Shifting Your Focus In Order To Sell More Homes

Shifting Your Focus In Order To Sell More Homes

There are some shifts in the real estate marketplace that have been taking place over the last year. One of the most important strategies you have as a real estate agent in order to be successful in selling homes is to be aware of shifts and changes in the marketplace. 

When our market was super hot that the prices were going up thousands of dollars per hour- Nestor knew that the market was going to go bust so we got out of the residential marketplace and switched over to the parcel assemblage niche- putting properties and owners together for developers and builders to buy. 

Then Nestor said a few years later that we would need to shift again since the signal that the land assemblage niche was not going to be lucrative any longer was when builders stopped going through with the sales and terms. 

Nestor said that short sales were coming around the corner- this was in 2007 so we positioned ourselves to be there when the market crashed. At that time, there were no designations for short sales. There were no rules. We did very well during those years with having a high 98% success rate in closing our short sale listings and staying in the top 3% of closed sales for our MLS. 

So what are the new shifts? 

Developers are back in the marketplace. New construction is happening again. Those are 2 great niches. 

Where are you focusing your marketing? 

The Move-Up buyer pool is one of the markets that is shrinking. There are 18% less move up buyers. Move up buyers typically are between the ages 36-45 years old. These move up buyers were born in the 70's. 

Think about it. How can these people be move up buyers when they have negative equity in their properties in most cases, still. In most cases, these would be move up buyers bought their first homes about 10 years ago at the peak of the market and we are not anywhere near those prices again, at least not yet. 

Some of these buyers are instead coming into the marketplace as boomerang buyers. They are starting over again and have been through short sales or foreclosures. 

We have always said that if you want to make more money selling real estate you either have to sell more units or sell higher priced units. I would rather sell fewer homes at higher prices any day over selling more units. 

The Luxury home buyer niche is growing and at a good rate. 

Stock prices have been going up and the interest rates are still low, this fuels the luxury niche. 

This niche are people between the ages of 46 to 60. These buyers are the tail end of the baby boomers. They are wealthier than any other generation before them. In many situations, their kids are grown and typically both spouses have successful careers or own their own businesses. They also have less debt. 

This group is good with their money. They have success in business equity, they own financial securities, stocks, bonds and mutual funds. They also tend to have income producing real estate, trusts and life insurance. 

The best part about this niche- is there are  A LOT of them! 

The best group if you love to help people is the older baby boomer generation, the ones who are turning 65. 55+ communities are popular with this age group but we also must consider multi-generational households who would not qualify for active adult communities. 

8 million people will be turning 65 over the next 10 years. This group tends to be very loyal so if you develop the loyalty they will refer their friends to you. In this group- you will see a lot of them will move in social groups. One couple will move into a community, fall in love with the community and start telling their friends about it. Soon more and more within that social sphere move into the same community. 

While Florida and Arizona have typically benefited from this group of buyers that is no longer the case. Yes, they will continue to flock to Arizona and Florida but many in this group will retire in places like Logan Utah, Boise Idaho and Fargo North Dakota. They also will move to places close to their grandchildren. 

Be ready to shift in your marketplace. Embrace the different niches you can work within to be successful and sell more houses this year! 

LIVE In Person SEO WORKSHOP

Sign up today to get your spot reserved for my LIVE Event: SEO Workshop 

SEO Workshop – Hands On Training with Katerina Gasset- Online Business Strategist, SEO, Branding for the internet and social media. 

Book now by clicking here. 

Date: Thursday March 26- 2015 

Where: Country Inn conference center in Gainesville Florida 

Time:  12 p.m. to  4 p.m. 

Limited spaces are available in the conference room so reserve your spot today. 

The early bird pricing is only good until February 15, 2015 so book your spot now. 

We will be covering: 

1. Keyword research the right way- how and why 

2. Setting up your silos on your sites- doing the steps 

3. Dominating your way to the top – flying under the radar 

4. How to push your sites up to the top of page one once they are found on page two

You will discover how to add social media to this mix along with other tips that will help you rise to the top. 

Your investment is only $197.00! 

If you are a Listing Experts Academy your investment is only $97. 

The space is limited at this hotel so reserve your spot today! 

Click here to reserve your spot today! 

You can fly into Gainesville or if you are in Florida you can drive to Gainesville from most areas easily. 

If you are coming from Miami or the Keys you may rather fly as it will be faster to fly in that case. 

There is a national baseball tournament that weekend so make sure you make your hotel reservations now before all the hotels get booked up. The tournament does not start until Friday but families will be flying in from all across the United States and many will arrive on Thursday. 

Katerina Gasset has been teaching, speaking and blogging about SEO since 2007. She walks her talk. Whatever she is teaching you how to do, she does for her companies and for her clients.

