Listing Syndication Systems

One of the challenges that we all face as Realtors® is learning  how to manage seller expectations.

Having the hard conversations and doing what is right is merely the beginning.

We all need to strive to learn what REALLY works, when it comes to marketing our sellers’ properties.

How do you satisfy your sellers’ expectations while not throwing away your hard-earned dollars on ineffective advertising?

Typically, sellers like to see their homes advertised everywhere. And, if your town is like ours, you have at least one agent putting on a show in newspapers and homes magazines -  in essence, selling false hope to land more listings.

The fact is: newsprint advertising doesn’t ‘SELL’ homes – it’s simply another form of ‘personal promotion’ and in that sense, it’s the industry’s ‘dirty little secret.’

So why do agents feel compelled to play that game when there are much better ways to sell homes that both preserve personal and professional integrity?

Why play that game when your sellers expect you to be the Real Estate Rock Star they hired and the one you yearn to be?

The problem is that most agents have a ‘need to please’ and part of that need is to meet seller expectations regardless of whether those expectations are well founded or not.

In a listing appointment, when asked, “Where are you going to promote our home?” some agents say, “Everywhere.”  And, in a futile attempt to live up to that impossible expectation, they waste money on print advertising.

So that’s what needs to be dealt with: the need to please versus figuring out how to seriously market listings…which is the more ethical thing to do.

We have subscribed to, studied and used the most innovative training available.  For the most part, it is simply outdated. Using canned scripts has simply gone the way of the dinosaur.  Often times, they do not match who you are as a person and resort to manipulative trickery to “convince” sellers to make decisions they otherwise wouldn’t.

Top agents don’t do that – I don’t do that.

So then, how do we meet the needs of sellers and learn to become Real Estate Rock Stars in the eyes of our clients?

Believe it or not, there is a right and wrong way to get homes sold and keep sellers totally satisfied.

Many national trainers taught agents to go ‘nose-to-nose’ with sellers in overcoming objections – that is simply THE wrong approach.

Simply do what your sellers want, but are not saying, “GET MY HOME SOLD PLEASE!”

So, if what they actually want is simply to get their home sold and to know that they are being well served – DO JUST THAT!  Make a habit of extraordinary and exceptional service.

Here’s how…

First, tell them the truth, educate them.  The fact is that the ‘net is more efficient than print. According to NAR, 90% of home buyers begin their search online.  So, next to your MLS, the ‘net is the best place for your listings to be found.  It is simply the most target rich environment that buyers go to for information.

Then, get your clients’ homes posted on as many websites as possible. This is where most agents, including us (until we figured out how to do it), fail miserably.

Next, know that it’s not what you know that’ll kill you, but what you don’t.  If you are like we were just a couple years back God save you because:

  • We didn’t know how to put our listings on thousands of websites without entering each one individually.
  • We didn’t know if it would make any difference in foot traffic and,  therefore, closings.
  • We didn’t know how easy it would be to capture and quantify information on who visited our listings.
  • We didn’t know if we had the tech savvy to do it ourselves, or how complicated it would be.

BUT, in our gut, we KNEW that if we could get our listings enough of the right  exposure, we’d kill two birds with one stone:

1. Sell more homes quicker.

2. Satisfy our client’s needs to get great exposure.

We also knew that many internet tools are FREE – and being the tightwads we are – that was enough incentive for us to get off our butts.  We putt our noses to the grindstone to try and break the code of getting our listings LISTED on every real estate related site possible online without doing it ‘by hand’.

We did it, and before long, our listings were popping up on 1,000′s of real estate related sites.  Our listings are now selling at nearly 3 times the rate of our competitors.

That’s cool by itself, but there are even more benefits than just that…

If you implement this system, you will be able to show sellers that your marketing reaches ‘all four corners’ of the internet.

This is cool, simply:

  1. Pull up a search of one of your listed properties with 1,000′s of links;
  2. Pull up a search of one of your competition’s listed properties (with likely less than 100 links).

When you show your sellers how pervasive your marketing is, they will have no choice but to choose you over all others.

Think about it: Super Agent John came in and touted that he was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and all you did was address the direct need and desire of the sellers.

We do this at listing appointments all the time and it blows our clients away…

We Google one of our listings and show them the number of links to it online. In the case below, 1,540 links!

Then we do a similar search with Google by searching a competitor’s listing and time and time again our competitors have fewer than 100 online ads/links to their listing.

100 v. 1540 Google indexed links to information about each and every one of our listings…

Hands down this is the most effective way to get listings and to sell sell them in today’s climate.

Another benefit is that nearly 75% of our listings are selling during the initial listing period. Our competitors, according to our local board statistics, are selling fewer than 20% of their listings during the same period.

Why do we sell more quicker?

Simply put, more eyes online means more foot traffic, more Realtor feedback, quicker reductions (if needed) and faster sales.

And in this market, SPEED is important.

Learn to SYNDICATE your listings. Posting your listings on the typical real estate sites is a good start, but all agents are doing that these days.  You need to be posting your listings to as MANY sites as possible. These include: social media sites, social bookmarking sites , video sites, video directory sites, podcast sites, podcast directory sites, blogs, RSS feeds, etc.

However, to enter your listing into 1,000′s of sites one at a time would take forever. We did just that for a while until we figured out the power of AGGREGATORS…

See, there are aggregation sites out there that will pick up your listing off of certain sites and then automatically repost it to other sites without you lifting a finger. So the trick is to list your listings on sites that get picked up by other sites and utilize services that syndicate your listings to more sites.

Here are a few to start with:

vFlyer – Online flyer system that syndicates to other sites. Beautiful flyers.

Craigslist – Online classified site that gets picked up by other sites.

youTube – Online video site that gets picked up by other sites.

RealBird – Online listing site that syndicates to other sites.

If you start with just these few sites, you too will be able to sit down with sellers, do a Google search on their address and show them hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages where their particular home is advertised. (awesome for price reductions)

This is powerful stuff.

If you haven’t signed up for our free training videos, we have more on Listing Syndication there. Sign up on the Agent Bailout Blueprint page.