As a wise man once told me, there are no buyer’s agents, just agents without listings.

Listings are the most valuable asset a real estate brokerage or agent has. But generating new listings, while not exactly a complex science, requires that a home seller develops the confidence that you have what it takes to sell their property at the best price and in the shortest time possible. That’s not necessarily an easy accomplishment, especially if you are new to real estate or do not typically carry many listings of your own.

One of the most important opportunities to influence a home seller to list with you is the listing presentation. A listing presentation is an event that no agent should contemplate without careful and thorough preparation. Irrespective, and all else being equal, if the main takeaway the seller learns is that you have the knowledge, experience and ability to give their property optimal exposure to more buyers, you’ve just wildly increased your chances of success.

Given that the Web has become the consumer’s playground for real estate research, your marketing plan will need to incorporate and demonstrate powerful strategies you will implement to publicize your prospect’s property online. Particularly on websites known to attract online real estate buyers.

In a few short years, Listing Syndication has virtually become a de facto component of powerful property marketing online, and a key differentiator in any successful agent’s listing presentation kit. When deployed through a solid platform, listing information entered once in the MLS can be accessed by the listing agent and re-distributed to dozens of popular websites of their choice, within their syndication service provider’s network.

When discussing how you plan to market your prospect’s home, Listing Syndication can be one of your most important competitive advantages. Reinforce your pitch with statistics that show that over 90% of consumers today use the Web in one way or another in their home buying process. As well, share with your potential client data that shows that online buyers are highly fragmented. Hitwise.com clearly highlights that the top 10 real estate sites garner only 40% of all the targeted traffic out there, and that the top three sites don’t even account for 20% of that traffic.

Being on all the top ten sites suddenly becomes critical, but hardly sufficient as that too leaves out more than half of the market.

This is where the Syndication discussion comes in. Explain how your Syndication strategy can optimize exposure of the client’s property by advertising it on several dozen real estate websites. Produce handouts and diagrams to help your prospect visualize how syndication increases exposure on many sites, and show them print outs of online traffic reporting and monitoring charts. Discuss tools you can place in their hands for them to be able to dynamically check on traffic flow and views of their property listing, at their convenience.

More exposure to more buyers online means a higher chance of a sale, faster. Deeply integrating a solid web exposure strategy into your listing presentations, leveraging Listing Syndication, is easy to achieve, easy to explain and sets you apart. It can also easily be that extra clincher you need to close new listings.

The thought of a real estate agent or broker investing in powerful marketing and not reaping the maximum benefit is disturbing. But most of us tend to get quite excited about things that show great promise. We initiate programs and nurture them to a certain degree, then, besides the few who follow through to amazing success, somewhere along the way we drop the ball.

For the typical agent this could mean a stale website, an outdated listing or two, a dead blog or an email campaign still in draft mode after two or three months of painful contemplation and work. Together these shortfalls undermine the desired outcome and in cases compound into a sense of despair or failure. Not good for business, as what we seek is positive momentum.

How we go about setting our goals can have a huge impact on our results. To those who actually take the time to set specific goals for their marketing, hats off. Goal setting is paramount to success, because it sets our mind on a specific course and subconsciously guides our activities, decisions and focus.

You’ve heard this one before: To set sail with no target leads to the land of nowhere.

Step number one. Set clear goals for your marketing — whether it’s number of buyer leads you want to generate, number of future potential clients you want to add to your contact database, number of listings you want to secure, the frequency at which you want to blog or update your site, your advertising plan, and so on.

Here is the clincher. We often set goals and put them away. Away from sight, these goals get more vague by the day. Before long, other ‘priorities’ find their way into our busy days and eventually take over. The noble effort has been short changed.

Step number two. Keep those goals visible.

And here is the ultimate tip to success in goal setting. Put your laptop, iPad or tablet away, and get that old fashioned pen or pencil out.

The deeper we internalize our goals, the stronger they get engrained into our subconscious mind and being. To achieve this level of deep engagement with our goals, the goal setting exercise needs to be as immersive as possible. A process that would engage as much of our body and mind as possible.

Typing goals on a computer keyboard engages or requires only eight physical movements, hardly the engagement needed to firmly cement ideas and goals into our mind. Writing the same goals by hand however (yes, the old fashioned way), requires ten thousand movements. Yes, you read it right. Ten thousand versus only eight. This makes hand writing the only way you’d want to go about taking down goals and important notes.

The difference is significantly deeper engagement and assimilation of the goals into our subconscious mind. With that, we benefit from much stronger understanding and adoption on where we are headed, and much more vivid and conscious awareness of where we need to spend our time and efforts. Needless to say, chances of success when engagement is this deep increases exponentially, because focus is at a completely different level.

In practical terms, for example, does your website today reflect the vision you had for it a year ago or when you first launched it? Have you executed the marketing campaigns you planned on and started to consistently attend the community networking functions you decided on? Evaluate these and other opportunities then set some new rules and goals. Using pen and paper of course. You just might surprise yourself.

