Introducing the zunePhone:
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Month: August 2007 (page 3 of 9)
It’s translucent plastic. It’s clean. No photo. It’s different than any other card. People always comment on it and remember it.
You’ll just have to pretend you can see through Rudy’s card. I think this is a fun idea. Might be cool to try on a very heavy vellum, also. As with size, texture calls attention to itself. We print our cards on a very heavy stock, just because so many Realtor cards are printed on the cheapest lightly-coated card stock. We UV coat front and back. It’s necessary in the Phoenix sun, but it also just feels lush. I’ve watched people rub my cards between their fingers. We are monkeys with minds. The quickest path to the mind can be through the monkey.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
“Closing Escrow, The Movie”, a mockumentary mocking Realtors, opens tomorrow, apparently in a very limited distribution. Presumably this won’t stop your most pomo clients from asking you if you’ve seen it.
The trailer:
As a rule, the funniest 90 seconds of a comedy will be in the trailer. If the trailer isn’t hysterical, enduring the movie will be agony. Press play to judge for yourself. Much more at YouTube.com.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
On a warm San Diego day in mid-June of 1969 I drove home from my last day of high school. About 60 days later I turned 18. Around 30 days after that I was jumping up and down in front of our mailbox, holding the notice from the California Department of Real Estate informing me I’d passed the salesman’s license test. A few weeks later I was proudly putting a knot in my tie, bright and early Saturday morning, the 18th of October. I had a full head of blonde hair, and was shaving more days of the week than not. 🙂 I was minutes away from driving to the office for the first time ever.
I was still living at home, and going to college full time. 1969 was a recession year, but I didn’t know it. I went full time in February 1974 — the beginning of the ’74-75 recession, and was married a month later. Seems I had great timing from day one. 🙂 Times were tough. San Diego hadn’t had their first real price run-up yet. Interest rates, to the best of my memory were generally in the mid-7’s to 8%.
I remember like it was yesterday, sitting in the office of H & R Block, sometime before the income tax filing deadline, (Big time, wasn’t I?) and the woman doing our taxes looked up at me, my wife looking on, and said, “Mr. Brown, you’d have been better off not having worked last year.” Ouch. To her everlasting credit, my wife looked her in the eye and asked why she was working part time, at night. Was it possibly because her husband wasn’t cuttin’ it? We’ve not been married for a decade now, but we still chuckle about that night. Even with the kidney shot to my ego that night, it was way cool to know she had my back.
1975 wasn’t much of an improvement, as I made more money, but only because I was getting the hang of things. We were still mired in the recession. I remember one guy in my farm area Read more
The video:
Time at a premium? Summaries here, here, here and here. Even a transcript.
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Thomas Johnson at ERA Houston has a unique take on making his business card memorable:
This two sided card is printed on a Tyvek envelope like you used to get from the bank to protect the magnetic stripe on your debit card. My thinking is that it could have a shelf life much longer than a normal business card. If the recipient uses my card and puts it in their wallet, I have their money covered.
I’m thinking the card is printed at credit card size, which makes it an odd fit with other cards. This is not a bad thing. The human mind craves order. Give people a bunch of business cards, and they will stack them into a neat little pile. The ones that don’t fit will call attention to themselves — repeatedly, like a popcorn hull trapped between molars. Cards that are slightly too small or have rounded corners will be stacked to the top. Cards that are too large will go to the bottom of the stack. Either way, people will look at the odd men out again and again, trying to make their little stack of cards neater. I don’t know that insinuating yourself into a prospect’s brain as an irritation is the nicest thing to do, but getting in there at all is the first challenge. This is a Black Pearl in the most literally figurative sense…
Your turn: What makes your business card tick?
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The first two videos are finally done. I uploaded one the other night and one more just now.
I’ll leave it to our resident genius (Greg Swann) to put them here, I’m just proud that I correctly uploaded them after figuring out how to do the recording with an external microphone (Thanks Allen!).
Here are the two emails I was responding to this evening:
I would like to set up a partnership with another Realtor where he works as a buyers agent for me and I get the listings. However we have not come up with a good pay structure and wanted your advice.
How did you come up with your pay structure and would you recommend me setting up mine the same way?
Thanks again for all your help and assistance and I would gladly pay you a fee for your services, just let me know the amount.
___
I listened to your entire seminar series from Bloodhound Blog. I really can’t enough good things about what you have to say. I know you get compliments constantly and all are well-deserved, but I have to you this: Your honesty about how you feel regarding other sales trainers is not only refreshing, it is downright glorious. People, including me, walk through life and say nothing about all kinds of things
because we doubt ourselves and dismiss and/or repress what we really know to be true – a life of being the sheep I guess. I have my eyes wide open – Thank you.So now that I have you all warm and fuzzy, I’d like your thoughts:I have a farm area of 3500 homes. I want to send postcards every month. I think I can only afford 1000 and still be able to make it to the 12th month – a goal I have never reached – always stopping way short for some new strategy. I will eventually mail to all 3500. Which would be a better allocation for the 1000 I can
do?: the first 1000 starting on one side of a geographic area and eventually moving across the map? -or- using Read more
Richard Riccelli is a direct marketing creative genius. Where better to express that genius than on his business card?
Says Richard:
A website preview and a free offer all on a business card…
Each card features a common contact front with a different info back that makes a free offer — while visually previewing my website.
Common front of the cards.
One back.
And another.
What better way to sell the product than with small, unobtrusive but very potent demonstrations?
What about you? Show us your business card and the thinking behind it.
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This is a Richard Riccelli idea: Let’s talk business cards in depth.
