean, so there's a lot of good places to kind of to jump off there. We can go through kind of each of the elements of the Listing Agent Lifestyle here. We could talk about the five, we talked about getting listings and multiplying your listings and getting referrals and converting leads and finding buyers. What I am very interested in is building on the kind of assets that you already have right now in terms of you've got two listings right now, which is a good advantage. Now, do you have a system for getting listings? What's your getting listings strategy or are you now going to start implementing our getting listing strategy?
Siyamak: I was just saying before we get offline, previous call that after all of this trying and error, I really liked what your system is. It really spoke to me to the core and basically, my request from you today is look at me as a white piece of paper and write whatever you like. I am open. I am eager. I work 20 hours a day. I am in a process to hire assistants, but I know that if I want to hire them and train them, I'm not using my time and money efficiently. That might be the obvious choice to go with.
Dean: Yeah that’s a good thing. Yeah, you're exactly right. That's part of the thing is that when we look at this part of doing this podcast and creating this kind of operating system for a listing agent lifestyle is to really document and systemize the ways to reach each of those objectives. You're starting with getting listings. You've got a couple of advantages. Number one, you're in Canada, where the unaddressed ad mail is very inexpensive. You can choose an area. You can mail postcards directly to neighborhoods for very little money, which is a good thing. You're in an area, where it sounds like there are some pretty good price ranges for you. What would be kind of the median price range in the market where you are? Are you right in Ottawa, are you in one of the suburbs or what's your market?
Siyamak: I'm sure you're very familiar with Ottawa. I work with basically the entire city. That is one of the distractions. Maybe I need to focus more on a neighborhood and I live in Chapel Hill, which is at the beginning of Orleans. Ottawa has a green belt around it. The Ottawa proper, if you can, like to call it is within that green belt. Outside the green belt, we have Orleans to the east, Canada to the west and then Bar Haven to the southwest, everything in between Alta Vista and the other neighborhoods are very much where I work. The past few months, most of my work happened in that area of Alta Vista, where the hospital is. I had two town houses that were sold in the past month in the same neighborhood. This Alta Vista area is mostly bigger lots, older houses and if there is a house that is built recently, it will be at 1.2 above because the houses are sitting on a big lot. The 105, 150 or 70 by 210 and they are 10 minutes from downtown.
Dean: Okay, this is great. What's the population of that area?
Siyamak: The population of Alta Vista would be like 16,000.
Dean: Okay, this is going to be a good start for you here. Now, this is a really interesting and perhaps counterintuitive kind of approach because so often, I always say to people, “Listen, the best thing that you could do and I really believe this is if you could set up a construct in your mind that your real estate license restricted you to the borders of Alta Vista, just to think that way helps you narrow your focus to, we talk about the concentrating your efforts into a particular market.” That's a pretty good sized market. There's lots of activity in an area that size and an opportunity for you to make an impact.
Now, I'm not saying that you're not going to cross those borders to go, help the people that are referred to you or the business that you end up generating through word of mouth or from serendipity or people who will approach you and want you to help them find out. What I'm suggesting is as far as what we call your before unit, looking for spending money to go into an area, let's take an approach of focusing on Alta Vista and planning to dominate that market. That's really an incredible mindset to have. I read a really great book years ago about Procter & Gamble and the book was called the P&G 99. It outlined the principles that Procter & Gamble follows when going into new markets, new products. They right now are maybe the most successful brand company in history. They've got 23 individual brands that do over a billion dollars a year in sales. That's pretty good track record, but their number one thing when they go into a market, their idea is to plan to dominate. What that means is that they're picking that market, they're going into it, not with a mindset of, “Let's go in and see if we can scratch out some of this some market share in laundry detergent.” They go in and they are looking to completely dominate the market. That means that they really build the very best solutions for each market that they go in.
If we took this approach and looked at Alta Vista as an example, a great thing to just start with is to pick the area within Alta Vista, where you'd really like to get more listings and start the process of identifying the future home sellers in that area. Is there a particular area within Alta Vista or a particular segment of the market that would come to mind as either particularly desirable or the most active part of the market or what comes to mind about Alta Vista?
