Sukhwinder Sukh Bhaura - Blog

7 TIPS TO TAKE YOUR EMAIL MARKETING TO NEXT LEVEL

sukh.bhaura@century21.ca — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Email marketing can be a very effective and inexpensive way to build brand awareness, stay “top of mind” with your sphere of influence (SOI), nurture the leads in your real estate database and forge stronger relationships with clients.

According to The Canadian Marketing Association, on average, you’ll get $39 of revenue for every $1 invested in email.

Overall email marketing is perhaps the most effective marketing channel around. Other channels don’t even come close to bringing in this type of ROI. And what’s great about email is that it’s easily sharable. A 2012 survey conducted by ExactTarget found that the No. 1 way people share content with their family and friends is via email.

But if email marketing isn’t done right, it can be costly. It can damage your reputation and weaken the trust and relationships you’ve worked so hard to build. That’s why you need to know the do’s and don’ts of email marketing and what constitutes an effective marketing email.

Here are seven practical tips to take your real estate marketing to the next level and make all of your emails shine. Keep these in mind next time you send out a mass email or create a drip marketing campaign in your real estate CRM:

1. Be relevant. Personalization and relevancy will be a key factor to the success of your campaign. The emails you send out need to be directly relevant to their recipients. You wouldn’t want to receive an email about buying a home when you just purchased one two months ago. Or, imagine a teenage girl receiving an email from a neighbourhood retailer about their great selection of men’s clothing.

Use a real estate CRM or email marketing system that automatically personalizes each email so each is addressed to the recipient’s name. The “Dear Valued Client” approach often comes across as cold and impersonal. It makes people think, “Jeez, I wonder how many thousands of people this went out to!” As Hubspot’s Hannah Fleishman says, “Write the way you’d like someone to write to you – clearly, naturally and genuinely.”

2. Don’t use an email client like Hotmail or Outlook. To maximize deliverability rates, you’ll want to make certain you’re not using an email client to send out mass emails. To ensure high deliverability, use a dedicated email service such as Constant Contact or a real estate CRM with email marketing capability.

3. Make it about them. “What’s in it for me?” For each email you send out, ask yourself, What value does this email provide to my recipients? Does the email help them in some way? Offer them something they’d be interested in? If not, you may want to think twice before sending it out. Don’t make your emails all about you and your business. Make them about your clients and real estate leads.

4. Be proactive when it comes to spam. Make sure you don’t have your spam-blinders on; understand which words are often flagged by spam filters and try to avoid these words. There are many free spam checkers online that you can run your email through for that extra peace of mind.

Also, make sure you comply with all anti-spam laws. For instance, ensure you have an unsubscribe link at the end of each email.

According to marketing strategist Jay Baer, “43 per cent of email recipients click the spam button based on the email ‘from’ name or email address,” which is why it’s a good practice to personally reach out to people who you haven’t made contact with in a long time before adding them to your email list.

Avoid sending emails with large attachments because this often is a “red light” when it comes to emails from a spam filter perspective. Instead of attaching files, link to them or embed them in the email itself.

5. Be interesting. If you want people to open and read your emails, you need to give them a reason to do so. This is especially true considering the volume of emails an average person gets these days. Make sure the email subject line is catchy and the email content is interesting and valuable to the recipient. For instance, if I’m sending out an e-newsletter, instead of the subject line being “My Newsletter” I might instead use “Matt’s Monthly Real Estate Tips.” Be sure to include images, as well, to spruce the email up.

6. Include a “call-to-action”. Don’t make people guess; tell them exactly what it is you want them to do. That may be to pick up the phone and give you a call, complete an online form or click on a particular link. If you’re asking leads to call you, try to provide an incentive for them to do so and be sure to make your phone number clearly visible.

Let’s say you send out an email about a great new housing development with no call-to-action. A lead may read the email and say to himself, “Wow, this looks nice, I’ll keep it in mind” and then get on with their day. But if the agent explicitly asked people at the end of the email to call him or her for special pricing information, they would surely get a lot more leads. That same lead would likely pick up the phone and call.

7. Measure and analyze results: If you’re serious about email marketing, you’ll want to use a real estate CRM or dedicated email marketing system with campaign reporting functionality. Data such as open rate, click-through rate, and bounce-back rate will help you improve your email marketing moving forward and allow you to A/B split test to see which content or campaigns work best.

We’ve had customers of ours use email campaign reports to identify hot leads in their real estate database. They’ve sent Just Listed e-cards to a group of leads and could easily view who clicked on their links and read their emails (and how many times each one was read). They got insight into who was interested in what they’ve sent out and from there, were able to give these real estate leads a call and set-them up on a drip marketing campaign.

I hope that these tips will help you get the most of your email marketing efforts. As any top producer or marketing whiz will tell you, email remains one of the best and most cost-effective ways to nurture your leads and keep in touch with clients. Be sure to update your real estate database on a regular basis to ensure all of your email addresses are still correct. Good luck!

