The Real Estate Marketing Expert's Blog

Leveraging the Herd Mentality.

Two restaurants sit on opposite sides of the street. The cuisine and atmosphere of both are of equal quality and the menus are comparably priced. But when potential diners see a line of people waiting at one of the restaurants and not the other, they assume the busy one is superior -- and they follow the crowd. It's a phenomenon known by many names -- Pack Mentality, Peer Pressure, Following the Herd -- and it plays a critical role in selling real estate.

For starters, people buy, rent and lease real estate when they see other people buying, renting and leasing. It's something people find comfort in: going with the crowd, doing what everyone else is doing so they're not left out or missing the boat. And not only do people follow the crowd when making decisions in real estate, the mere presence of too many people while making a critical decision -- like what to buy or where to live -- can cause people to act in ways they otherwise wouldn't. And that can work to your advantage.

So, how can the principle of the Herd Mentality work in real estate?

Here's one thing I always tell my clients when I'm consulting with them. Consider closing your sales offices Monday to Friday and only opening them once you have multiple appointments booked at the same time. By scheduling overlapping appointments, your team can build a sense of urgency with these potential clients, rather than spreading those same few client visits out throughout the week. This also frees your team up throughout the week the make presentations, meet with brokers and get out into the community.

Check out this video for an example of the Herd Mentality in action!

First rule of real estate marketing: Make everything trackable.

There's no denying it: the pace of change in our modern world is dizzying.

If you don't believe me, close your eyes and think about life just 10 years ago and consider how different things were then -- especially in the business world. A decade ago, nobody had high-speed Internet or HTML interfaces. There were no iPods or BlackBerrys. Google was just coming out of Stanford and had yet to revolutionize the way the world shares and accesses information. Back then, nobody was tweeting or had a Facebook profile. And although cell phones were available, they weren't everywhere like they are now.

The painful truth is that what sold your property a decade ago is terribly outdated now. Today, smart, skilled builders and developers are trying to market everything from million dollar developments to single-family residences using antiquated methods from the Dinosaur Age. My goal is to change all that.

One of the first things my company, N5R, does it to begin tracking and measuring our clients' sales and marketing efforts. It's almost life altering when we present our results. Our clients can't believe that the things they thought worked best didn't work at all, and the things they thought worked the least were actually generating 80 percent of their business.

Let me give you an example. One of the most common tools that developers in residential and commercial real estate use are the standard, old-school registration cards. Unfortunately, 70 percent of the data on registration cards is baloney. People will check off the first box in the list nine out of 10 times. Now, people don't mean to lie. But most of them can't remember what they had for breakfast let alone how they came to hear about your project. So, if registratio cards aren't telling you where your leads are coming from, is there a more accurate way to track them? Yes, there is.

But before I explain how to track leads, let me stress again why it's important to track leads.

When most developers do a marketing plan, they don't bother doing projections. Typically, they do a media plan and say, "Okay, we're going to spend this much on the Chicago Tribune. We're going to do something on Google. We're going to do something on billboards. And we're going to do a print piece." So, they write out a number of different initiatives as part of their marketing plan, and put a dollar figure beside each one. Done. The problem with that this is old-world thinking. There's nothing trackable about any of these initiatives -- and none of them include projections. So how will you know if the things on  your marketing plan are actually working?

What I challenge developers to do in my real estate consulting business and through N5R is to add a layer of information to your marketing plan by writing down what you expect your cost-to-lead to be and how many leads you're planning on generating. Then track that information every week, every month. Are you hitting your numbers with the Tribune?  If not, try changing the creative direction or try something different. If your Google ads aren't hitting your cost-per-lead or you're not getting enough leads, make a change.

Another thing: not only should and lead-generation tool be trackable, it should also give you results in real time. The days of waiting weeks and months to find out what's working and what's not over. And if you don't feel that trend already, let me assure you that your clients certainly do.

For information on how to make your strategies trackable and in real time, download my eBook.

It's not the market; it's your marketing.

In today's economy there are new rules to selling real estate. What worked in the boom won't work in the crunch. This means that home sellers, real estate agents, home builders, and residential developers must take a new, more aggressive approach to selling real estate. In other words, you need to challenge your old way of thinking and rethink the way you sell your property in 2009.

But the good news is that despite the unsold inventory across the country, there are some unused and underused marketing strategies that are showing some serious results. And my goal is to share them with you. What makes me qualified to do that? For 10 years now, my companies, N5R and Bodnarchuk Consulting, have worked with firms of all sizes to teach developers new strategies to generate leads and profit from new technologies -- and I recently wrote a compact eBook that contains 10 essential strategies to selling  your property in 2009.

Over the last decade, I've shaped N5R into one of the most successful real estate companies in America, with projects in 10 countries, 30 cities and over $4 billion in sales. N5R's clients include some of the largest and most successful global developers, including Ritz Carlton, Four Seasons, Hyatt, Hilton, Intrawest, Ginn and more.

Times are tought -- and what you need are strategies that are even tougher. That's what I hope to provide you in this Blog.