Whether it is always verbalized or not, a common sentiment many brokers and their management teams are grappling with is the realization they have to do something, they are just not sure what or how soon. Of course you realize you have to reinvent. In fact, you talk about it all the time but what are you actually doing?

LOL. That’s what I do when I hear brokers and/or managers talking about the future but they still haven’t figured out how to text, still don’t realize the importance of creating a social media presence for themselves and their companies, don’t think getting back to an internet lead immediately is critical, or still think that everyone should have a private office.

FYI, if you don’t think the agent of the future is looking at how you handle these things you are fooling yourself. They are looking for the company and broker/manager that “gets it”. Do you think the agent of the future wants to work for “Mac” or “PC”? I am not talking about computers here, I am talking about the icon of what is cool and hip to today’s agents and consumers.

The sooner you are honest with yourself, the sooner you will be able to address your team. The sooner you address your team and hold them accountable, the sooner you will start making an impact in the market and be able to truly say you are reinventing yourself.

The first change is cultural and it starts with YOU!

• What are YOU doing to reinvent yourself? You will have ZERO credibility if you are not doing what you are asking the team to do
• What are YOU doing to make sure your management team is reinventing itself? How are you holding them accountable?
• What are YOU doing to take away whatever obstacles that may be impeding change? Are you really breaking the old paradigm or are you letting old habits die hard?
• What are YOU doing to make change something your company embraces rather than something it ignores, or worse, runs away from? Are you incenting people and making it fun?

It’s not going to happen overnight. Reinvention takes time but you can break it up into manageable pieces that everyone can buy into:

1. Set 3 – 6 months goals that will lay the foundation for what has to happen later
2. Acknowledge small victories and set the tone you want
3. Set 6 – 18 month goals using the shorter term goals as a jumping point
4. Stay focused and make sure you are hold your team accountable

During any long term project like this you have to have a rallying cry. When we started PCMS at the beginning of the recession in early 2008, some days seemed impossible but we believed in what we were doing and knew it would pay off as it (thankfully) has. If you can’t think of one, feel free to borrow ours:

Positive Attitude Hard Work Laser Focus
PAHWLF!

About our webinar presenter, Bradley Miller

• Founded 1CAVO 2007 to help brokers with ILM needs.
• A 23-year veteran of the real estate industry starting as an agent in Champaign, IL.
• Managed the residential division of the 100+ agent family business, Miller & Miller Realtors for several years.
• Joined Homestore.com (HOMS)  in 1999 as a national accounts manager.

Webinar Attendees!

PCMS Consulting wants to offer only the best and most helpful content to our audience, and your feedback is highly-valued by our team of real estate consultants! Please use the comments section below to ask questions or send feedback our way.

I recently had a fascinating conversation with another industry professional who made me laugh even though the topic was very sad. This person made an analogy to dinosaurs and the Ice Age that rang true as it relates to what is happening in the real estate brokerage industry. “Our industry (in general) is like a herd of dinosaurs grazing on dry grass wondering what happened to the green grass while, in the distance, a glacier is slowly coming down the side of the mountain ready to make fossils out of all of them.”

Harsh? Yes! Somewhat true? Yes! All the signs are there:

• Physical plant overhead bankrupting brokerages;
• Internet leads going unanswered;
• Websites still looking like static brochures; and,
• Agents leaving the business.

Yet these and many other issues remain, all too often, unaddressed by brokerages either out of fear, ignorance, or hope that the market will return to “normal” so we can all wake up from this nightmare. Guess what? It’s not going to happen so if you are not willing to embrace change and innovation, you might be, metaphorically speaking, find yourself “stuck in the ice”. There is a great site called www.coolquotes.com that I refer to when I want to communicate an idea with a quote. Here are a couple of good ones that should get you thinking:

“He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” Harold Wilson

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

As humans we don’t like change and as real estate professionals we have had the additional burden of a tough market for the past few years which has kept our focus on survival rather than innovation. When you add all that to the fact that the consumer’s expectations have continued to grow you are faced with a huge gap between innovation and expectations. So here we are, what are we going to do? Are we going to go the way of the dinosaur or are we going to take the bull by the horns and make the changes that are necessary to reinvent ourselves for future success?

Here are a few things to put into your reinvention playbook:

• Create a vision
  • You need to lead the charge by living your new vision
• Remove obstacles and create short term wins
  • The changes will not take hold over night so build on successes
• Create a new corporate culture
  • Make innovation part of everything you do
• It’s not too late but you have to start today!

DOWNLOAD our real estate webinar, “How do you effectively drive traffic to your website?”

Webinar Attendees!

PCMS Consulting wants to offer only the best and most helpful content to our audience, and your feedback is highly-valued by our team of real estate consultants! Please use the comments section below to ask questions or send feedback our way.

DOWNLOAD our real estate webinar, “What are today’s online consumers looking for?”