Many books and presentation skill-building workshops describe techniques and methods that a presenter must employ and master in order to deliver their message with the most impact. You have likely come across all of these strategies at one point or another. Here are a few components we’ll concentrate on for the purpose of this article:

1)     Discuss a subject you are passionate about, and don’t hold back on stage
2)     Don’t read verbatim from your slides or notes
3)     Make good eye contact
4)     Use stories / anecdotes to make a point and engage people
5)     Speak clearly and with confidence

The problem begins when each of those points are discussed and practiced as individual items.

A typical result, while completely unintended by the coach, book or participant, is a delivery that lacks charisma and conviction. Where passion is restrained by awkward, constructed eye contact attempts, or the odd scripted slide title and bullet point recital at some point during the presentation. Weakness becomes apparent to the audience and credibility gets a hit.

These five components are interlinked. They are part of a chain that should not have any weak links, otherwise things fall apart. Teaching a child five letters and stopping there is completely different from showing them how to interlink the five letters to make up words that have meaning, convey messages and generate intended actions and reactions.

Understanding this concept in the context of presentation skills is vital. Seamlessly integrating and applying the various components and techniques is a key catalyst. When this is achieved, delivering a message in a convincing manner happens naturally, virtually with no effort.

Here are the three fundamental elements that form the backbone to the entire structure:

i)      You must know your subject inside out and be a huge believer in your ideas and thoughts around it.
ii)     Have deep experience and insight around the subject. Meaning, you have real stories from the trenches to tell, that support your thoughts and views on the subject.
iii)   Rehearse the presentation to death.

When these three components converge, the five presentation techniques discussed at the beginning of the article naturally become part of your delivery. In other words, you would be able to use the ‘five letters learned’ to form words that cause emotion and generate action.

You see, when you know your subject inside out, and you have relevant, important points and issues to convey, you get passionate, because you believe. You come across as more convincing and genuine. And since you rehearsed this thing as any professional should, you won’t need to read off your presentation slides.  Your words will flow like a story teller’s. Because you bring in experiences from the trenches to share, you will use stories to make and support your point, which engages the audience even more and gives your presentation the credibility it needs to make a difference and make an impression. When you have your message internalized and your stories up your sleeve, you will look at the audience as if you were talking to close friends at a party. Whether you are on stage or whether you are presenting your real estate marketing ideas and services to a new prospect, you will connect with them, and your eye contact will be legitimate and fluid; your voice will resonate conviction, knowledge and passion.

This is REAL impact.

No guess work here. Load up your website up with listings and you would have covered one of the top two things on a home buyer’s list of most valued information on a REALTOR®’s website. 83 percent of buyers who used the Internet last year to research properties said that detailed information about homes for sale are ‘Very Useful,’ according to the National Association of REALTORS®’ (NAR) 2010 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers report.

And given that 21 percent of sales agents reported generating between 11 and over 100 inquiries from their website, 3 percent pulling between 51 – 100 inquiries and 4 percent more than 100 inquiries, your online store has the potential to be more than just a pretty place. The reason I say this is that there are still 31 percent of agents out there whose websites bring in no inquiries at all! That’s a huge opportunity.

Established REALTORS® seem to be well set then, if they typically carry good inventory. Provided they do most other things right of course. We covered some of those things or ideas, in Parts 1-3 of this series.

Undoubtedly though, even the best sellers’ agents can benefit from additional listings, to attract even more visitors and generate more return visits to their websites. For those who have no listings or just few, this particular challenge can be daunting. Here are three surefire ways to add more listings to your site. As in, many more.

1)    Expand your personal network – This is an on-going exercise that requires time. If you want instant gratification, skip this step and go to points 2 and 3. But in the long run, this step will be key to success and business resilience especially in tough markets.

Here are some facts, also from NAR’s report. The most important thing people look for in an agent is honesty and trustworthiness, and nearly half of all buyers find their real estate agent through a referral from a friend, neighbor or relative, especially first time home buyers.

The more experience and transactions you facilitate, and the larger you grow and foster a supporting network of friends and contacts, the more business and listings you’ll get. Join and participate in local societies and groups, join one or more charities, volunteer time on a not-for-profit board and attend school events if you have kids. A note to self: ‘I won’t spend all my time at such events with people I know. I will reinforce those relationships and make it a point to meet several more people and exchange more business cards or phone numbers. And, my networking does not mean spending lots of time in online chat rooms with other agents.’

2)    Build IDX into your website – This can be as easy as cutting and pasting some code onto your website. IDX or, Internet Data Exchange, is a solution that allows visitors on your website to search approved Multiple Listing Service (MLS) properties in your area. The service is subscription-based and for the value it adds, many would concur is worth every penny.