Katerina was the keynote speaker for ActiveRain in Atlantic City teaching agents how to get listings from blogging on the internet. Katerina has been quoted in Forbes magazine, keynote presenter for RealBird webinars, REBAR camp instructor, private consultant for brokers and agents around the U.S. and Canada.

She has spoken at REOMAC events, NAHREP and AREAA conferences and trainings on SEO, Social Media, Branding and internet marketing.

Katerina has successfully helped agents get to page one on Google. Katerina founded Listing Experts Academy in order to get all the branding, SEO and online marketing trainings in one place for easy access for members.

Katerina is the top blogger on ActiveRain, a real estate network with over 250,000 members.

She lives with passion, her presentations are energetic and full of actionable steps. Anyone who hears Katerina speak walks away with not just the knowledge and how to's but also the motivation to get going to the top of their business and Google!

 

Katerina has been a real estate agent since 1983. She has been licensed in California, Washington state and Florida. Her husband, Nestor Gasset owns International Properties & Investments LLC – a real estate brokerage in Wellington Florida.

 

My Top Prediction for SEO in 2015

My Top Prediction for SEO in 2015 

With all the talk, double-talk, assumptions and guessing about what is what with SEO these days there are a few things you can count on no matter what happens with Google and other search engines. 

You will not go wrong by drilling down into your niche, flying under the radar of the big 4.

Choose terms that their SEO departments are not going after. These big guys spend over a $100,000 a day for PPC and they want the biggest bang for their buck so they are not going to piddle around with terms that you can still make good contacts, closings and income from. 

My top prediction for SEO moving forward is about branding. 

I believe that just as I stated about 9 years ago that it was time to start building your own personal brand on the internet because Google is all about brand. 

They have a patent for their Panda algorithm that specifically discusses the importance of ranking search results. 

Then add on to that the fact that Eric Schmidt (when he was CEO of Google) stated that the internet is a cesspool and that brands would be who cleans it up. 

Think about why the big 4 were able to capture so many top spots on Google page one for the very terms that real estate agents for years before the arrival of those “brands” were dominating by themselves. The problem was agents were driving their sites with IDX and home search results trying to be the search engine for the home buyers in anonymity which came back to bite them because that is absence of brand.

Moving forward into 2015 there are ways in which you can beat the big 4 in organic search using SEO and I predict that this will by establishing the following brands: 

1. Your name or your name + real estate agent as a brand ( if you have a famous actor's name)

2. Your company name ( if you are the broker/ owner) as a brand

3. Your niche keyword terms as a brand

There was such a misconception in the SEO world about brands for years before Panda and Penguin, etc. The focus was on generic keywords and not brands.  For years, that thinking was put into practice. I have always stated from the beginning of learning SEO that creating your brands online was going to be the way that you can set yourself apart from your competitors.

Those who followed this advice weathered the storm of Panda and Penguin and of the big 4 dominance on the SERPS.

If you are not one of those, it is not too late to start establishing yourself as a brand on the internet in 2015.

We started really working to dominate our company brand on the internet about 6 months ago. Before that for years we had some competing real estate companies who share the same name as our company: International Properties and Investments LLC.  One of those companies had almost the entire page of page one on google serps packed in for them. 

Today I looked to see how we are doing and to my pleasant surprise, in Google incognito window and logged out of Google, we have ALL 10 spaces on page one with our company name and platforms that have our company profiles.

• Our point 2 agent website is #1 with our Google local page attached,
• #2 is the brand new EMD (Exact Match Domain) site that I am in the process of creating which will become our branded main company website,
• #3 is a Yelp review about our brand, company name,
• #4 is our facebook business page for our company,
• #5 is our ActiveRain profile,
• #6 and #7 is our market leader website,
• #8 is our Google plus business page,
• #9 is our Pinterest business company name page and
• #10 is a YouTube playlist named for our company brand on my personal YouTube channel. 

Get your Free SEO Field Guide – containing your checklists of onpage and offpage SEO tasks, click here.

We can teach you how to do this yourself in our SEO courses or you can order done for you packages which include our virtual assistants to help you with your marketing. 

ListHub Listing Agreement Ends With Zillow

ListHub Listing Agreement Ends With Zillow 

The contract that Zillow has with ListHub expired on April 7, 2015. 

ListHub has had a contract and provides the data to the big Z of all of our listings. 

Move.inc who operates Realtor.com owns the listing syndicator, ListHub. 

Move.inc was acquired by News Corp in December. 

Right now the big Z gets a few hundred thousand listings out of the 3.6 million that are displayed on Z now. 

They have been getting the listings fed to their site since 2011 through ListHub. 

