Today the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast, I'm calling in from Toronto, coming to the end of our summer adventure, and heading back to Florida on Sunday.
I'm excited about this week's episode because it's a topic that's perfect timing for right now.
As we come toward the end of the summer and into the fall, if you can get your ducks in a row for what we're going to talk about here, building your listing and creating oil wells to get listings that continue to pump out new listings for you, then you've got a great lead in to the New Year with a lot of potential listings as soon as they are ready to start putting their homes on the market.
So I think you're going to enjoy this episode.
Links:
GoGoAgent.com
Listing Agent Scorecard
Be a Guest
Transcript: Listing Agent Lifestyle Ep085
Dean Jackson: Hello, and welcome to the Listing Agent Lifestyle podcast. My name's Dean Jackson. I'm calling in from Toronto today in the middle of our summer adventure. It's the beginning of August, heading back to Florida on Sunday. But I'm excited about this week's episode because this is a topic that is perfect timing right now. If you can get your ducks in a row for what we're going to talk about here, which is: building, listing, getting oil wells. How to get listings that just continue to pump out new listings for you. Imagine if you can get something like this started in September, then you've got a great lead-in to the new year, here, with a lot of potential listings as soon as everybody is ready to start putting their homes on the market. So, I think you're going to enjoy this episode. Here we go.
Okay. Number six, set up listing oil wells. That's my favorite terminology for this. All these things, we talk about generating as many buyer leads as you can, as fast as you can, because you're going to reap the harvest of them faster. Because if you're thinking about a two-year window, you're going to get those anyway.
But now, in addition to that, we want to start thinking about, "How can I get listings in this market?" Listings are such a great focus because they're so leverageable, and there's so many other opportunities that come from having listings. And if you can get a way that you can get listings without really having to do all the manual kind of prospecting that is traditionally associated with getting listings, cold calling, or door knocking, or calling FSBOs or any of those kind of things... Choosing an area, just choosing something that you're going to consistently approach as an area that you want to take over-
Speaker: Farming.
Dean Jackson: Farming. Absolutely. Starting with an area that you want to be a listing agent in a named community. I talk about, the ideal would be a named community with a thousand homes, and the highest turnover that you can get. But even that, when you really look at it, you want to make sure that you don't only make your decision based on the turnover rate. You want to look at the total yield of that neighborhood.
So, perfect example, when we were thinking about where we would set up our listing oil wells for Winter Haven, one of the things we considered were condos. And there are just about 2,000 condos in Winter Haven, and they have a turnover rate of 8%. So, there were a lot of... There was 160 condo sales. Then-
Speaker: Per month?
Dean Jackson: No-
Speaker: Per year?
Dean: Over the year, out of the 2000 condos, there were 160 sold. So, we contrasted that. You look at the lakefront homes, which are the most expensive thing in Winter Haven. There are 2,000 of those, 21 hundred, and they had a 4% turnover rate, where 84 of those homes sold in the last 12 months.
So, you look at one, you've got 160 opportunities over here, or you've got 84 opportunities over here. And you might think, "Well, I go over here because this is where the turnover rate is." But that's not where the story ends. When you look at it, that the average commission on a lakefront home in Winter Haven is $9,000 versus $1,200 for a condo commission. So you do the total yield on that, of the 160 times 1,200, there was like $192,000 or something in total yield, if you were to get all of it. And on the lakefront side, you get 9,000 times 84.
Dean: Exactly. That it's way more the total yield on that. So, that's where we chose to spend our time there, because it costs the same amount of money to mail postcards to the lakefront homes as it did to send to the condos. So your cost per lead, or your cost per transaction is much less. You don't need as many of them.
And so, when you look at it, going into that, part of the mindset is to commit to doing that for the full year. That you're going in, making that decision that it's not, "I'm going to mail this neighborhood, and then I'm going to mail it again, and then I'm going to go choose another neighborhood. Or I'm going to skip six months and go somewhere else, or I'm going to send a different thing." You want to have some stability to the system, to the way that you're doing it.
And what I often see is, I see a commonality in the way people do it, and it's really based on the numbers, how it works. If you look at it, that the only two numbers that are visible, mostly, in the first 90 days, let's say, if nobody lists their house in the first 90 days, if we know that it's... 90 days to six months is the incubation period, kind of thing, before they actually list their house from the time they ask for the report.
What happens is, when you mail a postcard in to a neighborhood for the first time, you get the most response that you're ever going to get, because they've never been presented the opportunity to have the free January, 2012 report on Winter Haven lakefront house prices, and they want it. There's that pent-up demand for it.
So you get 40 people raise their hand for the report, first month. And you spent $960 or whatever it was for mailing out the 2,000 postcards, and you feel, "Wow, this is really cool. I've never gotten this many leads on anything." So everybody, you've probably had that experience where you mail it and you're like, "Wow, this is great." And then the next month you mail it out again and you get 30 responses, which is still great, but nobody listed yet from... You sent the packages and nobody has listed yet. And now you've spent $1,800 and you've gotten 70 people to raise their hand.
And the third month you mail, and you get 20 people who respond, and you've spent another $900. So you've spent $2,700 and your response seems to be going down. And you're thinking, "well, this isn't working anymore. I'm not getting any listings." Meanwhile, nobody has been in the system for 90 days yet. And that's often where we see people bail. And so, it's like this colliding curves, the response is going down, the cost is going up, and it's accumulating every month.
But what you have to realize is to look at it, of what is it going to be when you get that first transaction? So, let's say that it's even four months before you get that first listing, and you've spent $3,600 cumulatively on sending out these postcards. And your response is now 15 people in the fourth month, which is about where it averages out, now. It goes 15, 12, 16, 17. You kind of reach that stability point where every month it's plus or minus a few off of that number.
But you've spent that $3,600. Now you get a listing, and it sells, and you've made $9,000, but you've spent $3,600 to get it. And now you are in profit on that, that that now becomes a self-sustaining oil well. You take back that money, and you go, and you start digging another well while you keep that one going. Because you still have, remember, the future value of that bundle of 80-plus leads that you've got now, who may pop out next January in an email that says, "Hi, Julie, we've got a lakefront house that we want to sell," and you know that they responded 12 months ago. So you've got that value built into it.
So you start setting up those oil wells and completely looking to dominate that neighborhood. And then you go on. And in December, we did another targeted mailing. We chose some very specific neighborhoods, and how many did we send out, 1,800 or something? For that mailing we did for the neighborhoods. It was about 1,800?
But they were all in a collective of smaller neighborhoods that had a hundred people or, some of them had 80 people. But Lillian put together the individual postcards for each of those neighborhoods. So, rather than try and have an umbrella of southeast Winter Haven real estate prices, we put, each of the neighborhoods had their own thing. So it was specific to them, which bumps up response. And we got pretty close to 50 responses on that, didn't we? Out of the 1,800, I mean, go into those narrow little neighborhoods. And now the whole thing is to set up that oil well to go into perpetuity.
Yeah, Dave.
Dave: Based on what you just said, and taking the same mindset of the annuity value of like we do with the buyer leads...
Dean: Right.
Dave: ... would there be any validity to going in and hitting a neighborhood for four months because you will have accumulated the names?
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dave: But then take your budget and move on to another neighborhood, and work that first one until it starts producing something? Because of the fact, as you say, in the beginning, the response goes this way and then goes down like that?
Dean: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well, what we find is that because of the way that... In the beginning, the reason it's front-end loaded is because they've never seen that offer. So all that pent-up demand is there.
Now, after four months, the people who are responding now are potentially the people who, they have to sell, because they've seen the opportunity and they haven't. And now all of a sudden they've got a transfer, or they've got something, and here's this card. So, I look at it as, there's never a month that we mail with no response. And so I look at it, I don't look at it as, "We're getting less response, so go." But I look at it that we're getting people who, most of the curiosity seekers are kind of weeded out of that-
Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And-
Dean: ... by the fourth month.
