Long before I was doing real estate sales coaching. Before I ever sold a home, I had a real estate sign business in high school.
I use to drive around in my Dad’s old Dodge Ram truck with truck load full of posts and signs. In Wisconsin. Ice. Snow.
I use to also shovel driveways, sidewalks in the winter for REO listings. During the summer I would mow the lawn. I will get to that later though.
I had to hammer and chisel through the frozen tundra of Wisconsin to put up for sale signs for real estate agents on their new listings. There was a form and checklist for real estate agents to fill out, for example, sign rider, directional, flier box, etc.
A few years later I would become a real estate agent. Now I was filling out the checklist. Never once did I fill out the form requesting a flier box. I had a website. I was bringing a tech edge to my clients. It was 1997. (Wow! That seems like forever ago!)
An old sign rider from back in the day. Guess what brokerage I was with?
I promoted the website via a sign rider.
I did this for a few reasons:
- I thought that people would be able to remember a URL easier than a phone number.
- I thought people wouldn’t want to get out of their car for a stupid flier. (Remember, I’m in Wisconsin. It’s cold in the winter.)
- I didn’t want to worry about keeping the stupid flier box full.
- I wanted to drive traffic to my website, where I could tell a better story about the listing.
Real Estate Agent Flier Box FAIL
I was out looking at property listings the other day and came across this listing.
No fliers in the flier box.
What does that say about you? About your business? About your brand?
If I’m a neighbor thinking about listing my home, do you think I’m impressed with your marketing?
Why is the brokerage OK with this?
I get it agents. You are independent contractors. But there it is. A huge John L. Scott sign with NO fliers. Where are the standards? Agents, don’t you want your brokerage to have standards? The other agents in your office and franchise represent you no matter how independent you think you are. You are more interdependent than independent.
You can do better. You have to do better.
The other thing that drives me crazy about this sign is the number of riders. That’s a whole other real estate sales coaching blog post though.
I uploaded this picture to my facebook profile so that I would have it to post here. A few people saw it and shared their thoughts.
Brandon Marchand called a spade a spade.
Dan Keller is being optimistic.
Janaya K Goselin sees this in her market too, I guess.
Jeff Bernheisel asked if the lawn was mowed. He has blogged about how a neglected lawn, may lead a buyer to thinking “I wonder what else has been neglected on this property?”
Stacey McVey flat out says that’s “why I refuse to do them.”
So quickly going back to Jeff’s comment. Remember earlier when I said that I use to shovel sidewalks and mow lawns. Appearance matters. First impressions do set the stage. We can’t help it. Its human psychology.
I was paid to “stage” the outside appearance of the house. You can do this too. You can do better. You have to do better.
Real estate agents didn’t want to pound signs in to the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, but it got done. They had me.
They didn’t want to shovel 8 inches of fresh snow, but it still got done. They didn’t want to mow the lawn of their listing in 95 degree humid weather, but it still got done. They had me.
Now that I’m in real estate sales coaching, I can’t do it for you. I can only make you aware that it needs to get done.
You can do better. You have to do better.
Your clients deserve it.
The other real estate agents that you share an office with, a franchise, deserve it.
The real estate industry deserves it.
Hire a high school kid to do your dirty work. Don’t use a flier box. Find alternatives. Search for solutions. Do better.
You can do better. You have to do better.
What are things that we in the real estate industry have to get better at doing?
Filling flyer boxes takes time and a weekly task. I refuse to have them empty (although it happens). We use both flyer boxes & url’s and it seems to work fine
True story Darin. If your activities are not sustainable or worse you are not capable of sustaining them at a high level then you need to take a step back and figure out how you can close this gap.
It is not limited to offline activities. I was contacted by a Realtor last Friday evening inquiring about design and SEO services.
We chatted for about a half hour as I drove home from the office. I was provided the two site addresses both of which were easy to remember. I asked the Realtor if I could email them more info using an email address on their site, to which they agreed. As I was driving I wasn’t able to write an email address down. I was willing to pull over to jot it down but thought if it is on their site no need.
How wrong I was…
I followed up on Monday in great detail and sent my response to the ONLY email address on either of the two sites. Seconds later it was returned. It was forwarded to an email address that does not exist.
“Sorry, no mailbox here by that name.”
I scratch my head and explore the site for a few more minutes looking for another address. Nothing.
I Google the Realtor hoping to find an address on a Linked In profile or maybe a Facebook page.
Nothing.
So I use the contact form on their other site. I cut and paste the content of my email and place it in the form and send it off.
Minutes later I get an email welcoming me to their site and providing me a password to access the search of their site.
No mention of “Thanks for your note, by the way if you’d like to use our search here is a password”.
Nope, just a here is your log in and password. Which was far from what my message I submitted via their form was about.
I thought maybe I missed something and that is all the form is for. I read all the content around the form…nothing about signing up to use their search.
So I have no idea if my 15 minutes of effort ever did a message to anyone on their team never mind the person I was talking too.
As our conversation was very engaging and this team seemed like they would be great clients I toughed it out, this combined with the prospect of revenue lead me to put in a significant effort. Now I will need to call them back by phone today.
If I was home buyer or seller I would have moved on after the first email bounce.
Why would you let this happen? Would you leave a defunct email address on your business card? If your phone number changed would you not update it everywhere it existed online and offline?
Why are you making the coveted conversion exponentially harder then it already is?
Brandon – Something that I have encouraged agents to do…depending on how cool your sellers are with this: Leave a stack there and let them fill it up. Of course, doesn’t work if it is vacant or an REO.
Kye – Probably another good reason to have your website professional done or at least on occasion looked over from an outside perspective, check links, files, etc make sure everything works for the public.
Thanks for your comments you guys!!!!
Great post, Darin! I’ve never used a flyer box (well, apart from one time when a seller twisted my arm) but I agree with all the reasons you provided for why it is a waste of time, energy, and money. Another reason to avoid them is that the flyers can get wet (incidentally, I took a course once where the instructor actually told us we should LAMINATE our flyers!). There is also the fact that many people (at least in the markets I work) are offended by the wastefulness of printing flyers that will only wind up in the trash ten minutes later. Lastly, another reason not to put out flyers is that other agents might take them (I mean a big stack of them). That may sound paranoid but a number of agents who routinely use flyer boxes have complained to me that this has happened to them…