Compete with FSBO by Being Able to Tell Your Client More When Showing Properties

FSBO, FSBO, FSBO – the dreaded For Sale by Owner – The acronym that brings the DIY-ers out of the woodwork – those looking to save a buck wherever they can. For Sale by Owner is a phenomenon that has picked up exponentially over the past few years. 

Real estate sales professionals have been on different sides of the fence as far as the FSBO issue. After CREA’s move to change the rules in 2010 to allow real estate sales professionals to post the FSBO listings on MLS for a fixed fee, some embraced the change, quickly throwing up websites and promoting the new service, whereas others took the position that posting FSBO listings for a fixed fee would devalue the a la carte services offered by real estate sales professionals. 

While there will always be people who want to do things for themselves, real estate sales professionals stand to continue to dominate the marketplace by offering services superior to that of what can be gained through merely posting a property on MLS. 

There are some obvious ways that real estate sales professionals do more for their clients: access to more information, benefits of other advertising, open houses, someone who is always available to tend to issues relating to the sale.  

Thanks to technology and evolutions of the law, there are now new and innovative tools only available to real estate sales professionals that enable you to offer your client even more and be more competitive. 

One great example of this is ViMO: ViMO is an app that enables you to learn sales history, demographics information about a property or neighbourhood, right from your iPad. ViMO also offers electronic form capability – using the app you can create, sign, store, organize and transmit electronic forms, such as purchase and sale agreements. This means that you can literally have an appointment with a client, show them all that is available, look up things like comparable sales on a listing, determine and offer and even sign and deliver an offer – all at once if your client is certain.  

Someone trying to buy a home on their own will not have that kind of ease of access to information. Also, you demonstrate your value because your client will understand that your role is more than just listing a property or taking them to see some properties. Your role is to help them make the best deal, at the best price, while being appraised of all the information that could be available to them. 

The more that real estate sales professionals in Ontario do to provide superior services, the more the public will see the value in having a real estate sales professional in their corner vs. trying to sell or buy their next home themselves.  

For more information about ViMO please visit www.myvimo.ca.

Tips for Enhancing Your In-Person Experiences with Your Clients

The life of a real estate sales professional in Ontario is very fast paced. An ongoing concern for these individuals is advertising, sales and marketing. Typically these 3 items consume the majority of a real estate sales professional’s monthly budget. 

It is a well-known fact that the cost of acquiring new clients is far higher than the cost of retaining them. Building more repeat and referral business from happy clients is one of the key building blocks to becoming a successful real estate sales professional.

Many large organizations now use a "Net Promoter Score" (NPS) to gauge how well they are achieving repeat and referral business. NPS is a customer loyalty metric developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix.  It was introduced by Reichheld in a 2003 Harvard Business Review. 

Here is how NPS works – think airlines: have you ever taken a flight and at the end were offered a survey that included the question “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend the airline to a friend or family member?” Those who answer from 1-6 are the detractors, the 7s and 8s are indifferent, and 9a and 10s are the promoters. The logic here is that the more promoters you have, the faster your business will grow and the lower your overall cost of acquisition. 

When looking at the real estate sales profession the same is true – building a base of promoters is critical.  

Delivering top-notch customer experiences are crucial in building a solid base of promoters. So how can you improve your customers’ experiences, namely face-to-face interaction? 

Pre-interview – Find out what the client is looking for by having a preliminary phone call to go over the client’s goals. Make sure you understand their goals and focus your offering on what your prospect is looking to achieve. 

Respect time – When a client commits to go look at properties with you or have you to their home, while you are spending your time – so are they. It is important to respect your client’s time and have all activities pre-arranged.  

Be prepared – While you may have properties that you know your client may be interested in, make sure to bring your client information about the properties they have mentioned or other properties that directly meet their criteria. Make sure that have done the research beforehand, or if not, have the technical capability to obtain all of the relevant information about a neighbourhood to be able to represent a buyer or seller. 

Embrace technology – Apps like ViMO enable you to perform research on a property, neighbourhood or owner as it relates to sales history, demographics and more. Embracing technology and looking at apps like ViMO enable you to do more for your client on the go. This way you can review information with your client while on the road, rather than having to return to the office to perform more research. 

Under promise and over deliver – this is an old adage that continues to ring true.  Return calls when you say you will, provide information when you say you will, and don’t make promises you can’t keep. Your actions will directly impact your customer’s experience with you. 

Focusing on understanding your clients and their goals, respecting their time, always staying prepared using the most current technology while always over delivering will lead to better customer experiences. 

For more information about how you can deliver better face-to-face customer experiences please visit www.myvimo.ca.

What Mobile Apps and Online Tools Are You Using?

From time to time we like to blog about different online tools available to real estate sales professionals as it is the best way to keep everyone in the know and the industry more competitive as a whole. This time around we decided to ask you. Here was some of the feedback.

·       Kevin Roberts – one of our American counterparts chimed in. President of Southwest at Transwestern, a real estate company in Texas, swears by LandVision. Texas’s version of GeoWarehouse, LandVision is a mapping tool that helps real estate sales professionals research listing, sales, ownership demographic and other information about properties of interest. We agree that having online or mobile app access to a state of the art mapping tool that enables you to perform due diligence and learn all that you can about a property, owner or neighbourhood is a vital asset to real estate sales professionals.