Dave: In the Washington D.C. area, when you're in the closer-in suburbs, there are rarely neighborhoods that approach a thousand homes. It's typically four, maybe 500.
Dean: Right.
Dave: And yeah, there have been times when I've been mailing to it where that monthly response has dipped to zero.
Dean: Right.
Dave: And so that's why I'm prompted to ask that question.
Dean: Well, what I was saying was, you look at a thousand homes. If you have to have a collective to get to a thousand, I'm renaming those cards to accommodate those neighborhoods.
So I may not get a response from this 200 home subdivision, but the collective, out of the thousand, is still going to get the response. That's why I say like a minimum number, as opposed to just choosing a 200-home subdivision and just continuing to mail to that, because there's not as much volume out of 200.
Dave: Okay.
Dean: Yeah. So I look at it as both. You want to continue with one thing. And I look at the whole thing.
Barb, what happened with you? You were doing-
Barb: [inaudible] I had raised this question-
Dean: Yeah.
Barb: ... before with you. And I think we're starting... I think our target date's March one, to go to... We picked a postal area called Edgewater, and we're going to do the waterfront homes. So it'll go out to another 500, but in our getting listings program, that has picked up since the last time I talked to you. Remember, I was like, "Oh, my God, we're not... "
But it has spun off three listings and sales within the last four months.
Dean: Right. All from that first neighborhood that you, that-
Barb: All from the first neighborhood.
Dean: Yeah.
Barb: And then-
Dean: It took nine months before you got the first one, right?
Barb: Yes, yes. No, we got the first one and then we didn't get anything more. And so it's gotten that, and then-
Speaker: Okay. And, and so it's, it's, uh, uh, gotten that and then, uh,
Barb: Yeah. And we do the reports every month. So out of a subdivision of 480, we've got 46 families on the reports list. That's been three listings sell, and then they're starting to spin off their other family members. We go to settlement this month on a daughter of... in another area, totally different area... of the mom whose house we sold.
Dean: Yeah. And that's all part of that index of looking at-
Barb: Just from 480, yeah.
Dean: Yeah. If every listing, if your listing index... We talked about knowing your numbers and your during unit is-
Barb: Right.
Dean: ... if for every listing you get, that's 1.5 transactions, or 1.7 or whatever... That's why even focusing on the listing stuff, there's so much leverage on that, too.
Speaker: Just a simple logistics question. Say you're mailing to 500. You get 50 responses, so the next month you are just mailing to 450, then?
Dean: Yes, exactly. You're taking out the people who respond, right.
Speaker: Okay. Is there a simple way to do that other than to hand sort through them, the addresses?
Dean: Usually, what we do is when you compile the list, you just remove those people from the Excel or the spreadsheet that you're using.
Barb: Control F.
Dean: Yeah.
Speaker: Right. But I take them off the tax record, because that seems to be the most current.
Dean: I understand. But you had to compile them into some format that you sent to the printer or whatever? Or do you just print mailing labels?
Speaker: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right from the tax records.
Dean: Okay. So that might be a little bit more cumbersome, then. See, here's the thing, though, is if you're just printing mailing labels, is it doing them collectively, or...
Speaker: It just takes from a particular area.
Dean: Yeah. Okay.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You're not doing it through a mail house.
Speaker: It's from our MLS.
Dean: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, but who's printing your postcards?
Speaker: I have been.
Speaker: You're printing yourself and mailing them yourself?
Speaker: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Speaker: Okay. So I create my mailing list the same way you do, through a public record on the MLS, and it's on an Excel spreadsheet. And then I create my postcard just exactly the same way his is. And I do it through Click2Mail, I upload it onto Click2Mail. I upload my address labels right there, and they send it out. And the day after I upload it, they're in the mail. That's how fast they are.
And then when the requests come in, we take them out of my Excel spreadsheet, and we move them over to the report sheet. So then I've got the running sheet of these are the people who are going to get reports next month and they're no longer going to get a postcard.
And then on the very last month, we send... or after the 12th mailing, then we send a 13th mailing that says, "Would you like to continue to keep receiving... Your year is up. Do you want to continue to keep receiving the report?" And then they email or call in and say, "Yep, I'd like to keep... " If they don't respond, we don't send them anymore. But if they do, we just keep sending the report. We don't send them the letters and the newsletter again, because they're the same. But we send them the MLS sheets of all the things that have listed and sold in the last six months.
Speaker: Even though they're the same? So, a couple things. If you still want to do your own mailings, just download your list into an Excel file and then create your mailing labels out of your Excel file each month, instead of right off your MLS. But the post office has started something new that if you go by carrier routes, it's called-
Dean: Every Door Direct Mail.
Speaker: Every Door Direct. And it's like 10 or 15 cents to mail instead of-
Barb: 16.
Speaker: 16 cents. It's cheaper than if you're-
Speaker: And where do I find that at?
Speaker: Still on the USPS-
Speaker: Oh, I go to USPS.com, select Click2Mail.
Speaker: But it's more specific. You can't pick this range of homes. You have to go by-
Dean: Pick a carrier route.
Speaker: ... the carrier routes.
Speaker: Oh, I have to pick my subdivisions, because I'm very specific. Mine have the subdivision name. So, it's the [inaudible 00:18:53] report, it's the Oak Valley report, it's the... I mean, I can get several subdivisions, I don't have any big subdivisions. So I've got 300 of this, and... But each one is very personalized.
Dean: Right. And that's the thing, that's what you really want to-
Speaker: So I have to... I can't do... because it'll be going to people who don't live in that sub. That would look stupid.
Dean: Yeah.
Speaker: I had a question for Barb. How long did it take to get the 48 people for the 480 homes? Because that's 10%, that's a-
Dean: Yeah.
Speaker: It's a huge return.
Speaker: That's big.
Dean: Yeah.
Barb: It's taken... I don't know. I think it's taken at least a year, maybe a year and a couple of months.
Dean: And that's pretty typical. So we are over 200 now, with the lakefront ones, so out of 2,100. So that's about typical, that you could get 10% over the course of the year. And that's a valuable thing. So-
Dean: What's that?
Dean: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I just sent out like 700 postcards, just sent them out, and we've had already seven requests.
Dean: Yeah.
Speaker: That's 1%.
Barb: That's 1%.
Speaker: Yeah. But that's just with them... They just went out.
Dean: Yeah.
Speaker: So on Monday there could be more.
Speaker: No. Some of those neighborhoods I've been sending to a while. Now I'm going to pick a new neighborhood and start March, and I'll get way more response because it's a neighborhood that's never seen it.
Dean: Right.
Speaker: But these are neighborhoods I've been sending to.
Speaker: Right. But sometimes I restart the whole neighborhood again because new people move in.
Dean: You're right, exactly. That's the whole point. Yeah.
Barb: I think consistency was the key. And so we've been doing it...
Dean: Yeah.
Barb: The only time... I know, it's not my middle name, but, and the only time-
Dean: But that's encouraging, right? And now moving up to waterfront homes.
Barb: Yeah.
Dean: I mean, we had Kenny, up in Massachusetts, did that same thing, chose waterfront homes and got a $750,000 listing. Choose the market that is going to have the highest yield. You might as well. If you're in a field full of coins, you might as well pick up the gold coins first.
Barb: Absolutely, absolutely.
Dean: Yeah.
Barb: One thing that we did have to do, we had to watch it. We had to watch and see if listings were coming up, if they were on our list. And nobody has done that so far, milk us for the reports and then list it with somebody else. But we did take off, so out of our Excel spreadsheet, the people who listed their property with... you know. Because we didn't mail to the people who listed their property with somebody else.
Speaker: Isn't there an advantage, though, of those people that have already subscribed to a report, of seeing a postcard again, down the line?
Dean: Well, it could be. And that's not-
Speaker: I don't think there's any disadvantage to it.
Dean: In Canada, we don't ever take it out because-
Speaker: Because you can't.
Dean: ... because it's the equivalent of the every door direct mail, the unaddressed ad mail. But if you can... Like the way ours is set up, it's easy to just take them out. So there's no need to record.
Dean: Yeah. And you're sending them the get top dollar newsletter. Yeah.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: So to mail them the postcard on top of sending that, too, is kind of like...
Speaker: Well, but the problem is, the postcard is nine cents to mail, plus the cost of the postcard, another four or five cents.
Dean: But here, it's-
Speaker: So it's very inexpensive.
Dean: ... 40-something cents.
Dean: Right. We've got to pay real postage.
Speaker: But if I had to do a direct mail, just the stupid stamp is 70 cents.
Speaker: Yeah, we're not Canada, so it's more expensive.
Speaker: We're cheaper on the direct stuff, but we get sucked on the other stuff.
Dean: Exactly.
Speaker: But we're profitable in Canada, unlike yours.
Speaker: And your money's worth more than ours now. There you go.
Speaker: Dean, a question, for the room. Does anyone, when they're starting a getting listings mailing campaign, do you pull out all the properties that have sold or conveyed within the previous several years, and just mail to those that haven't been sold, say five years and back?
Speaker: What's the advantage? If you can remove people who've bought their home in the last two years, is that a good thing to do?
Speaker: I have people that just bought a year ago, they want to sell now.
Dean: Yeah, and that happens. And it's interesting because you can do that. In say 2007, 2008, 2009, when people were concerned about short sales, or the thing, some people were concerned about them because they didn't want to get leads from people who didn't have equity. So they would mail only to people who've owned the home since prior to that. And then some people wanted to get short sales, so they would only mail to people who were upside down in the home, and do it in a way that gets them to raise their hand without having to say, "Are you behind on your payments?"
Speaker: Without the short-sale pitch.
Dean: Yes, without the short-sale pitch. That was that. So you can do whatever you want. You could mail, Dave, if you wanted to, a new area every single month, if you wanted to.
Speaker: The advantage of mailing to everybody, whether you think they're going to sell our not anyways, is it puts your name out there and you now look like the expert in that area. And maybe they're not going to sell, but maybe they have a friend who's going to sell, and they just got your postcard today. Your name is maybe the person that they're going to recommend.
Dean: Yeah, that happens a lot.
Speaker: So on that topic, because the normal postcard has your name on it in tiny, tiny little print on the front. So, does anybody put anything on the back? Perish the thought.
Speaker: So how does it get your name out if that's the case?
Speaker: My name's there. It's way little, but it's there. If they want to [crosstalk 00:25:09].
Dean: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: go to the website.
Speaker: And that's what's amazing. I've had people just stop by the office, because we get a lot of folks that are in town and they wanted it before the... or want to know if I could give them the report before they left town.
The ones that want to find who you are, they've-
Dean: There's a lot of older folks in Winter Haven, and Julie and Cindy have had a couple of people stop by the office with the postcard to respond. Yeah, interesting.
Speaker: How old are they?
Dean: They're like 64 or something.
Speaker: These were older.
Speaker: So you shouldn't make it too small then?
Dean: Right.
Dean: There you go. It's not broken. It's not broken, Tom. So there's so much value in doing that, in choosing an area that you want to become the neighborhood expert in, that you're going to be the one that they get there.
It seems like a lot of people... that most of you have done some form of getting listings, done the mailings. Good. Zach.
Zach: Are you doing any pay-per-click for the landing pages?
Dean: That's a good question, because here's some of the things that we can do with those tools that you have. So now what you have with getting listings is the 24hourhouseprices.com website that has your neighborhood landing page on it. That those are all, just like Amy said, are all indexed, and so if people are searching for that neighborhood, they find those things. And so it comes up like that anyway.