Siyamak: Because of the size of the lots, the geographic area is big, but the number of units is not as high because you don't have very many townhouses. There are small community of towns by the hospital, but yeah basically they are mostly … It's a very well established, most of the houses, where they're built 50, 60, 70 and 80s. The difficulty in that area is every house is unique and pricing them becomes a challenge for most of the agents. You see a lot of people put houses with number that doesn't make any sense. It is a challenge for the seller themselves also because expectations and you know how people look at their houses, much better than the other house that was sold, not knowing that the other house went through a major renovation before they come to market or whatever the differences are. It's a difficult market to tackle because there's no like a cookie cutter kind of houses that you can know exactly what price range each house goes. It takes a lot of education and a lot of trust and there are agents in that market that basically dominated that market for the past 20, 30 years.
I hear from the clients there that the gentleman or the lady, who is the name on the board comes for the first meeting, but then they don’t see them after that. There are some rooms for better service. Still because of a bit higher end houses, the demand of the sellers are more challenging. There is no particular neighborhood I can say per say, “These are V1.” I can say around the house that is conditionally sold now that the one I told you, the 1.2, there is around … They say the neighborhood would be populated by between 5,00 to 1,000 people. There’ll be like 200 to 500 houses. I can create in my mind.
Dean: Would there be an area of a thousand homes in Alta Vista?
Siyamak: Yeah, absolutely.
Dean: That's what we're kind of looking for. It sounds like an area that people, who work in Ottawa maybe would like to live out here. They get that kind of big lots or lots of trees that kind of thing. Then, they get to work in the city and it's all very convenient. Yeah, the picture that you're kind of painting for me is that it's a desirable area that-
Siyamak: Very desirable, absolutely very desirable and everybody is wishing to go there.
Dean: Okay, perfect, so that's going to make it nice for us to … When we start talking about finding buyers that's going to make it really nice for what we're talking about here. It all starts with what did you say the sort of average price range is for the homes there?
Siyamak: The averages will be around, let's say between 600,000 to 800,000.
Dean: Okay, this is perfect. This is really a thing, where there's lots of big margin there, lots of opportunity for you and so picking 1,000 homes to start with is a very manageable kind of thing. That sounds like around the price range of what Tony Kelsey is dealing with the case study that we've been doing in Toronto. What I would recommend for you is to start the process with a 1,000 homes in and get the getting listings postcards, going out to that area every single month. Now, this is kind of interesting because it's August right now, we're almost to September, which is when we started five years ago now, the case study with Tony in Toronto. It'd be kind of an interesting thing for you to start this process now and watch and monitor what happens. Have you seen how our getting listings process works? I don't know how far you've gone into the process yet.
Siyamak: You have so many different things, so just if you remind me that it could be useful for others, who are listening also.
Dean: I love it, okay, so when you log in and you go to the members’ blog, the member’s area, there's a section, if you click on listings that'll take you to the getting listings. We've got an entire program that's already done for you. We've got, starts with the postcards that we mail into those 1,000 homes, so that we're offering them, would be the September 2018 report on Alta Vista house prices, which is the offer that we use across the board. I mean we've used this for oceanfront homes in in Cape Ann. We've used it for oceanfront condos, the highest end things, all the way down to the lowest end things of condos because the genesis thought that people have when they're getting ready to sell their house is, “Well, I wonder what I could get from my house, I wonder how much my houses worth,” because that sets the context for what they're going to do. They're having that thought long before they would ever consider telling a real estate agent that.
Right or putting their house on the market or talking to a realtor. They want to know what is going on and what our approach gives them is an opportunity to kind of voyeur in on the market data without having to have a real estate agent come over and give them their opinion of what their house is worth. This, it feels like, it's a reliable thing that I get the market data of what's going on. Now, this is going to then set up the desire to have you come and tell them specifically what their house would sell for. It may not be right now that they do it. Sometimes it is, but predominantly, we're building an asset of future home sellers that starts with them curious about what the houses are selling for in Alta Vista. That program that process we've gone through everything and created all the elements for you.
