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.

There’s no beating around the bush – times are tough right now.  Trust me, I’m feeling it too.  I even went so far as to move across the city, just a few blocks from work, so I could actually afford to drive to work.  Fueling up my rocket is a bit easier now … a three minute drive rather than a half hour drive.

Everybody is feeling the pinch, and it’s no doubt that some of the biggest impact has been on the Real Estate industry.  It’s not surprising that overall real estate confidence is at an all-time low.

There may not be as many prospects out there as we’d like.  But they haven’t gone completely extinct.  The economy may have taken a nosedive (for lack of a better term), but there are still people looking for homes.

Before you get too depressed, I have a few tips to use what you’ve already got at your disposal, even better, to help you make it through.  I’ve got quite a bit to say so this will be in two parts.  Stay tuned though…because at the end of it, I’m going to give away a few freebies.  The boss isn’t looking, and I’m feeling generous.

Whether or not the economy is doing good or bad, it is essential to market your listings in every possible way (yes, I know you already know this!).  But here’s the thing…I don’t mean you have to spend thousands on some huge over-the-top marketing plan. You can get a whole lotta bang for your buck by starting right here at home with your Point2 Agent website and save some gas money without moving across town.

I’m sure many of you are already doing most of these things, but just in case…here is a refresher.  Starting with the most obvious, of course:

Send Your Listing on an All-Expense Paid Vacation: aka Syndication – I probably don’t need to explain this one, but as you can see <– I’m already packed.  Are you taking the opportunity to use the world’s largest syndication network that’s available right at your doorstep with your Point2 account? Not to break out the lame analogies – but it’s like putting your listing on the Point2 tour bus (or a cruise ship if that’s more your thing), and we’re taking it to all the hot spots – and it’s door-to-door service. All you have to do is show up prepared to get the most out of it – we do the rest of the work for you.  Pretty sweet deal, I’d say.  If you’re not onboard and ready to have your listing hit the hot spots for real estate, well then…I guess you could stay home.

Go on, Stand Out a Little: aka Spotlight Ads – Maybe it’s just me, but when I’m out in a crowd, I like to stand out.  I like attention and lots of it (I’m sure my co-workers would agree that I might have a big head at times).  Last week I attended a function where I knew everyone would be wearing black – so what did I do?  I wore white of course.

The same concept applies to your listing.  Why have your listing lumped in with thousands of other listings, when you can have it front and center for the same price as a white shirt?  $25 gets you premium placement on Point2Homes for a full month.

Did you know? Point2Homes received over a million visits last month, over one million unique visitors, and over 12 million pageviews.  With that large of a gathering – why wouldn’t you want to stand out?

I know these may seem obvious…but believe it or not, there’s several who aren’t doing any of these.  Anyway, this is getting long! I’ll stop here for now…but join me next time, and I’ll mention a few more things…and tell you how you can get some freebies.  I’m impatient though…and in the mood for sharing…so share with me some of the ways you’ve found ways to attract prospects.  Just for the heck of it, I may toss you a little something just for sharing!

With all the information available instantaneously via the web, we have to learn to share the best of what we have and little more. The internet is now so massive, that the common person only has time to see the absolute best of the best. There’s now more sites than ever whose primary purpose is to surface the most intriguing content on the web. Here’s just a small sample: Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Propeller, Xanga, Furl – Damn… maybe even the best of the best is getting out of hand.

What I’m getting at is people are becoming conditioned to seek out only the best, and blur past the rest. The same is true when browsing real estate.

Potential buyers want to be impressed by their online, home-shopping experiences and deserve to be. I assure you that people will discredit a listing with no photos and limited information, even if it meets their personal requirements.  Why? Because they have grown to expect more. It is imperative that your listing not be undervalued because of poor marketing workmanship.

Providing quality listing photos is statistically linked to the quantity of prospects generated. In layman’s terms, more photos = more prospects = more sales. So what can you do?

1) Learn how to take great listing photos, or hire someone to take them for you.

2) Keep the seller informed on when you plan on taking photos, what they need to do beforehand, and why it’s so important.

3) Never post bad listing photos, ever. When a new listing hits the online market you may only get one chance to make a good impression – then it’s old news. You want to be what’s hot and what’s new.

4) Never manipulate your photos to make a property look better than it actually is. You risk losing your trustworthiness, and may be setting buyer expectations too high.

One possible solution for #2 is to provide your client with a pre-shoot checklist. Here’s a freebie designed by yours truly: Point2 Photo Checklist. Feel free to use it as is, or design your own if you wish.

I am sure everyone agrees with me when I say that almost everything is online, super hi-tech, cutting edge and revolutionary in our day and age – including real estate.  Of course, as a software tech company who develops products for real estate professionals and MLS’s, you won’t hear us complaining about real estate becoming more hi-tech.

Sometimes the tendency to rely solely on cutting edge products and technology can lead to inadvertently alienating your consumers and leaving them feeling devoid of the personal touch.  I’ve been a huge fan of connecting with your customers lately and I think in any generation that connection is a huge aspect of successful business.

In fact, here at Point2 we took a bit of an old-school approach recently to connect with some of our current and future customers in our preparations for attending NAR in Orlando.  We decided we’d send out postcards.  Yep, that’s right, postcards.  We chose to use this method to connect with some of our key contacts prior to NAR.  We timed the postcards to arrive right before our contacts would be leaving for NAR.  In this way, we hoped that Point2 would still be fresh in their minds.  We also chose an old-school method versus sending a timely email because we recognize that in our day and age many emails go unread, especially by busy real estate professionals and executives.  A flashy professional postcard arriving in your mailbox is more likely to at least get a glance and maybe even a read where an email might not.

Thanks to technology and a great company called Expresscopy, we were able to do ‘old-school’ with a twist.  We were able to time a postcard delivery to a list of our contacts with one of the easiest systems out there.  Everything is done online, including designing the postcard itself – and the design possibilities are endless.  Expresscopy takes care of everything, from printing the postcards based on your design, to addressing them, and even mailing them to arrive in time for your set delivery date.  The best part is this bit of old-school marketing with the aid of technology was still really inexpensive.  (By the way, through Point2 you can get a sweet deal at Expresscopy – 100 free jumbo postcards or equivalent - but just make sure you use our link to get the deal.)  Expresscopy has a whole section of postcard designs devoted to real estate.

Sending postcards is just one method of old-school marketing that can be re-energized for today’s hi-tech world.  There are many others.  I’d really like to hear what other types of marketing you real estate professionals are doing that may be a reinvention of old-school practices.

Tell us your experiences.  We can kick it old-skool together.

How do you even know what those expectations are?  How are you going to truly wow me as the consumer, and be unique enough so I do feel like you are giving me more value than the competition?

courtesy: Gaetan Lee

Understanding how consumers think, what’s driving them to buy or sell, their life situation, their hopes and dreams…this is how you gain the insight you need to ensure that you can provide your consumers with exactly what they expect, and more!

Cheesy?  Yes.  Effective?  Most definitely.

As an example, my own realtor has taken the time to understand what exactly my husband and I need and where we are in the cycle of buying our next home.  When our needs changed in the midst of our search, he was more than accommodating.  We know that he has other clients he is busy working for as well, but he never makes us feel like we are taking up too much of his time.  We feel like we are so important to his business that we are the only thing that matters.

The result?  Now I feel special – and more inclined to tell people about my positive experience.  Do your clients feel special too?

What are some good ways that real estate agents can provide ‘more’ in their service to wow clients?  What has worked for you?