The contract is not going to be renewed. A spokesperson for Z said that they are going directly to the MLS participants and brokers to get the data feeds and they are building their own listing syndication tool. They plan to get more listings from our MLS providers. 

Florida REALTORS magazine reports: 

In a statement, Move Inc. said that “ListHub has been negotiating in good faith a new listing distributing and reporting agreement with Zillow on terms that reflect the best interests of the brokerage industry. As communicated in public announcements, Zillow decided to end those negotiations and announced the launch of their own platform. Zillow chose their own route for their business model and interests.”

Z does not see any issues with converting the data over to the Data Dashboard broker feeds since many of the listings that will get shut off are those in large urban sectors. The only ones that they think might not get pulled in are some rural areas. 

You can see where each side stands. We have said in the past that the business model of z was to create their own model.  I think that many of the things that they “said” are going to be different than what they are going to end up doing. Something to think about…

Every Listing Is Won Before You Ever Step Foot In The Seller’s Front Door

Every Listing is Won Before You Ever Step Foot in The Seller's Front Door

Sun Tzu said over 2,500 years ago in the ‘The Art of War',  “every battle is won before it is ever fought.”

Before you ever step foot on the battlefield the battle has already been won.

If you want to be a listing agent or want to be a better listing agent reading Sun Tzu's ‘The Art of War' is a must read.

The battle is nearly always the one going on inside your own head. 

The first step to winning the listing is to “know thyself”. You must know who you are, what makes you tick, what keeps you up at night and what you want to jump out of bed in the morning for. You must understand your limited beliefs, where they come from, deal with them and then, let them go. You must get out of your own way. 

If you have any sabotaging behavior ( and all people do) ~ I can assure you that you will lose the listing before you cross the door's threshold. 

I get calls from agents who are concerned about going on listing appointments only to lose the listing to another agent. When we work on discovering what is it that creates this reality for them, in most instances it is all about that inner battlefield. 

It rarely is about the listing presentation itself. 

Even if we can trace the losses back to points in the listing presentation inevitability those points being missed or being made are connected to the agent's mindset. It always goes back to this one pivotal point: the conversations going on inside your head and what your subconscious wants to create for you. 

The second step is to know the seller. You must know the seller. Have you done your research on the property? Have you looked up the tax appraiser's report on this seller? Have you checked to see if there are any liens on the property, are they in lis pendens status? Have you checked on the MLS to see the property listing history and sales data of this property? All of these are critical to you knowing how to discuss listing the property. 

Have you checked out the seller on social media? Have you checked their facebook page, twitter, linkedin and online? Finding out every single detail you can about the seller will help you connect with the seller. 

The third step is sincerity. Does the seller feel like you just want a listing or does the seller feel like you care about their problems, pains and issues? Connecting with the seller on common ground is the key to building trust. 

We all know that people only do business with those they know, like and trust. Be that person. 

The text of The Art of War is in the public domain.

Here is a link to a downloadable pdf file of the book. Just click on the download link on this library: http://www.paxlibrorum.com/books/taowde/

Many people will take works and text that is in the public domain and add commentary to it in order to copyright and publish the works in book form.

You can buy one that is annotated on Amazon The Art Of War
 from $3.99 to $7.99 for a paperback book, the audio version is $1.99 and the Kindle version is .99 cents.

If you would like the simplified text file,  the MIT has one here: http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.1b.txt.

Listing Experts Academy is the perfect program for agents who strive to be the best listing agents in their markets. 

Win the battle by becoming a member today. Text me at 561-502-1577 to get started today. 

The Adventures of Whaa Cow at The Cody Hotel in Cody Wyoming- Customer Service Above and Beyond!!

The Adventures of Whaa Cow at The Cody Hotel in Cody Wyoming- Customer Service Above and Beyond!!!

After spending the night in Custer South Dakota we made our way on our road trip to Cody Wyoming which is about 45 minutes outside of the east entrance of Yellowstone Park. 

The Cody hotel is our favorite place to stay in Cody Wyoming. Cody is a small town in Wyoming of about 9,500 people. 

Tristan and Qing had their favorite little Ty™ Beanie Baby with them who they named, Whaa Cow. Whaa Cow had already been with us for the first several days of our road trip vacation. 

However, when we checked out of The Cody hotel- Whaa Cow was accidently left behind. 

When we arrived in West Yellowstone Montana ~ one of the employees of The Cody hotel called us to let us know he had found Whaa Cow and asked if we would like him sent to our house. I declined since the cost to ship the Ty™ stuffed animal was WAY more than the $8 that it would cost to simply buy another one exactly the same. Qing also agreed that it was not worth the expense and we sort of forgot about Whaa Cow. 