Siyamak: I'm a one one-man show now. Is this something that EZ Button can cover?
Dean: Yes, absolutely, so we have a service just like you mentioned there that we lovingly call our EZ Button that we can actually do the execution of it for you too to set up everything, get your postcards printed for you and get you in the mail.
Siyamak: That’d be fantastic because-
Dean: Sorry Siyamak, my throat-
Siyamak: Have a sip of water. I don't want to lose you now, just wait.
Dean: No, I get so excited about it, like it's so-
Siyamak: It is exciting.
Dean: I love when you say like, “Think of me like a blank sheet of paper, white sheet of paper that we can write a blueprint on.” That's where I start, right there is getting you established in an area, where you've got the thing that's going to be valuable, which is this sort of silent inventory of future home sellers because everybody that responds to that postcard, they're very likely higher than the general population likelihood to sell their house in the next 12 months, 24 months, 36 months. We've been going now, we've documented, you saw the infographic that we do for the case study with Tony. I think Tony, it may have been episode number one or two of the Listing Agent Lifestyle Podcast, where we outlined exactly what happened. The short version of it is that he mailed from September till February and closed his first transaction in February in that area. Within five months, he had gotten his first listing and first closing, but in that five month period of time over the next three and a half years because we have four years of data on this, 13 more people, 13 of the people that responded in that first five months listed and sold their house with Tony over the next three and a half years. Some of them, up to three and a half years longer.
The asset is this relationship. The asset is discovering the future home sellers before they put their house on the market. Now, one of the advantages that you have with that, so let's just do the math on this that you're in Canada. What real estate company are you with, are you with …
Okay, so you, I'm sure with Canada Post have a corporate rate for unaddressed ad mail?
Siyamak: Probably.
Dean: Yeah, you do, I'm sure of it. Let's even be ultra conservative here and say that you could mail those postcards for 25 cents, let's say total including the printing. That would cost $250 a month, which would be $3,000 for the year.
Siyamak: You, it's…
Dean: When you look at it, the average commission that you would get from one transaction, one side there would be what?
Siyamak: Multiple of that.
Dean: Would be, how much sorry?
Siyamak: At least 10,000.
Dean: Yeah, at least 10,000 minimum. When you look at that you've got … The way that we look at this is setting up an oil well that you are kind of once you get this rolling here, as soon as you do your first transaction, this is now self-sustaining, it's self-funding going forward here. I always encourage people to start with a 1,000 homes or whatever you can manage initially. If it's 500 that's great or if it's 2,000 that's great, but start with something that you can sustain for six months sort of thing. Once you get transaction, you've recouped the money, your seed money to get it rolling. Then, it's in profit and it's just continuing to self-fund and self-fund and expand. Tony started out with, I think he started out with 2,000 or 2,500 homes and now, he's up to 20,000. He's doing his whole MLS district now, but he parlayed it all from the self-funding from the commissions that he was earning from the transactions that he was doing along the way. Could you see yourself making that kind of an investment over the next six months to sustain something like that?
Siyamak: I don't see any other way.
Dean: I like the way you think.
Siyamak: Definitely, it's just, I've been through enough in my life to realize you have to do the job properly, you have to give the business to the people who are doing it, the who is as you mention it in your programs is very important. If I want to do everything myself, I may be very good at this in 10 years from now, by then, I might be already changed my career several times. I am fully in the system. I want, when I said, “Look at me as a white page,” by the end of this phone call, I would like to be your ideal case scenario.
Dean: This is great.
Siyamak: What would you expect this business to be done if it's with you, what will you be doing and what will I do?
Dean: Perfect.
Siyamak: … exactly that-
Dean: That’s great.
Siyamak: Because there's no point of going through reinventing and asking questions and doing stuff.
