real estate email tips

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Location, Location, Location: Drone Video Footage for the Biggest Picture

Published March 9, 2017 by Real Estate Leads

Not only will every real estate agent be familiar with the ‘location, location, location’ adage, but we imagine nearly every one of them will also agree with it. The home itself is one thing, but where it stands and all that’s around it is just as much – if not more – of the equation. As always, we’re very happy to discuss tips and strategies for real estate agents in Canada. Here’s one that’s not only super effective, but also involves some good old fashioned fun as well!

Realtors in generations past would take plenty of photos of a listed home’s nearby features and the neighbourhood as a whole, but they wouldn’t have the time or inclination to take shots beyond say a half-kilometre beyond the property. And all of those photos were taken from eye-level, unless of course you had one that was inclined to climb trees!

Enter the Drones

All of this has now changed with the introduction and increasingly common use of drones these days. Many models have an integrated video camera that can be remotely activated from the controls and uploading the video to your smartphone, notebook, tablet, or desktop is easy. The appeal this will have with both real estate agents and selling homeowners (including FSBOs) is easy to understand. Now you’ll have photos and videos of the home from the standard perspective AND a really appealing and informative view of the large neighbourhood and even the city or town itself.

Cameras that feature a wide-angle lens with panorama view option are preferable, as is 1080p video resolution for obvious reasons. Choose a sunny day and get your drone up high and video rolling! Flying drones is surprisingly easy, and it’s been reported that the average user is ‘fully proficient’ with operation of the drone within 30 minutes. It’s definitely not a difficult task, and the higher-end models are surprisingly stable in the air and easy to lift off / land.

A Surprisingly Versatile Marketing Tool

Video footage generated from a drone can also be utilized for more specific purposes, and shared in formats outside of the standard uploading method. For instance, drones are excellent for providing an up-close analysis of the condition of a home’s roof or chimney. And higher-end drones will allow you to stream live, either on their own or via your mobile internet device of choice.

The newest drones have built-in redundancy. If an operator lets go of the controls, it simply hovers in place. In addition, standard prices for high-quality drones are expected to drop to as little as $500, though drones with higher-end features, including gyro-stabilized platforms, which help steady the video images, will still run in the vicinity of $1,000 to $1,200. The smaller gyro-stabilized drones, with the rotors shut off, can also be handheld and walked inside a home to provide steadier images during a video walk-through.

Have you already got on board with drones as part of your marketing efforts, or are you considering purchasing one and doing so? We’d love to hear about your experiences with them, and – as always – the more listings you have to try out your new toy video recording them from on high, the better. So sign up with Real Estate Leads right here and get a big online boost to your lead generation efforts today!

To Be A FSBO… Or Not

Published February 4, 2017 by Real Estate Leads

We’ll start this week’s post by explaining that we’re well aware that this is a real estate topics blog and that the majority of our readership will be real estate professionals who’ll be well aware of what exactly ‘FSBO’ means. We’re going to take a quick moment though, to explain this wacky acronym to anyone who’s not so familiar with it.

FSBO (fizz-bo) stands for For Sale By Owner, and it’s a term used to describe a homeowner who’s made the decision to list and sell their home on their own, without the assistance of a realtor. Now we’re similarly aware that the same majority of you will obviously recommend against such a practice with vehemence, but let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons to being a FSBO. After all, being a well-informed realtor who can offer perspectives without bias or prejudice reflects very well upon you and it’s good to be able to appraise prospective clients of both sides of the coin, no matter how it may end up.

Advantages

Avoiding Commission

This one’s simple to understand from the seller’s perspective, as much as it’s in contradiction to your interests as a listing agent. On average, they’ll pay about 6% to sell their home—split evenly between you and the buyer’s agent. They should factor in the realtor’s commission when determining the asking price for their property. Their decided-upon sale price should be enough to pay off the remaining mortgage balance on the property, plus pay the commission. If that calculation leaves a little bit to be desired, this is one reason they might consider becoming a FSBO.

There are Plenty of Selling Resources These Days

The days of creating your own yard sign and then putting an ad in the local newspaper’s classified section are long gone. Now there are an array of resources available to help you sell a home. These included locale-specific real estate purchase agreements that can be found online, and local title companies or a real estate attorney can help with the legalities and answer questions – often online as well if you can’t contact them in person or by another means. This is huge for folks in more rural areas. Perhaps more important though are the excellent resources available on the web for advertising your property. You can include photos of your house, as well as detailed information about the property, including the number of bedrooms, upgrades, square footage and other features. The Internet is pretty much the greatest thing to ever happen to FSBOs!

Sense of Accomplishment

This one doesn’t need a whole lot of explanation. If you’re the type who likes doing all manner of things yourself, and saving money accordingly – you’d probably make a great and determined FSBO.

Disadvantages

Lack of Access to MLS (Multiple Listings Service)

This is definitely drawback numero uno when it comes to choosing to go FSBO as compared to working with a real estate agent. Working within a city or town’s MLS is restricted to participating (and paying) realtors exclusively, and having a home for sale featured in the MLS is of paramount effectiveness in putting the home in front of the largest number of buyers and the realtors they’re working with. It’s pretty much the bible in this regard, and selling your home without having it featured there puts you at an immediate disadvantage when it comes to exposure and finding the ‘right’ types of prospective buyers – no doubt about it.

Lack of an Industry-Professionals Advice Regarding Pricing, Etc.

A qualified and experienced realtor is often invaluable with the way he or she understands the value of a home in the bigger context of the ever-changing housing market in any specific locale. You may think your home is worth X-amount – and you may have some very solid reference points in coming up with that number – but it may simply not be a realistic asking price given the conditions of the market and any of the other factors that can come into play. The majority of which are beyond the scope of understanding for anyone other than a professional realtor.

Pricing yourself realistically but fairly goes a long way in having you sell the home within the timeline you envision, and FSBOs often struggle right out of the gate this way.

Being Overwhelmed / Intimidated with Requisite Paperwork

There’s a LOT of paperwork involved in selling or buying a home, and often more than the average person could ever imagine possible. Without having a realtor who’s gone through these documents many times previously on your side, you may well find yourself moving along at a snail’s pace, and becoming immensely frustrated accordingly.

You Alone are the Open House Coordinator

This one’s also fairly self-explanatory. Prospective buyers will always want to tour homes they’re considering buying, and if you choose not to work with a realtor you’re very much on your own when it comes to scheduling, staging, promoting and so on and so forth. An agent can filter calls and inquiries from other real estate agents and coordinate open houses and showings for your property, so you can go about your everyday life and not have to concern yourself with it – and it always involves a LOT of concerns. And last but not least, a realtor can speak of your home and it’s attractive features and amenities in a smooth, convincing manner in a way you simply can’t. It’s a developed skill.

Here at Real Estate Leads, we provide realtors with qualified leads generated online and exclusive to them and their region in Canada. We also like to talk about trends in real estate, and if you’ve got anything to add to this post or any other we’d like to hear what you’ve got to say!

4 Tips for timely responses to prospect and client emails

Published June 17, 2015 by Real Estate Leads

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Our email inbox never sleeps, email potentially comes in at any hour of the day, it just keeps piling up. Aside from sorting through important messages and spam, we could all use an idea or two more on how to increase efficiency, response time, & productivity.

To make your workday easier and potentially your paycheck bigger, here are some proven ideas:

One: Sign up with a web host that comes with a Spam Filtering service

Keeping spam out of your inbox is the first key to saving you time. We recommend 4GoodHosting web hosting and they use a dedicated spam filtering server, that is what we use; and for us it has been working great. All non-spam emails come in, except most every spam message. They are partnered with SpamExperts, which maintain a global database of known spam messages, and moves them to another folder where you can review them later if you wish.

Two: Filter and sort email automatically with your email client software (Outlook/Live/Gmail)

You can also set filtering on your email client, such as Outlook, to filter all email that is not sent to you directly, for instance. Also, you can have your email software automatically sort email from friends or family into folders – so you can keep the focus of your inbox mostly on new prospects and existing customers.

Three: Create some macros / auto-responses for faster responses

One of the ways real estate prospects and clients, and even former clients, appreciate and bond to you is through how fast you respond to their email inquiries. It doesn’t work against you to try to be an agent that regularly responds quickly or at least consistently in a reasonable amount of time.

So we suggest producing a handful of standard replies or even one-liners that you can easily insert (depending on your email software) or copy and paste; this also cuts down on the chance you would be at a loss for words, or would be otherwise proofreading.

Most of us get the same type of emails rather repetitiously, general inquiries, event invitations, you-name-it, etc. So by writing responses that sound as sincere as possible, create a dozen or so auto-responses. A great place for inspiration for this task is your own sent folder. You’ll be happier armed with the ability to write back instead of perhaps pulling over in parking lots to type messages on your mobile-size screen.