Source: http://www.remonline.com/7-tips-to-take-your-email-marketing-to-the-next-level/

Commission Agreement Basics

sukh.bhaura@century21.ca — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

There is no shame in pointing out that from a real estate professional’s point of view, one of the most important questions that arises from any real estate transaction is: “How much and when will I get paid?”

An agent’s right to commission is governed by the commission agreement, which is a complex legal document that gives rise to numerous issues relating to entitlement and enforceability of commission by an agent. Leaving aside the actual commission rates and structure, here are some of the important issues that are involved, using Ontario laws as an example.

What format? Listing agreements are legal contracts. To be enforceable, they must not only be validly executed, but they must also conform to the requirements of the provincial regulations and the Code of Ethics Regulation. The listing agreement will be completely invalid and will not be worth the paper it’s written on (as the old saying goes) if:

• it lacks a provision that it will expire on a certain date;

• it contains a provision for more than one expiry date; or

• a true copy of it is not delivered by the agent to the client immediately.

On this last point, the agreement must not only be delivered “immediately”, but to be valid it must also be fully completed at the time of delivery. In Certa Homes Ltd. v. Brown, the agent had the seller sign various blank exclusive listing agreements, with the dates to be filled in later. The court found that this did not comply with Ontario’s Real Estate Business Brokers Act (REBBA), so the agent’s claim for commission failed.

Ideally the listing agreement should be in writing, but technically speaking there is no actual legislative requirement in REBBA to this effect. From the agent’s standpoint, the problem is this: REBBA may not require an agreement to be in writing, but it does mandate that an agent cannot bring a legal action in court to recover commission unless there is either a written listing agreement, or certain other stated pre-requisites have been satisfied, among them that the agent has “obtained an offer in writing that has been accepted.”

In other words, the simple lack of a written listing agreement is not fatal to an agent bringing an action for commission – but it’s much, much harder to recover commission without it. A clearly drafted document in writing is the highly preferred route, since otherwise the agent will be required to prove that he was instrumental in “obtaining” the successful offer, and that a specific commission fee or percentage was verbally agreed to.

What kind of agreement? There are several different types of commission agreements that an agent and his client can reach. Which one is right for the client and the particular situation will depend on the facts. Here are the basics:

1) Open listing. This is the “free-for-all” of listing arrangements: the seller gives authority to sell the property to one or several agents, but usually also retains the right to sell the property on his own. Commission is only payable on completion of the transaction and the agreement terminates when the property is sold or taken off the market.

2) Exclusive listing. As the name would suggest, in these kinds of arrangements the seller gives the agent an exclusive and irrevocable right to list the property for a specific time. The seller gives up the right to deal with other agents during the currency of the listing (except perhaps through the listing agent, for example where provision is expressly made for him to use the services of other agents) and remains liable for commission even if the seller manages to sell the property himself.

3) MLS. These types of agreements cast the widest net and are the most commonly used. The property is listed with one agent (as in an exclusive listing), but the agent uses the services of other selling agents as well. The seller is obligated only to the listing agent for the commission, and that commission is shared by the listing agent and the selling agent (if they are not the same person).

Amount of commission: In connection with the amount or calculation of the commission, REBBA contains surprisingly few provisions. It merely states that an agent’s commission or remuneration “shall be upon an agreed amount or percentage of the sale price or rental”; HST is additional. (Note that REBBA expressly prohibits any arrangement where the fee consists of a combination of both a flat-rate and a percentage; it also prohibits commission based on the difference between the closing price and the listing price). If the agreement does not provide for a set rate or range of commission, then the fee will be whatever rate prevails in the community where the property is located.

Who pays? In the contemporary real estate marketplace it is usually the seller in a real estate transaction who pays the agent’s commission. However, this can certainly be changed by agreement between the parties, usually by having the buyer agree to assume that responsibility in the Offer to Purchase. It is also quite common for the listing agreement to give an agent the authority to co-operate with another agent, i.e. an agent for a potential buyer. There are three possible scenarios to cover how the buyer’s agent gets paid:

the agent for the seller pays the agent for the buyer;
the buyer’s agent has the authority to negotiate and accept commission directly from the seller; or
the buyer pays commission to the agent directly (usually under a buyer’s agency agreement).

Despite these various permutations, in practice the typical arrangement involves the seller’s listing agent paying the co-operating agent out of the commission received from the seller.

Other considerations: Special considerations apply to situations involving agents who are employed by a real estate brokerage firm and who are obliged under a contract of employment to share commission with that organization. First of all, a particular agent’s personal right to the commission will be governed not only by the listing agreement, but also by the specific employment contract that he entered into with that brokerage. Secondly, it may be the brokerage, rather than the agent personally, that has the ultimate obligation to collect any commission from the seller.

