Plan Now To Have A Great Year

Ready to get your business revved up and roaring for 2015? Then it’s good to have a plan, and lots of smart people out there have helpful advice on setting goals and staying on track in the field of real estate.

Right-size those goals
The top goal on the list of Inman News contributor Wade Vander Molen is to “set several smaller, realistic goals.” Instead of jotting down one massive annual achievement, such as doubling sales in 2015, set smaller quarterly goals, he suggests. Like breaking a long to-do list into smaller, less-daunting chunks, setting reasonable goals can help keep you focused and successful over the long haul. Read more

Put yourself in pictures
Ever dreamed of being in movies? Vander Molen urges you to step up this year and star in your own. Introduce yourself to potential clients and give them a chance to, well, just plain like you with a short video uploaded to YouTube. The platform is free to use, and videos show up with other types of content in Google searches.

If you’ve got the “you” video covered but would like to keep making movies as part of your marketing efforts, the article “Invest in evergreen video: the marketing gift that keeps on giving” offers some great ideas and tips for creating videos that will bring clients to you again and again. Read more

Know your business’s heart
Of course, clients are the beating heart of any real estate agent’s business, and Vander Molen and other realty experts hammer on the importance of organizing and updating your contact database as the year begins. After all, it’s hard to manage client communications if you don’t have a good grip on who the clients are.

The RISMedia article “Your 2015 Business Plan — In Less Than 5 Minutes” offers a list of questions to help agents get a better picture of what they should be doing better this year, and many of those questions focus squarely on how well you communicate with buyers and sellers. For example, at No. 3, the article asks: “Do you have a scheduled time each day or week when you communicate with your clients, contacts or friends? Do you do this consistently?” Read more

Here’s To Happy Sellers

Speaking of client contact, a copy of Homes & Land featuring their home is like a wonderful little gift in the mail for your advertised home sellers. When you place an ad with us, our Client Contact program sends each of your advertised sellers a copy of the magazine and a flyer promoting you and your marketing efforts. We also explain how your sellers can go online and see their property featured on HomesAndLand.com.

“Our sellers love it. They love to see their pictures in the magazine, they love the glossy print, and they especially love the at-home direct mail. When it goes out to the public and they receive their own copy of it, they’re excited about it.”

Text codes on listings advertised in Homes & Land magazine offer potential homebuyers a quick way to get more information on a property. Codes also pay off for agents, allowing you to capture a lead when a house-hunter expresses interest in a listing.

To make using text codes as easy as possible for potential buyers, it’s smart to publish texting instructions in any advertisement that includes listings with text codes, as illustrated below. For added interest, the page-top instructions could say “FOR MORE INFORMATION AND PHOTOS, TEXT 81035 THEN TEXT CODE.” While texting instructions can be found elsewhere in each Homes & Land magazine, placing the info right on your ad offers consumers the clearest path to immediate action — and gives you the best chance for leads.

Here are a couple of other best practices for text codes in printed real estate listings:

• For the most effective presentation, place each listing’s text code on the listing photo.

• Keep listing information short and concise. That way, house-hunters have a reason to text to learn more.

NOTES FROM ALL OVER

Buying Looks Better All The Time

Business website MarketWatch does the math and finds that buying now appears to be about twice as affordable as renting. The calculation’s cost of owning a home does not include property taxes and homeowners insurance, but it still has the power to wow, and renting appears to be getting more expensive all the time. Read more

And Now Let Us Peer Into The Future

No one knows for sure what the future will hold for real estate this year, but experts are doing their best to guess, and quite a few of them say 2015 is looking good. Click an item below to read the article referenced:

• Listen in as a passel of “power brokers” prognosticate on the coming year for RISMedia’s Real Estate magazine.

• Dow Jones & Co.’s MarketWatch, meanwhile, sees sunnier skies ahead in real estate. “Improvements could mean ideal conditions for the industry in the coming year,” the website says in its article summary.

• And who can resist predictions under a headline like this? Courtesy of REALTORMag, we have: “10 Reasons 2015 Will Rock for Real Estate.”

“Confident consumers are more likely to spend on big ticket items, which is sweet music to the ears of the real estate market.”