Dean: That's the whole point. That's the thing is we know that we've got the system in place that works. It's just a matter of executing it. The reason that we introduced the EZ Button program was because my observation of it, I've been doing this for, I started out as a real estate agent myself 30 years ago, but I've been working with other real estate agents since 1994, so another almost 25 years of trying to help other realtors use the systems that I've developed. My observation is that the execution of it is really where people fall down. I realized that we could execute the whole thing for somebody, where the only time that you really need to get involved is when people are calling up and saying, “Can you come over and tell me what my house is worth,” or “Can you come and give us a room-by-room review,” or “We'd like to talk to you about selling our house.” We can do all the executions and stuff, so that's why I've set up a whole organization behind this to help be able to execute this for you and help you stay in the highest value thing, which is being the real estate agent, being the one that goes over there to talk to them about selling their house, getting it on the market, then doing all the marketing of it and negotiating the contracts. That's the highest value stuff that you can do.
That's a very exciting thing. Now, that’s the question-
Siyamak: May I know?
Dean: Yeah, of course please.
Siyamak: I have clear vision of where and what I want to do. I just want to know the system you are putting in place. What else do I need because let's say I go and list this house. The problem sometimes happen is if I need to orchestrate every step of the way, what has to be done next that by itself requires a lot of involvement with whoever is doing the job. For example, I know the team that you are putting down is super helpful and superwoman. Is the system that you're putting together something that I tell “Okay, this is the listing, these are the photos, this is the details,” and leave it to her. She maybe can-
Dean: That's a really great question, so let me kind of explain how this how this works then because what we do for people is all of the all the marketing and the proactive types of things, the before unit things, like the Getting Listings Program. We can do every element of it for you because the basics that are required to run the Getting Listings Program are that the postcards need to be printed and mailed and delivered to the homes once a month. You need a landing page for where people come and request the report, which we can set up for you. We have the CRM, where all of that information gets stored, so you keep records on conversations with everybody or records of when they responded and which newsletters have gone out to them. Then, every month everybody that responds to the postcard gets a monthly newsletter. We've already written all 12 newsletters, all 12 cover letters that we send out with a copy of our Get Top Dollar newsletter, a cover letter and the updates of all of the activity in Alta Vista, which you would need to provide. You have to be able to print out, “Here's the information that goes with it,” but we can assemble everything for you and do it all, so that it needs to just get assembled and mailed from Ottawa, not from Florida.
That's all you need to do on the getting listings side because the entire program is designed, so that there's no need for outbound phone calls. We're not calling anybody. We're communicating with them and then, they will call you when they're ready to list their house. As soon as you get that call that's where you pick up. Now, you go over, you do everything that you do to get the listing and then, once you've got the listing now, we launch our listing multiplier programs. That's what I wanted to talk about with the two listings that you've got right now, we've got a lot of great tools for multiplying the listings that you have including an info box flyer, an instant open house landing page, where people can go and request more information about the house. We put together a beautiful PDF brochure document about the house with all the pictures and the basic information, not all of the information, but the basic information about the house, which we offer at the instant open house page, where people can go and leave their name and their email address to get the information. Then, we can follow up with them by email.
We've got a whole little email sequence that we use to connect with people and invite them to come and look at the house if they'd like to. If not, then every week, we continue to send a weekly the market watch email, which is updates of everything that's happening in Alta Vista. All of those things can be done for you or with you in terms of you would send the information about the property and the pictures, but we can put together all the materials, the infobox flyer, the PDFs, landing page, prepare … We have just listed postcards and just sold postcards that you can use. All of the creative work has been done and all the execution of it can be done. We just turn to you for supplying the-
Siyamak: Particulars.
Dean: Yes, the particulars, the details. Often what people will do is once the house is in the MLS or it's on your site, they'll send a link to it, wherever all those pictures are. We can just create it based on all the information that's on that listing. It doesn't even really require much effort on your part to do that.
Siyamak: That's great.
Dean: We're finding that those multipliers are where there's such a big opportunity there. I like that. Now, have you got an infobox flyer on the listings that you have right now?
Siyamak: Yes, I do.
Dean: Okay and good so have you already set up your instant open house in your account or were you using-
Siyamak: Yeah.
Dean: You've already done all that, perfect. How long did you have it?
Siyamak: My request is or what I'm looking for is I built with number of people, even the people I'm hiring to assist. There’s the company here that they provide you with service based on … They charge you by the minute, not even by the hour. Whatever they do, this is how much they charge to do a service for you. I realize the difficulty for me is to keep up with telling them what needs to be done.
