We recently had the pleasure of speaking with CyberStar Allyson Hoffman ABR, CRP, CRS, e-PRO, GRI, RECS, SRES, ACRE of RE/MAX North in Northbrook, IL to find out how she is staying on top of her market:

How do you distinguish yourself from the competition in your marketplace?

I have been doing this for going on 24 years. Early on I was a self-promoter, so it is from a long history of personal promotion I have gained that notoriety, so to speak, or the recognition that one would get from constantly being out in front of the public in advertising, signs, and with an enormous web presence. That’s what sustains the other personal promotion that I’m doing because I heavily promote my web presence. Thus, it’s a combination of things that work for me, but it began many, many years ago with a very heavy personal promotion campaign.

Do you have any of the discounters in your market that you have to compete with?

Oh, yes. But I don’t see the discounters as competition. I really think the way to get around that issue is to be direct with it. I quite honestly tell people, yes, you can absolutely find someone that will do this job, or put your house on the market for less, the question is, what are they going to do for you once it goes on the market and what kind of end result you’re looking for. When you have a more extensive, well-developed marketing effort, which actually reaches a larger group of prospective buyers, you’re going to maximize what you’re going to get for your property. If you’re only focusing on a small group, you will never really know if the whole market has had a chance to react and what that ultimately means to you. Also, if you just look at the statistical information that comes from analyzing the results that are obtained from discount brokers as opposed to the results that are obtained from full service brokers, it is really pretty clear in the list-to-sell ratios — the full service brokers tend to sell much closer to the asking prices than the discount brokers. I believe that if someone is willing to basically negotiate what their own worth before they even start doing the job, how hard do you think it’s going to be for them to push the client give away their money too? If they don’t care about themselves, they’re not going to care about the seller’s money either. It’s my experience that the full service brokers tend to be much better at being tenacious, reporting what they are doing, and negotiating effectively. And at the end of the day, you may pay more to get the job done, but what really counts is what you walk out with from the closing table, and if I want to charge X and someone else wants to charge X-MINUS, but I can negotiate a better deal, or present the property information more effectively to a wider range of people so that I’m pulling in a better offer to start out with, and I’m better able to substantiate what we’re doing and negotiate to point of a higher end product sale, then its much more likely that they will walk out with a higher net number at the end or the transaction, even if they paid more commission to me than a discount broker. And that’s all that really matters — how many dollars clients have leaving the table, not how many they spend to get that.

How do you drive traffic to your Website and your PowerSites?

I drive traffic to my sites in a lot of different ways. Number one, I have multiple Websites of my own that are all cross-linked which helps. I also promote my web presence as part of my personal promotion, so my own Websites are out there. If a buyer or seller wants to get to a PowerSite of mine, they can get it any number of ways … from its raw URL, any of my Websites, and from each of my other PowerSites because I use the showcase of listings. But the long and short of it is that by just having a massive amount of information about me and my listings on the web, and I do mean massive, it’s really pretty easy to find me. I usually will come up organically positioned fairly high on one of my Websites using many of the most common types of search terms people use for real estate around here, and I think that’s in part because I have been on the web for a long time compared to most people. I have URLs that have been nurtured since the early Internet days around 1996-1997. Thus, when people want to know how I got Allyson.com and Allyson.net, for example, it’s because I purchased them in ‘96 when they were readily available.

When I market my properties, what I’m really marketing is the URL to the Website. That is the focus of everything I do; there is not a marketing piece that leaves my desk about a property that does not have the URL as the primary focus. I really could care less about how long they look at an ad. All I care about really is that they see that the property is on the web with a URL and go there! Now forget the ad! The reason for the ad is to drive them to the Internet 100%. The ads are meaningless otherwise.

The URL is the most important thing for me. The PowerSites are extremely important because to me, that’s one of my primary marketing tools. I use everything on the web from my own Websites to all the web portals where listings can be found to create exposure — from our local franchiser, RE/MAX Northern Illinois, to more common things like Realtor.com. I use all the Internet classifieds too; Craigslist has actually been very good at referring leads to my website. I love the statistical information that PowerSites is now providing to us because I send that out every Monday morning to my clients. This way they can’t say “you are not creating exposure.” I had someone say—and this was before I started sending out the report, “what was I going to do to help create more exposure?” I then put the PowerSite statistics in front of her & said, “If you look here it shows that your Website has been viewed 15,000 times and no one has made an offer. I really don’t know how much more exposure you could be looking for.” It seems to me that the exposure is there, but the price is probably wrong.

Another way I market is through an “Inter-linkage Strategy” which is the term I use for the linkage between my personal Websites, all the other portals on the web, all the Internet classifieds, and my PowerSites. If you list a property with me, by the time all is said and done, you’re probably going to be on 50-70 places out on the web at least. And I could care less if all the 38,000-40,000 agents in northern Illinois want to market my listings on their Websites too — go for it and bring me a good buyer! Everybody else is worried that they’re going to take those leads and I could care less because I generate lots of them regardless. I have plenty and all the additional exposure should do is to help me to succeed more quickly. Eventually, the lookers will probably end up at my Website anyway.

How do you market the benefits of PowerSites to your clients?

It’s part of my listing presentation. In fact, the primary first section of my listing presentation is on marketing because that’s what the consumers really care about. They don’t care about how many years you’ve been in the business, or many pieces of property you have sold, whether you are number 1 or 100, just as long as they get their house sold at a number they like. I always start with the marketing. I dive into showing them the photography I do and the types of ads, and then I lead into the Internet because most people in the public sector are looking for print ads too and need to understand that print doesn’t do anything. All the ads are going to do for me is give me another way to get people to go to the Website and that’s where 80-85% of the consumer public is today when they are looking for property or thinking of selling. When we go over my marketing plan I get to a section that deals with the internet. It starts with a whole sheet where all the URLS I have are listed and all the web portals I use are noted, but the primary thing at the top is what the Internet strategy starts with—www.YOURADDRESS.com. Then I show them examples of my various types of PowerSites. I make sure I have examples for both high priced properties and low priced properties so they can see this isn’t something I only do for special clients—it’s done for everybody! Most of the time, this is something that will entice them. From there I move into what my other Websites do because really the primary thing is the PowerSite and making sure it is reachable from all those other places.

I actually tried an experiment with a couple who were interviewing three agents in a market that tends to be controlled primarily by local brokers making people think they need the local office to succeed. So I brought them into my office where we have large plasma screens for our clients to show them property and as they walked in, the mock up of their complete property website greeted them on that screen with a big banner that said ‘*** SOLD ***”! I jumped right into showing them all the features (and this did include a full photo tour since I had taken a lot of pictures when I previewed the house without them — it was vacant). To say they were bowled over is an understatement — they told me that I had the best presentation, hands down, and I was the last agent they spoke to. It’s a hard market to compete for listings in and they still have not made a decision because they were going out of town for a week, but I know that I made them really think hard and I am optimistic that this might be what is the deciding factor.

How would you describe your current real estate market and what changes (if any) have you made in the way you approach your business?

Our current real estate market is definitely a buyer’s market. I study the statistics every month. In the first three months of the year our listing inventory had increased by nearly 22%. In three months we went from 40,000 listings to just over 55,000 listings in January, February, and March and that would be at a time when you would be hoping the inventory would be dropping because people are coming into the market and buying the inventory. We are looking at about a 15-1 ratio on houses available to houses selling, so if you’re going to be buying, it’s fabulous. If you are moving-up, I am recommending that people go ahead and do it because sure, you’re going to sell your current house for less, but you will buy the bigger, more expensive house for equally less and then some. Hypothetically, let’s say you’re moving from a 100,000 to 200,000 price point or a million to 2 million price point and you’re going to lose 10% or 15% at 100 or a million. But since you’re going to lose that on the upper end as well, you end up making money in the big picture, by what you’re not going to pay on the higher price property. So for move-up buyers, for first time buyers, or anybody who doesn’t have anything to sell, its fine to buy now. But for the people that have to downsize or scale back, the question I ask them is, “Do you really have to move?” because they might want to consider holding off since the market is not going to maximize what they can now get out of their property. It would be better to wait a year or two until the market rebounds (and I have no idea how long that’s going to take).

What resources do you use to stay on top of current trends in real estate marketing and technology?

The primary thing would be list serves, reading things like Realty Times, RIS Media, and Inman News. Most of the resources I use would be online resources—of course I do get the journals and magazines that come in the door, but I don’t always have a lot of time to read those in great detail. I would probably say the most important day-to-day stuff is done on list serves with the CyberStars and Cyber Professionals because you have 200 good minds finding one great idea out there and just shooting them back and forth to each other with commentary. It’s a lot more beneficial than doing it all on your own. Sometimes I can take classes and things like that to learn new things that come along, but I’m usually so far ahead of the game that the classes offered are too basic for me. I was the technology chairman for the Illinois Association of Realtors in 2006. The interesting thing there is when I was doing the tech chairman job, one of my objectives was to try and figure out what we needed to bring to the membership and we started talking about podcasting and blogging and things like that—I was sitting with the whole committee for the state and I think there was only one other person at that time who said they were either blogging and podcasting besides me.

I think that the young people coming into the business are going to run circles around us older folks if we don’t get comfortable with technology changes quickly because this is not something that you can just catch up too easily, it simply changes too fast. It’s going to take the new people time to come up to speed on experience and things like that, but they’re going to go at it more quickly because of their technological skills and lack of fear of the Internet coupled their ability to communicate using email and text messaging — things that I would say that most of the Boomer set is just not great with. I’m a Boomer, so I’m an anomaly for my age. Not that I was techy to start with at all. Initially, I was forced to use a computer originally back in 1985 when I did this for the very first time and getting me comfortable then required dragging me to it kicking and screaming … not really, of course, but it surely felt that way at the beginning, probably in part, because at that time, no one else was even thinking about using computers in real estate!