There are several great IDX service providers in the marketplace today, so here are some things to look for:

-       Easy to plug (technical jargon: frame) into your website.
-       A solution that seamlessly integrates (funnels) leads into your prospect management system.
-       Don’t get held up by a long term contract. You should have the right to get out at any time.
-       Double check on the IDX service provider’s ‘uptime.’ You want a service that is ‘on’ all the time.
-       Affordable. You can usually secure a top name IDX directly or through your website service provider at a reasonable price.

3)      Handshake™ with other REALTORS® in your market – This idea applies only to Point2 Agent users. Handshake™ is proprietary technology that allows you to publish other REALTOR® listings on your Point2 Agent website, and the other way around. The idea is to automatically and immediately give you credibility but importantly, a large inventory to market. Especially for new agents, this advantage can make a significant difference. The more local co-marketing relationships you initiate and approve through your Point2 Agent site, the more listings you’ll get. You can test this technology for free here.

Public speaking ranks at the highest levels of all things feared by humans, period. Whether presenting on stage to a thousand people, at the office to your team or management, or offering your services to a prospective client, certain success denominators if mastered can make a big difference in your results.

This subject is deep and far reaching. My aim from this article series is to impart some of the more fundamentally important tips that you as a real estate professional can start to apply right away and that can make a significant difference in your performance.

One BIG ‘Don’t’ that, in my personal opinion, warrants we open the series with are ‘Non Words,’ also known as ‘Fillers.’ Non Words fall into what is technically described as Speech Disfluencies.

From Wikipedia: “Speech disfluencies are any of various breaks, irregularities, or non-lexical vocables that occur within the flow of otherwise fluent speech. These include false starts, i.e. words and sentences that are cut off mid-utterance, phrases that are restarted or repeated and repeated syllables, fillers i.e. grunts or non-lexical utterances such as “uh”, “erm” and “well”, and repaired utterances, i.e. instances of speakers correcting their own slips of the tongue or mispronunciations (before anyone else gets a chance to).”

Did you know that a whopping 20 percent of the words many people use in a sentence are Non Words and Fillers? That is shocking.

You have great tools at your disposal. For example, you click a button or two in Point2 Agent and out comes a gorgeous listing presentation and you rush out the door for your new client meeting. You now look phenomenal on paper. But how much would some more power and confidence in your speech and personal presentation skills go to get you the deal? How about your impact in a video recording for posting on YouTube or your blog? Wouldn’t you want to come across as more professional and assertive.

Many of us may have picked up the ‘Filler’ habit as kids at school, or at the office from some rising hot shot, thinking that must be one of the reflections of success. You’ve surely heard kids – and adult professionals – spray around words and Non Words like ‘um’ ‘uh’ ‘like’ ‘oh my God’ ‘sooooo’ or ‘you know’, like there was no tomorrow.

How about those who can tag several fillers to each other, literally saying an entire short sentence without communicating anything. Try this for size: ‘let’s seeeeee, uuuuuh, now, wait a minute, ehhhh, yes, it’s like …

The bottom line is that if someone pitched their services to you and packed one or two eh’s and um’s in between every few real words, they have an obstacle they just don’t know about. As a buyer, your perception is affected. With that, while not the only parameter in your consideration, your decision.

Fillers are distracting. They diminish your impact and show hesitancy and uncertainty. They annoy listeners and directly affect their perception of you and their decision about your services or products.

Remember this. Fillers are Killers. They hit your credibility and potential right in the heart no matter your domain and level of expertise, or your message. As delivery and presentation makes up around 90 percent of a presenter’s impact on an audience, Non Words simply do not belong. As an exercise, try to listen to your own voice in your next conversation. How many unnecessary words can you count?

For those who may think fillers give them the right to the next speaking spot (uuuuuhhh don’t interrupt me I’m not done speaking yet), think again. Especially on the phone, your listener might also think you keep getting distracted by other things like people, text messages or email. Tells them they are not the most important thing on your mind right now. Not very professional.

One of the keys to getting rid of Fillers is focus. Focus on your audience and your message. Use pauses between sentences to catch your next thought (or for effect). The silence, which may seem to last a lifetime when you’re on stage, or when trying to rush an idea past someone, seems only that long to you. To your audience, the pause emphasizes the importance of the message. It gives them time to assimilate the point and take better notes, and you come across as more confident, more assertive and more knowledgeable.

Just last week we debuted our brand new Express Tools suite of apps,and this week we are excited to unveil a brand new look for our real estate search site, Point2 Homes.

What does this shiny new coat of paint mean for those browsing for real estate?

Besides being (hopefully) pleasant to look at, we have made some subtle design tweaks that should increase the ease at which people pull crucial information from a listing – things such as the price, listing agent, property photos, and contact information.  All with the end goal of generating more leads for those agents whose listings are on Point2 Homes.

Look for some more great announcements coming shortly!