Dean: Right that's exactly it.
Siyamak: Lot of people are not proactive. If I need to really tell, “Okay, now do this, now do that,” I have to really sit and see what has been done and decide what is next. What I'm trying to see if the system you already created is a proactive that they take the thing and run with it or they need to be every step of the way, need to be told, “Did you do the buyers finding,” “You didn't tell us,” “Did you do this?” “Oh, we didn't know that you want to do that.” Is it a proactive that I know the entire system, now that there is this listing on our list, all what can be done with a listing is taking place.
Dean: Yes, now.
Siyamak: They might be sending the stuff for my final, if there's anything I need to change or there's anything that's not accurate or spelling is not correct, just a final look, this is fantastic. “Siyamak, everything is ready, we have 10 lines of action you are going to embark on, I want you to check them out for me and tell me they're all good to go, so we send this to the print. We send that to whatever you need to do, we create this, we create that.” If that's a system, I'm your man-
Dean: That's exactly what we're looking for. Now, where we draw the line then on that is that we're not doing anything that's outside of the system that we're talking about. We're not going to call like do, what we call kind of on the ground things in your area. I'm not, yeah, we're not going to organize the photographer.
Siyamak: No, no, no,
Dean: Or to do anything like that, but everything-
Siyamak: Your system.
Dean: Yeah that's exactly, what we've got is an EZ Button way, so that we can help you execute our system, so that you don't have to either do it yourself or learn enough about how to do it yourself, so that you can train somebody else to do it and then, have to follow up and hope that they do it right. We are experts in our system. That's what you're getting with the EZ Button is that our systems are going to be executed exactly the way that I would execute them if I were Siyamak in Alta Vista. That's what we're really looking at is that I do have them do what I would do if I were going to apply this in in Alta Vista.
Siyamak: Just to move forward with this mindset to action, let's say these two list things I have and I already had like three other houses that were sold in the past couple of months within Alta Vista also. We can use those who contact the neighbors, say these houses were sold in your area, we then-
Dean: Yeah, we have just sold postcards that you could do in the postal walk, like are you familiar with how the postal, the ad mail system works?
Siyamak: I haven't used it before and I really don't have any idea how that-
Dean: Okay, when mail gets delivered, they've basically carved up all of Ottawa, all of Alta Vista into what they call postal walks, which are between 200 and 500 or 600 home routes that one mailman would follow. You can through Canada Post and they have the same system here in the US called Every Door Direct Mail, but you can choose to send an unaddressed postcard to every home on that postal walk. If there's 500 homes on this postal walk, you can send 500 postcards to these specific homes. Canada Post has a map that shows you where the postal routes are, so you can just choose the one that is in the areas, where you want to be. If you do just list it or just sold cards, you want to do it in the same postal walk of where your listing was. You sold a listing in this particular, on this street, you would pick the postal walk for that Street and you'd mail the just listed postcard just to that postal walk. It's all really convenient.
I mean they've set it up really nicely, but our goal looking for you’re using the listings that you have is once we establish this idea of getting listings, now we want to multiply those listings that you have and that you continue to get by doing all these listing multipliers that we talk about like the infobox flyer and the Facebook ads and the just listed and just sold and instant open house, all of those things are to get you into contact with people, who are potentially interested in that listing and build your list of potential buyers because even if they're not going to buy that house, there's a good chance that they might be interested in another one, maybe a little bit down the road. You're building this list of buyers as you go.
Siyamak: That's fantastic. Back to the mailing out, I know in US, there’s a company that you just send them the stuff, they print it, they send it to mail. Do we have in Canada something like that?
Dean: I'm sure there is. A lot of times what people use is even something like Staples or Office Depot, which one do you have in Canada, Staples?
Siyamak: We have Staples, yeah.
Dean: Yeah, so we could coordinate to place the order with Staples, so that it's just a matter of picking up the postcards, taking them to the post office. That's all that would be done locally, kind of on the ground.