The other day Tristan received photos from Qing that the staff at The Cody took it upon themselves to ship Whaa Cow back to Qing at their own expense. But not until after Whaa Cow had some of his own adventures to share: 

Qing received Whaa Cow in this well packed shipped package with a half eaten cookie and a whole cookie. Whaa Cow could not be deprived of food along his journey home. 

Not only were there these cookies in the box with Whaa Cow but also these amazing photos of his adventures staying at The Cody hotel! 

 

And then there was this letter enclosed of all of his adventures.

Here are the words from his letter: 

“The last few days have been terrific! In the evening I sat outside by the pond trying to catch some fish, but with no luck. So I decided to roast marshmallows by the campfire instead. Yum. My legs turned out to be too short for the bike pedals in the exercise room. A few laps around the pool was much more fun. In the lobby I ended up eating too many cookies, and had to relax a bit. I also had a chance to test my piano skills and warm up by the fireplace. I even tried helping out in the laundry room but my poor little arms weren't long enough to fold the sheets. Before leaving in the morning, I ate breakfast. I sure have enjoyed my time here at The Cody Hotel and will have to come back soon.” 

What amazing and creative staff at The Cody Hotel in Cody Wyoming. They have definitely created raving fans here!  The example of customer service and taking something as small as a Ty stuffed animal and turning it into such a fun and creative adventure goes way above and beyond any hotel guest's expectations. 

This is also a great example of top notch marketing making a lasting impression on their hotel guests!

Kudos to the hotel staff at The Cody Hotel in Cody Wyoming!!! 

Replay of Realbird Webinar with Katerina Gasset

Here is the replay of the Realbird webinar when I was the guest speaker last week: 

“How to Fly Under the Radar of the big ZTR's” 

If you registered for the webinar you were sent an email from Gabe at Realbird with a link to the recording.

In case you did not register or could not make it to the live webinar, the webinar was recorded.

It is a little over an hour long- you can start it and stop the recording at different sections in case you don't have time to take notes for the entire hour.  

Please leave a comment if you liked the video on the YouTube video comment section, Thanks!

 

 

Replay of Realbird Webinar with Katerina Gasset

Here is the replay of the Realbird webinar when I was the guest speaker last week:

“How to Fly Under the Radar of the big ZTR's”

If you registered for the webinar you were sent an email from Gabe at Realbird with a link to the recording.

In case you did not register or could not make it to the live webinar, the webinar was recorded.

It is a little over an hour long- you can start it and stop the recording at different sections in case you don't have time to take notes for the entire hour.

Please leave a comment if you liked the video on the YouTube video comment section, Thanks!

 

 

Reminder: Wednesday – I will be the Guest Speaker on Realbird- Free- Get Registered Today

Reminder: Wednesday – I will be the Guest Speaker on Realbird. This is a FREE webinar! 

I will be sharing with you the latest in how to fly under the radar of the big ZTR's. 

You will also learn the 9 best tips we use for SEO dominating. 

And we will be going over the touchpoints and reaching out through your verticals. 

Lots of great stuff to learn and apply to your blogs and websites and social media!! 

We have nearly 400 registered for the webinar so far. 

I hope to see you there! 

Go here to register: http://goo.gl/ex2g6U

 

The Best Apple Parody Goes To IKEA!

What fun to write a post about two of my favorite companies on the planet! 

If you are a listing agent, studying marketing should be on your list of business education tasks to do. 

Studying the best in marketing helps you refine your own listing marketing and branding of your company. 

The company that I love to study is Apple. Before we changed over to all Apple computers – Macs, iPhones, iPads… we could not really relate to the fans that seemed so over the top in their love of anything Apple. 

The minute we opened the box to our first big 27 inch Mac desktop computer we were not just hooked, but became fanatical fans as well. Now we relate! 

Apple commercials are the best designed messages and people and companies around the world continually copy the look and feel of the Apple website, store and commercials. Studying Apple messaging is a must for any serious marketer. 

One of the fun things that comes from this is the Apple commercial parodies from other companies. There are some great ones out there. 

This year, with the new Apple iPhone6 being announced to the new i08 update to the Yosemite OS, companies are jumping at the chance to grab a piece of the messaging moment and bring it to their own audiences. 

Thumbs up to my another one of our favorite companies- IKEA, who we choose as the winner of the Apple parody this year! 

IKEA takes their new 2015 paper catalog and creates a hilarious commercial parody that will have you laughing for a while!

Oh, I should also mention that this IKEA video has over 10,000,000 views!!!! That just goes to show how much of a hit not just this commercial is but also goes back to the amazing success marketing of Apple. 

Here is the commercial: