RIGHT ON!!!!!!!!!!

i dont randomly knock on a door, but i respect that you do and know for a fact that the response generated is far greater than mailing.


i took a listing today. there was an expired that i had started to work probably 3-4 months ago, i tried to knock and speak with him but he was not home so i did the next best thing. i put a doorhanger on his door giving some brief details, and lo and behold i got a call. i set up a meeting and interviewed, along with several other agents. he had to wait for his wife to come back in country so that the docs could be signed and he could get her approval. he wanted to narrow it down to one agent. while his wife was gone i kept a bit of contact and he even fsbo'd. his wife came back and i got the call on teh 4th of july asking to present to him, and he signed today. the house is very reasonably priced(he has to get into his next home which he alwready bought) he is hte lowest priced home in the neighborhood!!!! the last time that happened (i got hte most reasonably priced home) the house i had sold in 8 days. if you are motivated to sell and your home shows well, plus you price it according to how fast you want to sell it you can move a home in this market easy.

Big Egos? Heck yeah!

Don't all salespeople have strong egos? I do... and I hope everyone else here does too.

Nothing wrong with that.

AH! The innocence of being new! The trouble with that idea is simple - it doesn't work very well and its very expensive ($$$). My first year, I spent a ton of time and money (several thousand) on mailings and had but one reply and that led nowhere. Let me just say that I did everything "right" by picking a farm that no agent or company dominated. I also picked an area that had a fairly high home turnover rate and sent mailing after mailing to try and get my name in their faces, but still nothing. It was then that I realized that most people were just like me - they open their junk mail with the paper shredder switched "on". I do the same, I get enough junk mail to fill a landfill each week and have no time to even look at it.

That doesn't mean that you should run around complexes where there are "no soliciting" signs. I know it is oh soooo tempting. There is one complex in my town that is currently a rental and is converting to condo. Everyone hates it there and I would love to catch some of that business that I know will be coming from the renters looking to bail out. BUT, they have very strict "no soliciting" rules and they mean business about it too. Some of the characters on this forum would have been in for a serious reality check if they tried to door-knock or leave flyers in this complex!

I may try mailers if I can come up with a VERY unique campaign. But it would have to be very outside the box and eye-catching to be at all effective, because I'm sure that most residents could paper the walls with the number of agent mailings they have gotten over the past few weeks since the annoucement.

Bottom line: If you are really serious about mailing campaign, it must be something very, very unique and outside the box. Giving them market stats and what has sold and your own listings and sales will not cut it. If you are not careful, you will find that you are advertising your brokerage and not yourself. So be careful who you ask advice of as well. Most brokers are happy to let you advertise them for free. You literally have less than one second to grab their eye or it goes into the shredder. You also need to count on many, many mailings in order to get their attention. Make no mistake, this is a very expensive way to advertise with a very high failure rate. You are risking thousands - so take great care. This is why there are agents who try over and over again to get around the "no soliciting" signs.