Siyamak: On the ground, okay.
Dean: Then, yeah that just happened, you would set that up on an automatic basis that every month, you don't have to think about it. Well, it'll be scheduled and the email you'll get will be, “Siyamak, the postcards are ready to go.”
Siyamak: Ready, go pick it up, yup.
Dean: That's pretty great. Now, a lot of times if you have a local assistant like a runner, we call them often somebody who can do these things like prints up or put out the infobox flyers and to take the stuff to the post office and to even do the listing next door program that we talk about around the sold listing that would be a really good thing. That little ecosystem right there of getting listings and multiplying them, we're completely equipped to help you execute that. Then, I want to talk about your getting referrals too because you're already getting referrals and I want to establish and really orchestrate that process for you. Do you have 150 people that you know, if you saw them at the grocery store that you'd recognize them and stop and have a conversation with them?
Siyamak: They will be all over the city, yes.
Dean: That's great because like I said, we're not going to limit you to Alta Vista in everything, but in the things that were starting the process of spending money on, orchestrating new marketing, focusing it in one area is the best thing to do. If we take 150 people that know you that if you saw them at the grocery store, you'd recognize them by name, how often do they hear from you right now or do you have a way that you communicate with them?
Siyamak: Many of them, they get … When I list any house, I send a blast to everybody that this house came to market or this house is sold. On and off, they get an email from me with that. Also, when I do any Facebook campaign for an open house or a just listed or sold, they are part of the group, they definitely see. Many of them, they like, they share. There are some connections with that, but it's not systemic. It is organic-
Dean: Right, I got you.
Siyamak: … it's not systemic and having that the best poster, the world best flyer-
Dean: Yeah, the world’s most interesting postcard, yeah.
Siyamak: Yes, postcard will be something that solidifying and consistent.
Dean: Yeah that's the thing that can be most easily set up. I like to get things rolling with getting your getting listings established, getting your listing multipliers going and then, immediately, getting your top 150, getting your world's most interesting postcard, so that each month, we're orchestrating referrals that way. We're planting those seeds. What tells me what kind of an advantage that you have is and I don't even know you, but telling me what's happening right now that people are already referring you, you've got the advantage of being referable. People wouldn't be referring you if you weren't referable. That goes a long way and I think that we're going to be able to multiply that and amplify that with the systematic programming of the 150 people that you know to be listening for conversations that are about real estate and giving them instruction on what to do when they hear them. That's really going to go a long way. I mean it's one of those things when we look at the return on investment of that, it dwarfs almost everything that we do because it's so high value and it's such a limited amount, like everybody that you know is having conversations about real estate. It's whether they notice them and think about you and then, tell you that they've had those conversations.
We're able to work to orchestrate that by programming it every month. Then, of course, already we write the postcard and we do everything already, so you don't. That's really one of the things that can be automated for you. That's really what you're looking for is to be able to systematically orchestrate everything on a monthly basis, so that the things that are supposed to happen, happen without you having to think about them. It sort of busy proofs your marketing because what I often find is when people get busy, Siyamak, you got all the time right now when it's not as busy, but when you get busy, then people fall into this danger of stopping the things that got them busy because they're too busy to execute the things. By having a system in place that allows those things to happen even when you get busy that really is insurance that it's going to continue for you.
Siyamak: I'm looking forward to that absolutely. Before I ask questions on that piece of paper, are you seeing everything you would like to see?
Dean: So far, I mean this is part of the thing is that you've got to establish the foundation here and those three things of starting the getting listings program, using the listing multipliers on the ones that you already have and getting your top 150 routinely getting your world's most interesting postcard that is what I would say is basecamp one, is let's get that established and that's going to be the foundation for you because you don't want to bite off more than you can chew. I would look at kind of that it's all designed to build on one another. The whole thing is to get it all installed and all operating because we haven't talked about a way for finding buyers for people looking in Alta Vista, but let's get you established first with finding the getting listings in there. Let's get everything kind of rolling and automated and then, revisit what the next steps are, yeah, absolutely.