I have built a form that you can use to upload an image of your business card. The form also asks you for your thoughts on your card. Use that space to explain your objectives for your card and how you went about achieving them.
I’ll make posts out of the responses so we can see what people are thinking and how those thoughts are expressed visually.
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Damage from the nation’s slumping housing market is evident throughout the economy and permeates financial markets. Add real estate agents to the growing list of victims, although they know few tears will be shed for them.
The National Association of Realtors expects membership rolls to decline this year for the first time in a decade. The group ended 2006 with nearly 1.4 million members — almost double the roughly 716,000 it had in 1997 — but expects 2007 to close with 1.3 million, a drop of more than 4 percent.
Agents’ ranks continued to rise even after the market began to cool about two years ago because of the 18-month lag between the downturn in sales and membership, says NAR spokesman Walter Molony.
Trade groups in two of the hardest-hit states — California and Florida — also forecast membership drops. The California Association of Realtors is expecting its first decline since 1997, forecasting a year-end tally of 185,000 members compared with more than 199,000 last year. The Florida Association of Realtors currently has about 154,000 members compared with more than 161,000 last year at this time, but expects flat membership by year-end.
Not to rob graves, but people working — successfully — in bigger brokerages should be attentive to the folks who are leaving the business. Not only will they have stuff to sell, like half-price lockboxes, but they are possessed of warm networks that will need to be serviced in the coming years. Not everyone can make a living selling real estate, but just about everybody likes to live indoors. If you can be the Realtor-of-choice for your former colleagues, you can work with a lot of people who will come to you pre-sold. And while I would never, ever suggest that anyone violate state laws by paying referral fees to formerly-licensed former-Realtors, it remains that gratitude is simply a matter of graciousness — and gift cards come in many denominations.
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I built a quick and easy nomination form for The Odysseus Medal competition. You can continue to use the BlogCarnivals entry form, but I put this together to make it easier to nominate posts written by other people.
The form lives at the top of The Odysseus Medal information page, which is overdue for a rewrite. If you want an even quicker solution, go here and drag that URL into your toolbar. Copy the URL of the page you want to nominate and click on that link. Autofill then paste then submit. Duck soup.
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I wrote about this before, but I don’t think I have what I want even yet. These will print 18″x12″, but I may go to 24″x18″ the next time. My design skills are not the best, but I arrived that this because I wanted three things on the sign, and this seemed like the best way to get them. I wanted the name of the brokerage, the web address for the house, and the maximum amount of photo I could get. This is what I ended up with for a first attempt:
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing, real estate photography
Sometimes when I write a post, it is done in little bits at a time- a few minutes here and a few minutes there. Then news or shift happens and oh bloody hell, it changes my post, or horrors-I just trash the whole thing. Take this post for example: It sat in draft mode growing old and stale for about two weeks. This morning I took it out, shook the dust off, spruced it up, and was going to give it one final proof read this evening before posting. Now thanks to Seth, it’s a few hours worth of old news and I’ve rewritten some of it. I hate it when that happens, but for better or worse it’s going to print.
I recently switched brokerages and have been up to my eyeballs in changing my marketing materials, creating new information, ordering new business cards. Yes, I ordered business cards last week, and after some discussion with my husband and much research, I took the big leap of faith and listened to my market. I now have business cards without my photo on them. And now I see that Seth approves- if only I had posted this morning.
No picture on my business card. This goes against everything I’ve been told to do by Realtors and “experts” but in addition to Seth questioning this, both my market and my husband have asked me “Why do Realtors put their photos on their cards?” My husband, Jamie, who kinda sorta likes the way I look, was thrilled that my photo isn’t on my cards, “It’s more professional” says he. While I don’t market directly to my husband, I do market to people like my husband, so it’s probably safe to say that if he likes it without the photo then people who think like Jamie will prefer the photoless cards as well. Even my teenagers prefer them- “Yeah, it’s different”. High praise, indeed. In truth there are other things about my cards that Seth would probably hate but what do I care, I’m not marketing to him.
Recently I received an email telling me that I am missing opportunities by not being more aggressive about promoting myself. The email was referring to my blog and it came from another Realtor. I have Read more
And now for some bazillion-dollar arm–twisting in behalf of a forthcoming listing:
I wanted this from my sullen teenager a year ago, but he’s been busy trying to portray the subtle distinctions between indifference, ennui and anomie — it ain’t easy! In any case, let me feed this from a DB file and I’m done with Zee Maps, too.
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Seth Godin on business card mistakes:
- Don’t print your own cards. Just because Avery and others make those little perforated sheets of paper doesn’t mean you should use them.
- Don’t use big type for the address and contact info. The #1 way we can tell if a business card is cheesy is with a glance at the type size. Really.
- Don’t buy those color business cards with your face on them. You’re not an ordinary real estate agent, so there’s no sense in acting like one.
- Don’t go with metal business cards. It might work for Steve Wozniak, but everyone else wants to bring your cards on an airplane.
- You might think it’s a great idea to do a full color card with a big (lousy) picture on it. It’s not.
- I like rounded edges. But only if you leave plenty of margin. (as below)
- Margins matter. Anytime your type gets anywhere near the margin, you’ve blown it.
However: For real estate promotion, the business card form factor is a tiny little workhorse. Here’s a Black Pearl that’s not in that post: People fear commitment. Taking a flyer from your flyer box can seem to them to be too much like risking being “sold” by you, you Loki-like trickster. We buy flyer boxes that have a little pocket at the top for business cards. If someone won’t take the flyer, they just might take the much smaller, less threatening business-card-sized flyer we make for the home. After the “Sold” rider goes on, we swap out to our business cards or to a card promoting us as listers.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing