Prospecting- Sharing Databases

The common belief is that the average American family moves once every seven years. If you exclude people that don’t actually own property, between 5%-10% of the population in any given neighborhood will move each year. If you were to take a specific area or neighborhood and compare the total number of homes that sold this year in that area, you would know the actual percentage for that area.  Extensive research indicates if you have 24 “touches” or communications this year with a group of people, and you’re a solid agent, you should be successful in capturing at least 20% of the business that is transacted with the group you are contacting.

Applying these numbers to your situation, you have 100 people that you are contacting 24 times in 2016, of which between 5-10 of these people will have a real estate need. The 24 touches will ensure you get at least 20% of the purchases or sales that are transacted. We can conclude that you can count on 1 or 2 of the possible 10 sales that will occur. This may not sound like much, but what happens if you have 1,000 people you’re contacting? Now, you are closing 10-20 transactions.

There are two critical elements to your Relationship Management, 24 Touch campaign.

1. You must have a way to communicate with the whole group. You can’t see or call 1,000 people twice every month, so it makes sense to use direct mail or e-mail. If you don’t have the money to direct mail, your business can still flourish if you are continuously collecting e-mail address to add to your database.
2. You must identify what you’re going to send. This can include, personal success, real estate information, open house announcements, or market updates.

What if you don’t have very many e-mail addresses? If this is the case, it’s important to implement an e-mail gathering campaign immediately. It’s strongly recommended that you contact people that will be receiving your e-mails. If that’s not possible, still send the e-mails, but be prepared to remove the addresses of anyone that objects to receiving information from you. Here are some great suggestions on how to gather e-mails:

1. Talk to other professionals you do business with, like doctors, lawyers, accountants, retailers, maintenance people, or anyone else that comes to mind. Offer to network or share your information with them if they will share theirs with you. Every time you have a new buyer, recommend they do business with this group and encourage the group to do the same.
2. Ask residents in a specific area to get you a copy of the neighborhood directory.
3. Join groups or organizations and e-mail to its members.
4. Remember to get e-mails every day from people that you talk to.
5. Ask your friends, family member and associates for the directories or e-mail addresses of everyone they know.

E-mail gathering should be one of the most important projects for you in 2016. The rewards can be fantastic. Think of it this way, if you were to e-mail to 1,000 people, information they enjoyed reading, and there were 50-100 sales, of which you participated in 20% of the transactions, you now have 10-20 real estate closings you can count on. If you calculate the commissions on this number of transactions, you are likely to be very happy. So,

GET TO WORK AND GATHER E-MAIL ADDRESSES!