·       Denise Paradis – real estate sales professional at RE/MAX has been taking advantage of Windows Movie Maker to support incorporating video into her sales and marketing. Denise said that Windows Movie Maker is “easy, fast and free and very feature-rich, taking raw videos and/or stills and creating an edited version ready for publication to websites and/or YouTube. Adding narration, captions, titles, music is easy too.” Denise also posted a sample of her results when using Window Movie Maker http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmO8eanCd50.

·       Robert MacKay – co-founder of Manage My Nest raised the importance of Cloud based SaaS solutions. Manage My Next is an online property management platform that supports homeowner associations, condo companies, co-ops and more… Tools like this can be very important to real estate sales professionals who also have a management portfolio or pool of properties that they rent/manage.

·       Patti Secord – real estate sales professional at iProRealty Ltd. Brokerage – contributed GeoWarehouse as one of her favourite online tools. For this reason, we are obliged to tell you more about it… *wink *wink. GeoWarehouse is an online mapping tool that enables real estate sales professionals to search properties and neighbourhoods and generate reports but is also a platform to perform much needed research such as sales history, property ownership, demographic information and more… You can also purchase supplemental information like surveys, condo certificates, Parcel Registers, instrument images*, MPAC assessment reports and more…

·       Mark Savel - a real estate sales professional in Ontario, practicing since 2007. Mark also runs the very popular blog forum TorontoLivings.com that not only addresses issues related to real estate but also looks at culture, entertainment and other lifestyle issues relevant to living in the GTA. He recently reviewed the new tool introduced by the Teranet this month - ViMO (Virtual Mobile Office).

ViMO is a mobile app available to real estate sales professionals in Ontario. The app is a sales and support tool that real estate sales professionals can use to perform research and do more on the go. In the review, Mark mentioned some of his favourite features:

·       “With the new app we’ll be able to pull up both sold and available prices right away.  Being able to do this will help purchasers make decisions in a quicker yet informed way… especially helpful in hot and competitive market!”

·       “Another cool feature of the app is the “heat map”.  Within a few clicks, users are able to see how hot a particular area is.”

·       “What I’m most looking forward to is the augmented reality function and its paperless contract ability.”

·       “Currently digital signatures on the Agreement of Purchase and Sale are not valid in Ontario – although that is quickly slated to change. In anticipation of this, the new ViMO app will allow purchasers and sellers to sign from the app on the spot saving a ton of time and paper!”

Mark indicated that ViMO will definitely be a new tool that he will be using in 2014.

We hope you enjoyed our share on online and mobile tools for real estate sales professionals as heard from other colleagues in your industry. If you would like more information about mobile and online apps for real estate sales professionals please visit www.myvimo.ca.  

http://torontolivings.com/tag/vimo

*** Instrument images* are supplied by the registrant and we cannot guarantee the information contained in them or how complete the information is.

* An official product of the Ontario government pursuant to provincial land registration statutes.

Electronic Documents for Real Estate Transactions – Yes Folks, It Is Here!

There has been a lot of buzz online the past couple of years about planned amendments to the Electronic Commerce Act (ECA), 2000. The 2013 provincial budget included provisions to achieve the goal of bringing electronic real estate agreements to Ontario. Many organizations have been vocal in support of these amendments including but not limited to OREA.

The amendments will extend the legal protections of the ECA to include electronic real estate agreements of purchase and sale. This is according to a press release made last summer by OREA. "This amendment means that REALTORS® and consumers will soon have the confidence to use technology that improves the speed, efficiency and reliability of real estate transactions," said Phil Dorner, a Windsor area REALTOR® and president of OREA.

Currently when you work on a real estate transaction, documents like new client agreements, offers, agreements of purchase and sale, etc… have to be signed, scanned, emailed, faxed and even driven back and forth – a number of times before the ultimate deal is done. This is time-consuming for the buyer, seller and both agents.

Electronic agreements stand to improve the efficiency of any given real estate transaction by reducing the time required to complete a deal by making it legal for parties to sign documents electronically, like on a tablet for example.

It is in this spirit that the Teranet team created ViMO. ViMO is a mobile app that offers the capability for real estate sales professionals to:

·        Create, sign and manage electronic forms within the app, right from their iPad.

·        Access electronic forms and create, sign, store, manage and transmit your electronic documents.

Signing and sending electronic forms is just one of the many capabilities available in the ViMO app. With that said the government’s push to see the introduction of electronic forms in real estate in Ontario is a long time coming. Real estate sales professionals in other provinces have long enjoyed this capability. Enabling Ontario real estate sales professionals to sign and negotiate electronic forms will only give them an edge in an already extremely competitive industry.

Additionally, think about how significantly this will ease the process of the back and forth that occurs with purchase and sale agreements, especially when coupled with the ability to sign and electronically store new listing agreements, client agreements as well as other important documents associated to a deal. The amendments to the ECA as well as innovations like the ViMO app make moving towards a paperless, more efficient back office system a reality.

For more information about ViMO please visit www.myvimo.ca.