But here's a couple of things that you can do is to send people who are on your market-watch newsletter a notice that whenever you send out the postcard, put it in your market-watch newsletter saying, "Here's where to get the free January, 2013 report on Winter Haven lakefront house prices," or Winter Haven house prices, or Milton house prices, whatever it is, and you send that out.
Chuck sends that out and gets 40 or 50 people out of the six or 7,000 that are in the get response account that respond just from the get response account. So, whoever you're mailing your market watch to, a lot of those people are local, and by offering the report fat, you could just link them right to the landing page and they can fill it out there. You start thinking about that as a cool way of using that tool.
Speaker: I was going to say, that's where I could use that direct mail. I could just do a Clarkson house prices and mail to everyone in the zip code, and offer a report on Clarkson house prices and just send everything that's been listed or sold in Clarkson in the last six months.
Dean: Yes, exactly.
Speaker: I'm going to do that.
Dean: Yeah. So that's kind of a cool thing, what you can do with that. Putting that on your blog, if you have a blog, or anywhere that you can imagine. What we've been doing now on our infobox flyers is putting it on the back of the infobox flyers. So, we have a a pretty cool... If you've seen the new infobox flyer on Daily Dashboard, we're on the back, we have the getting listings report for the area, and then go to the website. So, there's two lead generators on the back, one for getting listings and one for your website that is the standard thing now.
But we've got backs of infobox flyers for Winter Haven, Lake Wales, Auburndale, Haines City, Lake Alfred, so that when we get a listing in that area, the back is already done. And then we just put the front with the picture and the URL that goes to the 24-hour house tours site.
And those are a great lead generator. Those are a really good lead generator. Very inexpensive, too.
Speaker: So I had a question back about putting it in my market watch. My market watch is just an email that comes out of my MLS, it's not something I physically mail.
Dean: Your what is?
Speaker: My market watch? So you said, "Add it to your market watch package" or something?
Dean: Oh, so you don't write a narrative like every week with your-
Speaker: I do, just through email. So add that at the bottom?
Dean: Yes, exactly. Or in part of the body, or in the [crosstalk 00:30:18]. Yeah, talk about it in the thing. "By the way, we just prepared the January report on Wash Park house prices," or whatever. We would say Winter Haven, or Chuck says Milton, and just send people to that-
Speaker: Web address.
Dean: ... the Milton page, or if you're doing it for your Clarkson website, you have the Clarkson report and it goes to clarksonhouseprices.com, and that is a great lead generator because you're getting local people.
Speaker: So just in my weekly email-
Dean: Yes.
Speaker: ... that I'm sending out once a month, mention that?
Dean: There's so many opportunities in that weekly email. If you start thinking about the opportunities that... You start featuring silent market homes in that is a great thing, too. "Hey, I'm just going to talk to some sellers about a three-bedroom house, if that's what you're looking for, email me, I'll get you all the details before it gets on the market." People love the inside deal, the inside scoop, so that you're engaged with people about something. And how better than to go into a listing appointment with a list of people who have emailed you asking for information, wanting to be the first one to know about that house? It's pretty neat.
And there we have it, another great episode. And if you'd like to continue the conversation, you can go to listingagentlifestyle.com, you can download a copy of the Listing Agent Lifestyle book, the manifesto that shares everything that we're talking about here. And you can be a guest on the show if you'd like to talk about how we can build a listing agent lifestyle plan for your business. Just click on the "Be A Guest" link at listingagentlifestyle.Com.
And if you'd like to join our community of people who are applying all of the things we talk about in the Listing Agent Lifestyle, come on over to gogoagent.com. It's where we've got all the programs, all the tools, everything you need to get listings, to multiply your listings, to get referrals, convert leads, and to find buyers. And you can get a free, truly free, no credit card required trial for 30 days at gogoagent.com. So, come on over, and I will see you there.