Siyamak: How long it takes to get this going, the three first steps, the preparation, the setup, the-
Dean: Yeah, quickly, do you have the addresses for your top 150, like do you have their mailing addresses already, do you we need to find them?
Siyamak: I haven't even checked how many of them I have their mailing address or not, but either case, we can-
Dean: Yeah, well would look … This is as fast as you can move, like there's no reason that we can't get the first world's most interesting postcard out to however many you do have addresses for August. Then, add into that number in September until we get you to 150. We can start, pick the area, pick the 1,000 homes that you want to start with in Alta Vista and we can set up the postcard for you, the landing page, the newsletters, the Get Top Dollar book, the newsletters, everything, so you've got all of the collateral, all the assets already prepared. Then, it's just getting that first mailing out there and continuing to set that into a recurring situation. It's easier to maintain it than it is to get it started. There's just some, like getting it into orbit, like getting all the things established, but that can all be done this month. Everything we've talked about can happen this month. There's no reason to delay.
Siyamak: Okay, I'm excited to start. I already try to do most of the stuff myself. I have a better idea of how it works. I know that it's not worth my time if I'm going to go see clients. I have to give the person who does it the best to do it.
Dean: Yes that's right.
Siyamak: The only thing for me is also I'm trying to keep the cost within a framework that I can really continue. I know that EZ Button is not expensive, is very reliable, but in US dollars, so we convert, goes beyond the 500 Canadian almost. To set this, I need to have a budget how much it will cost to start. We should not discuss this I mean maybe on air, how much will be the budget I need for this to be done?
Dean: Yes, for all of these things, if you talk to Diane or to Lillian, they've already done all of these things. They've got a good idea of how long each kind of component of it takes, so that's kind of the good thing is that it's not going into a black hole. You're doing very specific things that they've done in the most efficient way. We've got a lot of efficiencies in this, so even them doing it is going to take less time than you're doing it yourself or training somebody else to then, they have to figure out how to do it and do it.
Siyamak: One last question maybe from my end, I'm still struggling with the right website and do you have a website that you work with that local agents can communicate, can talk to?
Dean: We do, yeah, yeah. We have a whole program, called Money Making Websites and it's a whole turnkey website that feeds right into GoGo, so all the leads and everything come right into your CRM and the autoresponders, the whole thing. Diane can tell you all about that too.
Siyamak: One other thing, I see for example from the infobox, there are 40 people who signed in.
Dean: Look at you that's awesome.
Siyamak: What is next step with that? How do you progress?
Dean: Okay, so have you? Yeah, have you established the autoresponder that goes out to them?
Siyamak: I don't know how to do that or I haven't. They know that this is an option.
Dean: This is great. When you go into the members’ area, in the members’ blog, just do a search on listing multipliers or infobox flyers. There is a video tutorial that shows exactly how we did this with Tony, which talks about the autoresponder message. You can broadcast an email to those 40 people. Are they all from the same listing?
Siyamak: Yeah.
Dean: Okay, so you've got 40 people, who I just want to like stop for a second Siyamak and I want to kind of establish what's happened here for you. You put out an infobox flyer. How many flyers did you put out?
Siyamak: I put, infobox flyers, two.
Dean: Two, or how many individual flyers in the box kind of thing?
Siyamak: Each one has 30 flyers.
Dean: Okay, so you've put out those flyers and you must have had to replenish them by now then if you've got 40 people, who have left their name and their email. Do you establish that these are people that were driving through that neighborhood, they saw that sign, they saw the infobox flyer, they got out of their car, picked one up. They went back to their car. They went to the website, they entered in voluntarily their name and their email address. Now, you've got 40 people, who you know exactly the kind of house that they're most interested in because they went through all of those steps to get to you. If you look at that right now that if you were buying those leads from realtor.com or realtor.ca or any of the places there, you would be paying $40 or $50 per lead for something like that. You've created almost a $2,000 asset that you've got there by proactively doing something like putting out an infobox flyer.
Now, if you just send an email to all of those people because we can personalize it and if you just send an email to them today, on Thursday and say, “Hi Dean, I'm meeting some people at the house this weekend, would you like to join us?” Just a short personal, expecting a reply message like that to that group of people, you may have some people and who say, “Yes, I would like that.” All you need to put in the subject line is the address of the property. The address of the property would be 22 Greystone or whatever the address is. Then say that, “Hi Siyamak, I'm meeting some people out at the house this weekend to take a look, would you like to join us?” How simple as that?
Siyamak: That's very simple, but I think there's something really I did differently and I was derailed. Most of my response, now I'm checking is through Facebook. I may be mixed up. I put the same URL in the Facebook ad.
Dean: Okay that’s fine.
Siyamak: I'm a bit confused, maybe I don't know how to run the system properly yet, but this is a good thing to know and to go and fix it and learn how to do it properly.
Dean: Yeah, absolutely. However, they got in there, whether it was the Facebook or the infobox flyer and that's the thing you can duplicate those pages, so that you know which one is for which. You can use one for … You can categorize it as Facebook as just listed, as infobox, as Craigslist or Kijiji or where your print ad, whatever it is that you're doing, you can send to a specific landing page that's mirrored. It mirrors that instant open house page and that way, when they come in, they'll be categorized precisely for you, so you know what’s working and where they came from.
Siyamak: It makes sense. I noticed now that I have a group that is listed under instant open house that has now Facebook on it. These are the ones that came from the infobox.
Dean: Okay, perfect, there you go, perfect.
Siyamak: Just learning yeah, as we go through.
Dean: This is all very exciting.
Siyamak: I am very excited and I can't thank you enough. I would like to get on this as soon as I can and get it going.
Dean: Well, I'm sure that-
Siyamak: What do you recommend next, just talk to Diane and you-
Dean: Yes, talk to Diane. She is standing by right now to help you out.
Siyamak: Excellent, excellent, I look forward to that.
Dean: Awesome. Well, Siyamak, I really enjoyed our conversation. I'm excited to watch it all unfold here and we'll check back and we'll do an update here to see how things are going in maybe six months.
Siyamak: Thank you very much Dean. I am looking forward to be able to say one day, “I implemented everything Dean said and see where am I now.”
Dean: That's my dream to Siyamak, this is perfect. We're perfectly aligned.
Siyamak: Thank you very much Dean, can’t thank you enough.
Dean: Awesome, thank you, bye bye.
Siyamak: Have a wonderful day, bye, bye.
Dean: There we have it, another great episode. I love Siyamak’s enthusiasm. I have all the time in the world for disciplined executors and people, who are enthusiastic about really building on a great foundation. I think there was a lot packed into that. That's exactly the same sort of context for what I would recommend for you, picking an area that you want to establish yourself in as the dominant agent, starting with that, starting with the listings, get yourself kind of taking this listing centric approach to building your business around it and then, focusing on multiplying the listings that you get while orchestrating referrals from the people who know you, like you and trust you, so that every time they hear a conversation about real estate, they'll automatically think of you and they'll know exactly what to do.
If you want to start executing everything that we talked about in this call here, then come on over to gogoagent.com. I've got all of the systems, all of the tools, all the creative work, proven, tested, everything you need to get listings, to multiply your listings, to get referrals, to convert more leads and to find buyers all while increasing your daily joy, your sense of abundant time and your financial peace because having a systematic way of continually bringing in new business really creates a peaceful sense for you. I'd love to join up with you to help you reach your goals with this and just come on over, gogoagent.com. You can come on in. We have offered a free trial for 30 days and no credit card required. You can come on in, see everything that we're up to, take a look, look through all of the training materials that we have, play around, try some things out. We even had on one of the episodes of the Listing Agent Lifestyle, we had Ron Reed talking about getting his first listing before his free trial was even up.
I'm totally committed to helping you establish yourself with this listing centric approach to your real estate business, so gogoagent.com, come on over. If you want to continue the conversation here, you can go to listingagentlifestyle.com. You can download a copy of the Listing Agent Lifestyle book and if you'd like to be a guest on the show, just click, “Be a guest,” and tell me a little bit about your business and then, we can get together and build a plan for you.
That's it for this week. Have a great week and I will talk to you next time.