This was passed along to me by Benn:
We are a small real estate company in Md. We are trying to expand our clientele do you have any advice on how we can grow our business. We are looking to attract more listings without paying a lot of advertising expense. We tried the expired listings but most of the time the homeowner phone number is not listed.
Thanks,
(name deleted)
I’ve deleted your name, so in case you feel insulted by what I am about to tell you – you can feel a little less insulted because no one but you will know who wrote the note above. Including me. I couldn’t find you, no matter what I tried. The very first thing I attempted to do was to find out a little bit about you – what you are doing now. There are so many different companies who seem to have a similar name – that there was no way for me to land on your web site. If you even have one. You didn’t give your name or any contact information when you wrote this and I am going to assume this is somewhat standard operating procedure.
The first problem I see you being up against isn’t the size of your company, because that is irrelevant. What sort of leaps off the page is you are very out of communication with the world around you. Do most of the people who live or work within a hundred yards of where you office even know your name or what you do? If they saw you on the street would many of them even know you sell real estate? I believe this is your primary barrier to confront and handle: come out of non-existence with the people in your immediate vicinity. Start there. Then widen that circle. Get out and talk to people. Get rid of (as in completely rid of) the idea that you need permission to approach someone – like you need someone to issue you a license of some sort before you open your mouth. You didn’t find any phone numbers in the print-out of the expired listings. So what? Just give up on expireds? Maryland is a pretty small state. You could probably drive across the whole state in a few hours. You could absolutely drive completely across the town where you live in 90 minutes. Show up at their door. Ask them if they still want to sell their home.
You don’t want to pay a lot for advertising for two reasons: you don’t have the money to pay and you wouldn’t know what to put in the ad anyway. Okay so skip advertising for now. Prospect. Learn what people consider valuable just by trial and error. See enough people and ask enough people what they might be interested in and in very short order (a few hundred people from now) you will know what to say and what not to say when you are talking to a prospective customer.
There are exactly two methods of getting business in our business: marketing or prospecting. Learn to effectively do one or both of those or leave real estate sales. Fortunately, or unfortunately, those are the only three choices. The skill of getting customers is the "important skill" in our business. For a really bright future make this important thing your important thing.