About our Webinar presenter, Ashfaq Munshi

• Founder and CEO of Terabitz
• Brings a unique mix of 20 years of entrepreneurship, engineering, marketing, and management experience.
• A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard,  completed graduate work in computer science at Brown and the University of California, Santa Cruz and is an alumnus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
• Has founded four other Silicon Valley companies: Radiance, Vivecon, SpecialtyMD (acquired by Ventro), and Commerce Engine (became Ariba).

About our webinar presenter, Jose Perez

• Founded PCMS Consulting in 2007
• MBA in Real Estate from University of Texas at Austin with over 20 years experience in the residential and commercial real estate industries.
• Former SVP Franchise Sales and Acquisitions for Realogy Corporation,  parent company of CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, Better Homes and Gardens, and Sotheby’s International Realty.
• Directly and indirectly responsible for the franchise affiliation of over 3,000 brokerage companies and the acquisition of another 1,000.

Webinar Attendees!

PCMS Consulting wants to offer only the best and most helpful content to our audience, and your feedback is highly-valued by our team of real estate consultants! Please use the comments section below to ask questions or send feedback our way.

About our webinar presenter, Jose Perez

• Founded PCMS Consulting in 2007.
• MBA in Real Estate from University of Texas at Austin with over 20 years experience in the residential and commercial real estate industries.
• Former SVP Franchise Sales and Acquisitions for Realogy Corporation,  parent company of CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA, Better Homes and Gardens, and Sotheby’s International Realty.
• Directly and indirectly responsible for the franchise affiliation of over 3,000 brokerage companies and the acquisition of another 1,000.

DOWNLOAD our real estate webinar, “What Does the Brokerage of the Future Look Like?”

Webinar Attendees!

PCMS Consulting wants to offer only the best and most helpful content to our audience, and your feedback is highly-valued by our team of real estate consultants! Please use the comments section below to ask questions or send feedback our way.

PCMS Consulting today announced its Camp REinvent™ Summer Webinar Series. The company will be hosting ten free, 30 minute webinars focused on real estate broker reinvention through internet marketing and recruiting efforts.

“Our original Camp REinvent™ was a hit!” states Jose Perez, President of PCMS Consulting. “What we hope to accomplish this time around is to drive more brokers and managers to the program by making it shorter and much less of a time commitment. If someone wants to engage us on a deeper level, they can do so on an ‘a la carte’ basis based on their specific needs.”

Camp REinvent™ was conceived as a way to expose real estate brokerages to a variety of relevant topics that help them bring change and innovation to their companies and markets. Each 30 minute session contains ideas that are designed to spur serious conversation among brokers and their management teams to make a concerted effort to reinvent the way they operate, communicate with clients, and recruit the “agent of the future”.

LP Finn, Vice President of Coach Realtors, an 18 office brokerage in Long Island, NY participated in the original Camp REinvent™ from June to December 2009. “Our team really embraced the concepts that were presented in Camp REinvent and it caused us to introduce various new programs that have helped us become more profitable as well as recruit new agents into our company.”

In addition to company personnel, the webinar series will include guest hosts from several technology companies that are helping brokerages make a difference in their online marketing efforts. Confirmed guests include Ashfaq Munshi, CEO of Terabitz, a highly regarded Web 2.0 enterprise vendor that creates both company and agent ROI through their innovative platforms; Bradley Miller, Founder of 1Cavo, an outsourced internet lead management call center that deals with the industry’s ineffective response to internet leads; and Maria Mull, Vice President of Development of AlignMark, an expert in real estate human capital tools that drives agent recruiting leads, a simulation tool, and a way to manage and distribute agent recruiting leads.

PCMS Consulting Camp REinvent™ Free Summer Webinar Series for Real Estate

All webinars @ 2 p.m. EST

ABOUT PCMS CONSULTING
PCMS Consulting is a full service real estate consulting, management, and sales organization specializing in real estate brokerage and franchisor growth related issues.  PCMS was founded in 2007 and delivers a innovative consulting services and related products that leading companies require for maintaining and enhancing their market position and profitability. The organization is led by founder and President Jose Perez who has compiled a veteran, forward-thinking team of consultants, business development personnel, and innovative industry product vendors and franchisors to assist clients as they seek to “reinvent” their companies in a dramatically changing environment.  For more information, visit www.pcmsconsulting.com.

How do we help you REinvent your real estate business? We transform you into an innovator!

In its continued quest to offer innovative solutions to the brokerage community, PCMS Consulting today announced two new technology partnerships within its Internet Services Group. The company has signed strategic marketing agreements with 1CAVO of Denver, CO and Digital Docs.net of Orlando, FL.

1CAVO provides an outsourced internet lead management solution which combines lead management software with a call center that guarantees calls on internet inquiries within 15 minutes, 7 days a week. Founder, Bradley Miller, notes some disturbing statistics that is making this service very attractive to brokerages who believe they are missing revenue opportunities as a result of the fact that:

• 48% of internet leads are not responded to (California Association of Realtors);
• 7% of internet consumers are not ready to buy within 30 days but remain interested in more information (California Association of Realtors); and,
• 52% of internet consumers expect a response within one hour (California Association of Realtors).

Digital Docs.net, founded in 2001, optimizes real estate brokerage sales and profits through their Digital Closing Docs with Forever Marketing™ platform.  This one-of-a-kind technology dramatically improves automated post-closing client contact for the real estate agent and also notifies the agent and broker when the client returns to the market, thus increasing repeat business.  Since Digital Closing Docs™ integrates with the title agency it also increases agent capture rates (and monthly order count) of the broker’s owned (or affiliated) title agency.  “Our Forever Marketing™ platform is the only technology of its kind that automatically keeps the agent linked to the client for as long as the homeowner owns their home.” states Digital Docs.net founder Robert Reich.

“Our industry needs to reinvent itself. Every service we offer and technology we represent helps brokerages do just that.” says Jose Perez, President of PCMS. “These two exciting partnerships directly address two of the most glaring weaknesses our industry struggles with: internet lead management and professional client follow up.”

PCMS client, The Strata Group, a 200 agent, seven office brokerage in the Baltimore, MD area is in the process of implementing both of these products simultaneously and is optimistic they will provide significant returns. “We want to be leaders and innovators in our market. Both of these products will not only result in more business, but they will be excellent listing and recruiting tools that will clearly differentiate us from the competition.” states William Yerman, President and CEO of Strata.

While 1CAVO began operations earlier this year, in addition to Strata, they already boast several other leading multi office brokerages as clients. “Many companies are struggling with internet leads due to the fact that it is not cost-effective enough to establish their own call center.” states Miller. “That being said, they realize there is a significant opportunity cost due to missed internet lead conversions.”

Digital Docs.net is an established player in the title industry with customers in 18 states. Their engagement with PCMS is a result of their desire to bring this highly successful and necessary service to brokerages that either have an existing in-house or outsourced title relationship. In less than 30 days, through the assistance of the PCMS team, Digital Docs.net has already closed three transactions with brokerage companies and is in talks with several other large industry players.

ABOUT PCMS CONSULTING

PCMS Consulting is a full service real estate consulting, management, and sales organization specializing in real estate brokerage and franchisor growth related issues.  PCMS was founded in 2007 and delivers innovative consulting services and related products that leading companies require for maintaining and enhancing their market position and profitability. The organization is led by founder and President Jose Perez who has compiled a veteran, forward-thinking team of consultants, business development personnel, and innovative industry product vendors and franchisors to assist clients as they seek to “reinvent” their companies in a dramatically changing environment.  For more information, visit www.pcmsconsulting.com.

Two months ago I wrote about this topic and received a lot of great feedback and requests for more information. It’s an area of our business that is ripe for change and as the market begins to thaw, one that is begging for our attention.

Last fall, as part of our Camp REinvent™ coaching program, we “secret shopped” eight of our clients to see how quickly their agents responded to internet leads. We randomly selected five agents from each company and sent emails asking to be contacted. The message specified the part of town we were interested in, the amount of money we were willing to spend, and the approximate timing of our move. Pretty qualified lead wouldn’t you say?

Out of 40 total emails sent, we got one response within an hour, one five hours later, one ten hours later, and one 24 hours later. Believe it or not… 36 of the 40 emails went unanswered! NAR stats are not quite as bad, however, it is pretty well accepted that almost half of internet leads go unanswered and most of the balance called one or two days later.

Imagine letting someone sit in your lobby without addressing their existence. After a certain period of time, they would get up and leave disgusted with the poor service.

That’s probably happening right now with your online consumer unless you have some sort of system in place to handle those leads. It’s just too easy for a consumer to get information nowadays so if you don’t get back to them in an acceptable period of time (under an hour in my opinion), they are just going to type in your competitor’s URL and give them a shot… possibly writing you off forever.

NAR also tells us that only 7% of consumers are ready to buy within 30 days. Agents know this and since most of them are only interested in “hot” leads, they let many internet leads fall through the cracks. According to an MIT study, the probability of converting an internet lead decreases six times after the first hour so whoever gets to that consumer first is going to win. Bye the way, they win 93% of the time according to NAR!

Consider this, depending on the size of your company, you may be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year driving traffic to your site and hosting it. When a lead comes in, many of you are leaving it completely up to the agents to follow up. That is just not a good strategy if you want to win over the online consumer who is becoming more and more prominent every day.

How do you handle your internet lead management? You have three choices:

• Keep doing things the same way as the market gets better
  • Unfortunately, as things get better, many will take this approach not accepting the world has changed and internet lead management is now critical to their success
• Hire someone internally to be your internet lead management department
  • Unfortunately, unless you are one of the large regionals or a national company, you probably don’t have enough lead volume to justify a real call center and will only be putting a band aid on the problem
• Outsource your internet lead management to a call center
  • In this scenario, you are sharing a professional call center with other clients thus allowing the expense to be spread out over many  companies

The world has changed these past few years and we need to change with it. If there is one area I see over and over again that brokers are, effectively, leaving to chance, it’s this one. How much more money are you willing to leave on the table?