This gives rise to an interesting question. What happens if the brokerage does not make an effort to collect the commission owed? The case of Crompton v. Norman Hill Realty Inc. involved this very question. There, certain real estate deals failed to close, and at issue was whether under its contract with the agents the brokerage was nonetheless obliged to pay their commission. The court held that the brokerage had an affirmative duty to the agents to make every effort to collect the commissions (or to negotiate a reasonable settlement) and to pay those agents their share of it. It would be unfair, the court concluded, to allow the brokerage to negotiate a settlement that was advantageous to itself, but that was reached at the agent’s expense.

What’s the bottom line? You work hard as an agent to earn your commission. Make sure you

think about what you are required to do;
do all those things you are required to do; and
make sure you do not do something that will result in you losing your right to receive and be paid your hard-earned commission.

GTA REALTORS® RELEASE MONTHLY RESALE HOUSING FIGURES

sukh.bhaura@century21.ca — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

GTA REALTORS® RELEASE MONTHLY RESALE HOUSING FIGURES

Greater Toronto Area (GTA) REALTORS® reported 10,182 sales through the TorontoMLS system in May 2013, representing a dip of 3.4 per cent compared to May 2012. Sales of single-detached homes in the GTA were up by almost one per cent compared to the same period last year, including a three per cent year-over-year increase in the City of Toronto.

"The sales picture in the GTA has improved markedly over the past two months. While the number of transactions in April and May remained below last year’s levels, the rate of decline has been much smaller. A growing number of households who put their decision to purchase on hold as a result of stricter lending guidelines are starting to become active again in the ownership market," said Toronto Real Estate Board President Ann Hannah.

The average selling price for May 2013 sales was $542,174 – up by 5.4 per cent in comparison to $514,567 in May 2012. The annual rate of price growth was driven by the tight low-rise segment of the market and particularly by single-detached and semi-detached home transactions in the City of Toronto. Average condominium apartment prices were also up slightly in comparison to last year.

The MLS® Home Price Index (HPI) Composite Benchmark was up by 2.8 per cent year-over-year.

"The annual rate of price growth in May was not surprising given the competition that still exists between buyers, particularly for low-rise home types such as single-detached and semi-detached houses. We remain on track for a three-and-a-half per cent increase in the average selling price for 2013 as a whole," said Jason Mercer, TREB’s Senior Manager of Market Analysis.

How Big Is Big Enough?

sukh.bhaura@century21.ca — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Home Buyers Ask: How Big Is Big Enough?

This is one of the first questions home buyers should ask themselves.

The real estate value mantra - location, location, location - is at the heart of this apparently-simple decision. In the age of urban sprawl, buyers too often make the urban versus suburbanchoice using the wrong criteria.

Which home-buyer group do you belong to?

Buyers who want to maximize time spent doing what they like, with those they love, will chose to live within reasonable proximity to work and what matters to them. They aim to live in the middle of what they love and to keep travel time to a minimum, even if square footage must be compromised.
Buyers, who are convinced they want more square footage than urban homes and condominiums offer at the same price point, are automatically drawn by "bigger is better" marketing campaigns for suburban locations. Details of long commute times and the resulting life in a car (or on a train) are glossed over, as are realities of lost time with family and friends. Size is king!

Many buyers faced with the urban versus suburban decision concentrate on price per volume in the same way that detergent and many household products are price compared. With commodities, bigger is better and cheaper, and therefore the better buy. With houses, it's not so simple.

Bigger is not always more important that location and lifestyle, but it seems to stay in the buyer spotlight.

Need versus Want
The "up-sizing" craze that transformed healthy eating into obesity binges has had a similar impact on housing. Media promoted the "bigger is better" view of houses and encouraged buyers to go for the max. That strategy worked for some, but left many house rich and cash poor, or worse.

Financial guru Suze Orman suggests that gaining power over money is tied to separating needs from wants. For instance, when you know exactly whyyou need a certain amount of square footage, go for it. But, if you want what everybody else seems to have, or crave size that impresses, lessmay be more when it comes to home size.

Revisit the calculation you used to determine your square footage goal. What's the minimum living space you need? This is the amount you must clean, heat, and maintain. More space would need care, too, but do you need this extra expense and work? Consider your current space. Are there rooms that are rarely visited? How much time will be spend out of the home enjoying life?
Valuable Out-of-House Time
What's outside your front door determines your quality of life. With a wide variety of social, cultural, sports, and other activities to choose from there'll be less time spent inside in front of a screen. Choices may be greater in urban areas, but only if you make the effort to participate.
Commute Time = ?
Commuting hours represent time you can't get back. There's also the risk of delays and accidents. What will you miss while on the road? And then there's rising gas or transit costs to consider. How many cars will the family require?
Small is Sustainable
If you consider yourself environmentally-conscious, urban sprawl will not attract you. Smaller homes represent sustainable housing. Car-free lifestyles work on all green levels. Walking to work is a hot option. If you're not thinking "green," check with your children. They may be ready for less.