Hey it's Dean Jackson and I've got a special treat for you today. If you're listening to this right now it means that you are a Getting Listings member and you've either taken one of our live teleclasses or you've participated online at some point over the last three years and you may even be just getting started and I want to introduce you to Chuck Charlton in Milton, Ontario. Chuck is one of the original Getting Listings members from the very first graduating class. He's a doer and he has the distinction of being the person who got and sold the very first listing from the Getting Listings teleclass before the very first session was even over so before the teleclass even ended. That listing was the first of many and he went onto make over $100,000 with the Getting Listings program in that very first year and nearly $360,000 over the three years since starting; they're all direct results of systematically following the program and he's going to share all of his step by step secrets with us. So listen to this interview, it's amazing what Chuck has been able to achieve in those three years since our very first Getting Listings teleclass and I know that this will be an encouragement and inspiration for you. Maybe you've even had better results than Chuck and I'd sure love to hear from you. Maybe you had great results initially and you'd like to get back on track. Either way you're going to really enjoy this conversation as Chuck lays out step by step the secrets to his results. So enjoy the interview and please share your results with me. Dean Jackson: Thank you for joining us. I was telling you in a conversation earlier that I was looking at the message board on Getting Listings and I discovered that exactly three years ago yesterday was the third anniversary of the first listing that you got and sold as a result of the Getting Listings program, isn't that neat. Chuck Charlton: It seems like yesterday but in a way it seems like a lifetime ago. It does doesn't it? When we were talking a couple of weeks ago it spurred me on to think about getting together here and sharing your results and the path of what's happened over those three years. I think it would be cool if we started right from the beginning and talked about what was going on for you as you started Getting Listings and moving to a new town, all of that kind of stuff. I've never really shared this publicly before but just to give some context around what was happening because I know there's a lot of people out there right now in today s what we call the new world and they're having a tough time. And so I was in a partnership in Toronto which is about half hour away from where I am right now and my wife was finishing her degree so we had all the 2
student loans and we had the vision of the two of us building a real estate team and we saw this town called Milton, like I said about half hour west of Toronto and it was going through this huge growth spurt and we just saw so much going on there. It turned out that in seven years the population doubled from about 30,000 to about 60,000 so it was just being in front of that, it's like fishing in a river that has a ton of fish, we knew it was a great place to be. There is a lot of young people, a lot of people just like us and the problem was we didn't have a lot of money and for some reason we thought it was a great idea to move to a town where we knew nobody, we had no and somehow that just seemed like the best idea ever to us. To get the fresh start right. Right and so what happened it was almost like that whole when the student is ready the teacher appears because right when we made that decision is when I got an email from you talking about the first Getting Listings program and I remember you said it was limited to 100 people and the description was just everything I was looking for. I mean I really saw that as being the cornerstone of this process of moving to a new town so we were at a point at one step because when you start your team and a new company, you've got signs and business cards and letterhead and all kinds of things and we actually borrowed $20,000 from my parents and my line of credit was pretty much maxed out, I had a pet cat that passed away, it was just the worst possible thing, that was in late 05 around fall and the program started up around I think October or November. So I really took the approach I'm going to make this work like it wasn't even a question, I had to. And anyway the first time we sent the postcard I think was November and it was 1600 people we sent to, I know you recommended between 500 and 2000 so about 1600, and we got 30 responses and that was thrilling it was really validation for all the decisions that were made up to that point. And then we bumped it up the next month to 2300 people who got the postcards so that's 60 responses and then we did it one more time in January and to the same list of 2300 we got 102 responses. Right now January, February, March are great months for finding people who are thinking about selling their house because it's the new year, everything is one their mind. Yeah I even see that with our website hits is that we get a huge amount of people in January and I've seen the stats for mortgage applications and they're always the highest in January so it's great, 3
December, January, February, March are probably the real key times for this. But it works whenever, if we started in July it probably still would have worked great. But when you look at that, 102 responses from 2300 people that's 4% of the population raised their hands and said I'd like to find out about this. I mean our printer was just going nonstop and it was pretty amazing. So we listed, like you talked about in mid January we listed the first home with the program and I think it was a little less than two months when we started. Let s back up a second and talk about the feelings that were going on the first time you mailed the postcard, like the comments that people make to me especially if they've been farming or sending recipes or sending personal promotional things, they do that a lot and they're almost like overwhelmed with emotion the first time that they send out the postcards and get the responses. Yeah I've never actually done a farming program like that so I can't speak to that but it's thrilling, like 100 people I mean that was the point probably where I started doing a bit of celebrating. Do a little happy dance yeah. Yeah the happy dance. Did you get a sense like it's going to be okay, everything is going to work out now? Yeah. So if I add that up we had 30 and then 60 and 102 so it was almost 200 people that I was sending information to. It's only a matter of time I think when you build up a certain amount of numbers even if you mess up every way possible which I have with this program. I've sent out postcards with the wrong month and the wrong year and the wrong website, I've done everything imaginable to screw this up but still success has come. That's fantastic. I remember the very first time that I sent out a direct response postcard, I sent one to renters and up until that time I'd been doing a lot of cold calls that was how I was building my business, I would call people and I would do a market survey approach is the way I was doing it. But I really started studying direct response, I really started getting into that idea of using direct response to leverage myself because the problem with doing all those cold calls was that I was the one that had to do them and when I wasn't making the calls I wasn't generating leads. 4
So I sent out the postcards, the first time I was offering a booklet on how to buy your first home and sent it to apartment complexes and I still remember the feeling, the giddy feeling, that I got when the first responses came in because I knew right then in that moment that I would never have to make another cold call again because now I knew that I could send the right words on the right postcard to get people to call me. People would raise their hand and that was the genesis of me really dedicating my life really to studying and applying direct response to real estate so that's fantastic. I think part of the magic of and even one of the biggest lessons I've learnt in the last three years is that this program is really set up around very clear next steps. It's like the postcard there's only one thing to do and I see some people sometimes say well on the back of the card I could make an offer about our website, it s like one thing you keep it simple; if you have too many choices then people won't do anything. And then when they get the first packages there's three very clear next steps. There's the pinpoint price analysis and the room by room review or the... what's the last one I can't even think of it? Anyway so there's three things; that's funny I've probably printed thousands of those. But anyway the point is that there's clear next steps at every stage in this. What's happened since then over the first three years now that you've been doing the program, what's been the evolution? Let s get everybody up to the present here. I would say the evolution has been since those first three months. In the first year we did about $100,000 from the program that was our gross and I probably paid somewhere between about eight and 10,000 for printing, postcards and all that stuff. So the average listing fee for us is about $7,000, $7,500 and so all that debt got paid off when I talked about borrowing the money from my parents, it was so gratifying to write a cheque to them and say hey you know what here s your money back in less than a year. And I think there was probably part of them that said we ll probably never see that money again. That's probably true though isn't it? Especially with parents, they don't mind, well I don't know if they'd mind but anyway it was a great feeling. And when I count that number, that $100,000, I look at the number of listings and if they do buy another home as a direct result of us listing the home or us having that conversation through getting listings that's what I count. And what I don't count is some of the buyers that call us or email 5
us like internet enquiries, some of that stuff like the spinoff I don't include in our numbers so it may be another $20,000 a year just from that spin off I'd say would be a reasonable estimate. All those things create little seeds that multiple. Yeah for sure. I mean that's one of the benefits of listings is that ability to get out there and have buyers actually enquire directly to you. So 07 was even better for us and we probably did at least $125,000, again more spin offs, a little bit higher investment there, about 10 to 12 thousand dollars. So we have about a 10 to one return on the program and it really moved our team very quickly like in two years we went right from survival; I think we flew past stability and we went right to success and very high returns, it was a very profitable system and still is to this day. Last year in 08 we had a little less result even though I think we did a better job with the program in general with getting the packages out and beefing up the packages and some of that stuff. What I learned from that though is I think there needs to be personality especially if you've sent some of these things to people since 06. I mean we recycle the Top Dollar newsletters, the only thing that's really different is the price report and so what I learned is that we need to add some personality in there too, the testimonials are something we always add but even more than that. We've started to implement, in 09 we've started to put in letters from the heart, we started to put in things that even if they don't care about the numbers that they would still respond to and it will be something different every month. So they're getting a sense of who you are a little bit too? Yeah exactly. More than just sending raw data? Yeah. The other thing I didn't talk about is results for that whole during unit referrals and we aren't at the point where we're doing a 50% during referral rate we're probably at about 10% but that still equates to another maybe one or two people a year that we end up helping so the ripple effect of this program is just huge. 6
That's fantastic and you wouldn't get any arguments from anybody that even for it to be stable in 2008 for you considering what's been going on in the economy, 2008 was a slow down year for a lot of people, I lot of people weren't doing anything in 2008. Yeah I mean it still ended up being maybe a five to six to one return which I know we're probably going to talk about the whole investment model of this program later on but it's just phenomenal, when you really step back and look at it it's just brilliant. Let's talk about your step by step system of how you do get in listings today three years later with everything that you've learned from it and what you've learned building the system. I'm sure it's almost like on auto pilot now? Pretty much. I just like taking the calls that say come meet us, that's really the extent of what we do. Which again that's the other benefit of the program is it's completely leverageable, you could run this program from... I could probably run this program if I wanted to I could find a neighbourhood in California or New York or Florida, anywhere, and I could probably run this from my house up here in Canada. So the first thing we do is to get the staples or another local printer to do the printing so we've got the postcards all set up. The costs generally for us are about seven to eight cents per postcard, we do a two up instead of a four up just because it doesn't cost us any extra to send the postage on that. And in Canada it's a little different than the States is that we can actually select an entire postal walk or a neighbourhood and we can say okay there's 800 homes here, I would like to send in unaddressed cards so you don t need to put the home owners names, you print the card and then send it to that entire area and it costs I think like nine cents per household. We have something similar here now, it's a little bit more money but you can do a whole postal walk. Of course no postmen walk here but postal route let's call it. Do you print up your postcards ahead of time, do you do several months at once or do you print them all just every month, it's like a standing order and off they go? I wish I had the ability to do 12 months printed in advance, unfortunately because of the nature of the neighbourhood series that we do the numbers change every month so we end up having to go through that process. I would love it if we had some sort of consistency with the numbers, it would make things a lot easier. 7
So you send out the postcards and I'm sure you don t do that you have your assistant who can handle that whole thing, so far I haven't seen anything that you necessarily have to do. Yeah I mean I have done it in the past and I don't think that's necessarily right or wrong but we've gotten to the point where the assistant can take care of all that stuff. And then what do you do when you get a response, do most of your responses come from the website or from the hotline? I would probably say 90:10 the website for the most part and what we do is the very first thing when the response comes in, when the request comes in, we put their information into Top Producers - that's the database we use, and we add categories. So one of the categories would be we do HV active so Hawthorne Village Active means that they're on our active list because if they do end up listing with someone else we usually bump then to inactive and then we just set a reminder the day that their listing expires just to check and see. So we put them on an active list and then another category that we do is we actually do HV January 2009 so that tells me when they actually requested the report. You can look back at all the people over the three years, you can see active people and when they initially responded? Yeah and we had a guy just in December receiving the reports since January 2006 had a job transfer called me up and said Chuck I need to meet with you. So it's fun to see, I haven't actually tracked how long it takes on average for people to call me versus when they get the postcard but just kind of subjectively I've noticed usually 6 to 12 months is the most common period of time. And I think that corresponds well too if people bought a new home, I think it corresponds well to family things like having a baby and needing more space so that seems to be the magic window. So what we do now we know it's going to pay off for us in summer and fall of 2009. And the other thing is so we put their information in, the plan, the categories, and then we go onto the MLS system and we see if they're a first owner, how long they've owned it for, the last time the property sold and we just put little notes in Top Producers so we make sure also that they're not listed. 8
So you build a low profile almost? Pretty much. And then when they call in it is real easy just to type in their last name and just look that stuff up right away, to have it accessible is nice. Then we do the initial package, so part of the plan says package printed, so we do the initial letter, the two page cover letter; we do the top dollar newsletter; we do the Sell Your Home for Top Dollar Fast, we print that, we fold it in half, we do a yellow card stock cover; and we do a full colour like we print in colour the house price report, it's usually about 20 to 25 pages and we put it in a nice little booklet with a transparent cover. I want them to keep that book even if the investment is higher for that cover but I want it to be a wow. So those are the standard things, I mean those are all the things we talked about. I also do a magnetic calendar because I like the idea that our information is going to be on their fridge for the next 12 months and if they start in 06 they've gotten a calendar in 07, 08 and for 2009. We also do something like it's a facts information form and if the listener is familiar with the buyer newsletter, it's like page seven of the newsletter, it just says I'd like to know the last five homes sold and I'd like to know more about your Saturday tour of homes and all these kinds of things. So we do little fact sheets to give them some next steps. And we also do a green booklet and that's full of testimonials, we probably have 50 to 60 testimonials in there and it is printed, it looks almost like the Sell Your Home for Top Dollar book except that it's got a green cover instead of a yellow but it's folded, it's stapled the same way. And it's just page after page of happy people that you've helped? Yeah exactly, it's what it is like to work with our team. And again with that booklet format I'm hoping that it is something they keep a little bit more than if we printed off 10 pages and stapled the corner which at a time is what we used to do and we've built it up to this to putting a little booklet together. That's the thing right you just... it's like your bonsai tree it kind of grows and you trim and you put your own kind of artistry on things but the core is that you're still including all the things that are in the system and off the shelf and you're adding to them your personality. I always say to people the Getting Listings program you can use it standard right off the shelf but the personality is not included, you add the personality. 9
And it's funny because when I look at the most successful things for us almost every home I go into list the calendar is sitting on the fridge so the calendar and the testimonials to me, the helping people on the move are the two most important things in the whole package. Love it. So when the leads come in that goes out pretty quickly, you do that right away, do you have them prepared in advance? We try to, it used to go out not quickly before the assistant but no it's pretty consistent now it's usually within 24 hours and I mean there is always little things like you'll run out of Top Dollar books and things like that happen, I think it's just keeping your inventory up but for the most part we're pretty consistent with them. Do you call them? I generally don't. Usually if I call them it s because I recognised their name or something but I think the big distinction is if it's any reason that you're calling them that revolves around you I wouldn't do it. That's the thing, you're absolutely right is that most of the time when people have a desire to call them it's because they want to know are you ready yet, are you ready yet, they want to know is it... it's a self serving call. The top priority that I had when I was designing this whole program was to... always when I'm designing a new program make provocations for myself, I set up situations by saying it has to be something that they could delegate the whole system, the operating of it, and it has to be something where they don't have to call people to be successful. So you've proven that you don't have to call people, that they end up calling you. I think part of it is just removing the ego from it and just saying you know what it's fine like I'm going to deliver enough value through the communication by mail and a little bit by email that they will call. I know you do email people, so what does your email say that you send initially? We send an email right on day one, right when we send the package out that says Dear Michael and Judy this is Chuck from Royal LePage, Meadowtowne and I just wanted to let you know I got your request for your free report on Hawthorne Village house prices and your report has been put in the 10
mail so you should get it in a few days. In the meantime if you'd like to share a bit about your plans feel free to call me at blank or just reply back. Thanks and have a super day. Really basic, it opens the door if they do want to talk about stuff and I would say probably about 10% of people actually do respond and some people say no just curious, some people say yeah you know what I'm kind of feeling the itch to move from a semi to a detached home and we get into conversation about that too. That's okay that's great. And that's been modified and tested. I've tried a few different ways of wording that and this one seems to be getting consistent good responses. Do you then have a follow up email that you send? I figure if we sent it on day one the report is probably going to get there around day four, nobody opens their mail right away and reads it so most people actually don't check it out but I send an email at day 10 and I say Dear Mike and Judy, just touching base to see if you've received your house price report we sent in the mail. Have you had a chance to look at the package? So that's just the criteria of short, personal, expecting a reply. So have you had a chance to look? Most people just respond and say no but I'll look at it next week and get back to you or they might just say no I haven't and that's okay, it's just a chance to see what's going on with them. So then they go right in then to your monthly mail? Yeah and the big error I made in the beginning was I set up the plans so that we would send out letter one 30 days after the first report and letter two goes out 60, so our plan was almost like we were sending out four letter twos and three letter threes. Oh yeah you know what and that's funny. I should figure out how to be more clear about that because that's a misconception a lot of times that people have, they're thinking that there's a sequence to them that they're meant to jump in at whatever month so now you've corrected that, everybody gets the same newsletter, the same cover letter. Yeah exactly. So we took those off the plan and what we started to do... we realised this maybe after three or four months that it was very confusing and so ended up using that Active group so the 11
HV Active we say okay let s mail to everybody the same cover letter. So in March we'd send out cover letter three, newsletter three to the whole list and it's very simple, it's much easier. How does all that turn into listing appointments? You're getting all these leads, you're sending them the initial package, you send them a couple of emails, you send them the monthly mailings now, the Top Dollar newsletters and the cover letter and the reports and all the personality things that you're adding, but you don't call them throughout the follow up period you just let that run its course? Yeah I just basically set it to simmer and just wait for the calls. How does it turn into listing appointments then if you don't call them? What actually does happen, how does it happen that they turn into a listing appointment? I've never had to call them and see if they're ready and then they say oh yeah by the way I am, they always call me. I've never had to push or pull anybody, I just wait for the phone to ring pretty much and there'll be a few months sometimes when you don't get any calls, you get three calls in one week sometimes. So there's not a lot of consistency to it because I think life for many people doesn't have a lot of consistency. They'll be fine in their house one day and then all of a sudden they'll say okay it is time to move or they would have thought about it a while ago and then all of a sudden there's been a job change or there's been something that tickles them to give us a call. So that's what I do, I basically just wait for the phone to ring. I've had people that have essentially hired me before they've called me just on the strength of the system. I just had one actually, they're divorcing and the lawyer called me and said Chuck you're the guy who is going to be listing the home because they know you and you've been sending them stuff. Of course you didn't know them? Yeah exactly I had no idea, I mean I had to remember them and it's like oh yeah I have been sending them stuff but that's the strength of the system. And obviously as a buyer for all consultants I don't know if I'm going to be able to help them, it turned out that I could. But that's the thing, you don t want to get too excited. I mean you're pretty charged neutral when someone calls, you just listen, you be a problem solver; tell me about your plans, what's your next step, what's important about blank to you, tell me about your house? A great question is 12
what do you expect of me? Just asking them questions, greeting them on the phone. I rarely get to a listing appointment where I haven't been very confident that if we can agree on just a couple of things we're going to be working together. Personality screening happens on that first call. What do they say initially, you had that call from the lawyer that's kind of a unique situation but typically what do people say when they call you? It's just simply it's caller, it's email, it's probably 50/50 between those two. I just had an email yesterday and the gentleman said Chuck we're thinking about selling and we'd like to sit down and meet with you and that's mostly what they say, they don't necessarily ask for a pinpoint price analysis or anything they just say Chuck I need some help, I m in this situation and we're probably going to have to sell the home. How long do you spend on that initial telephone conversation? I would say easily by the time we go into some details about their plans, their house and everything it could easily be a 15 minute conversation. So you're doing a lot of the background work and setting the stage there? Yeah it's important, if you're going to invest an hour or two at the appointment you want to make sure that you're with the right people. Do you send a pre-listing package ahead of going to meet with them? I used to send one and it was more of an informational, it was a lot of things that we talked about at the appointment and I've been thinking lately, I've gotten away from that because I don t know I may be need to figure it out. In a lot of ways you've been sending a pre-listing package every month until they call you, I mean you've been building the foundation of that and because you have such an in-depth conversation with them initially you've done all of that pre work really ahead of time. 13
Yeah for sure, so I think what I've thought about lately is having a little survival kit, something completely different than the traditional pre-listing package all about me kind of stuff, like I've been thinking about a paper bag for when they start hyperventilating because of/ That's great and that's more personality. Yeah and a rubber band; like fun, make it fun, make it remarkable. Nobody is going to tell their friend about a pre-listing package, the traditional one that most agents send, it's like okay yeah he told me a bit about what he does. But I think something like that would be something that they would tell their neighbour like hey you've got to see what Chuck just left on my front doorstep. That's funny. Do you find that you are in competition a lot or is there a lot of cases where you're the only one they call? I am, probably half the time I'm in competition, it's just the nature of before unit it's not the same as the after unit. You find people even though you've been sending them information they need some validation if nothing else. It gets you to be one of the people that they're considering if nothing else. Sure and it doesn't change our approach, I mean the idea is that we want to make sure they're the right clients for our consulting services and we also want to just really showcase exactly what it means to work with us and what we're going to do to help them. Let s walk through some of the highlights of your listing consultation, your initial consultation. So you arrive at the house and when you first meet with them what are you listening for or watching for, are you getting some first impressions or anything as you go through? The first impressions are mostly in that first phone conversation but a lot of times I only speak to one spouse on the phone and so you get a feel for the other person and you look for things like the disk profiles, what kind of person are they, how do they absorb information, the things that Joe talks about is are they visual, kinesthetic people, are they auditory, because we've got some visual materials in our package, we obviously speak during the consultation so it allows us to get a little bit of a sense about how they absorb information and so yeah that's the initial. I don't usually start 14
the presentation until I think there's a base line of trust, until there's some kind of foundation. So usually how I do that is I try and find some common ground, I just had a baby so that's a big common ground for a lot of people; talking about family or occupation or recreation, all those kinds of things. May be I'll see a movie on their shelf and I'll say boy that's a great movie you know. Yeah just anything to have some common ground there. And then we get into the... I introduce the listing binder to them, I go over all the dialogues, the permission to reject, the four options, my purpose. I like to do that at the kitchen table when we first meet. A lot of agents will take a tour of the house and sometimes if it flows that way, if they just want to introduce you to the house right away go for it. But I think it's a good way just to sit down and just say I don't know if I can help you, I'd like to ask you some questions and if I'm not the right consultants for you I'll let you know, those kind of things. I think it's good to set the foundation early. And then we tour the house and we talk about... sorry just going back is the scripts that I really use is permission to reject, the four options, I do my purpose, my three roles you're a consultant, you're a negotiator, handling the details; I do taxi limo and then I flow into the five, six and seven and we use the seven boxes as well. Then we tour the house and we talk about the things after that that are a little bit more transactional, about the staging and the marketing and the pricing. We use the room by room review, we actually take the last page after we tour the home and I write down exactly what they need to do and we do the could do, must do, should do. The room by room review, it makes it easier for you to have that little track to run on and maybe bring up some things that would be a little more difficult to bring up if it wasn't written down on that piece of paper. Yeah pretty much. Usually what I say to people is I can get their house to an 8 out of 10 just simply by this book if they followed the instructions and then we can get a stager in to turn it into a nine or a nine and a half out of 10. So that opens up part of the things that we do for the actual listing, so we talk about the marketing and staging and all that stuff after we take the tour. And then how do you present the price, you talk about the marketing first and then you get into the price? 15
We're going to cover both anyway, I know some people like to leave the price, I sometimes even ask them what do you want to talk about first? Because if you talk about price first and then you go into how you're going to help them get that price I think that's just as effective. I m glad you said that because a lot of times people feel like you've got to have this rigid way of approaching things and from everything you're telling me it's almost like... and this is the way I look at it it s like a modular kind of get together, you've got to fit all these modules in, you're going to talk about price, you're going to talk about marketing, you're going to talk about staging, all those things and it doesn't really matter what order you talk about them in. No I don't think so, I think that you just need to paint the picture for them by the end of the appointment about exactly what you have to offer, really what your unique offering to them is. For pricing I don't think there's anything better than Jim Irvin s 30, 60, 90 pricing, it's amazing. Since I've started doing that it's really had a significant impact on that part of the presentation. So you give them the idea of there's a 30 day price, a 60 day price or a 90 day price and people get to choose based on their motivation really? Yes so I've got the pre-printed report and then what I do is after we're all finished I ask them a question I say What price do you think it would take in order to absolutely sell your home in 60 days? And so they'll answer and we'll have a conversation and usually what I'd do is I ll write down 30, 60, 90 and I'll tell them, I'll say look this is what I believe are your 30, 60 and 90 benchmarks, so that's usually how we do things. Just as an aside what do people mostly pick, do they mostly pick the 30 day or the 60 day or the 90 day price? There's a real pull towards the middle, that's the really interesting effect because we also do a fee for listing it's a little menu, it's like a restaurant menu, and so there's a small package and a medium and a large and people have the strong desire to not stretch far either way, they like to be in that comfortable middle spot and so most people do choose the 60 day price. 16
Then how do you present your service option? You mentioned you have a small, medium and large package. Yeah exactly, we call it the ultimate, the enhanced and the minimum package and it's just simply going through... usually when I talk about marketing in the presentation is I go through the middle package, I don't talk about some of the extras from the big one and often times when I present the smaller fee packages I say you don't get this, you don t get that, it's like pulling candy away once they've started eating it. So that's how I present that, I don't think there's any rhyme or reason to it. I usually have a pretty good idea by that time if we re going to work together. Sometimes I'll even give them the four options before I talk about our fees. So we'll get right through marketing and pricing and I'll say guys we've done all our papers in the binder, because the menu is a separate thing, in the beginning we talked about the fact that you can decide to do nothing or you can decide to do it on your own or you can decide to use someone else or you can choose to work with us, what are your thoughts? And then sometimes they'll just say Chuck we're ready to go. And then it's like okay well now let's talk about which package is best for you and if some people say wait you didn't tell us your fees then now I can start to introduce that and usually what I'll do if they ask that question I'll say well if we can find the right fee and marketing package for you is there a good basis for us to work together? So like a bit of a trial close. Right exactly. Do you ever turn down listings? Occasionally. I think because of the nature of that 30, 60, 90 pricing even if they had a price in their mind before I came it's such a strong argument on our side that usually they get won over to our approach. So most of the time it comes into an issue of fees and I actually charge more than most agents in our area so the challenge is really to create the bond and to show them why we're better, show them the results that we get. So that's for us the biggest challenge is that we do everything really well it's just letting them know especially in the before unit where they don't know someone who has gotten better results from us as how we can actually take that extra amount they're paying us and multiple that investment for them. So let s talk about that a little bit then, what happens when you get a listing? And I know you've got a fantastic record in terms of selling those new listings. We've sold every home we've listed in the last seven years so that's been about 200 homes or so, I mean every single one like no cancels, no expiries. I put an asterisk beside that 17
because there is one that we rented out before we could sell it and the other one they got a divorce and he ended up buying her out so I don't think that one really counts either. But anyway so we've got a really good track record. We don't do print advertising, I found that it's really not a good investment of money and I tell the people that straight up. I don't do a lot of open houses, what we do do is we do YouTube videos, we do 24 hour recorded messages, info box flyers for me is probably the best thing that we do, they're fantastic. We do a property website so it would be like 126ElmStreet.com, so there's a lot of little things. There's 30 websites that we put it on, we do all the Craigslist and the Kijiji and the Back page and all that stuff so we do all that. The other main thing that's a real big selling feature for us is we've got an auto responder with 5000 people we've amassed over the last three years so it's great to tell the seller I'm going to send your home to 5000 people tomorrow. That's the first thing, and that's the great thing that you've really been able to triangulate, looking for buyers on one side and then you've got your sellers on the other side and often the first course of action is to try and match those up with the people that you've already found. Yeah that's the sweet spot to be is when you're right in the middle between buyers and sellers and you're just making matches between them and there's been about four times in the last year where we've actually taken a buyer, taken a seller sometimes before it's even hit the market and we've made a match and it's exciting, everybody is thrilled with that. What's your mindset, your over-riding mindset, when you take a new listing? Are you looking to find the buyer yourself or are you looking to sell it through the MLS, what's going through your mind when you take that new listing and you get going? I think the mindset is just simply that I know the system works, we just put it out there, we know that it gets to enough people. I mean I guess the idea I have is I'd like every buyer looking in today s market for a home like this to know about it and whether they choose to buy it or not I don't have control over that; I can t help once they get to the front door and come inside but I can help how many people come to the front door, how many people want to come and see it. That's a brilliant thing and so if you think about it you've got all the bases covered, if they're looking online you're there, if they're driving around neighbourhoods you've got the info box flyer you're there, you've got of all the ways that people are 18
looking. If they started looking months ago you've got them now, you've got email contact with them. You've got hundreds of people who are getting your market watch newsletter as well, people who are getting the same kind of updates on the buying side. Yeah we've got probably about 150 in our hot 100 buyer list as we call it and we've got maybe 500 people in Getting Listings and it's just fun to put those matches together. You actually pointed out something important which is when you look at the NAR studies, when you look at a lot of studies there's actually three or four different ways that people find their home and the first one is the internet obviously, driving around is another thing, the third thing is neighbours. A lot of people don't realise 18% of the time a neighbour refers a friend or family member that comes and buys the house. And the other way is obviously other real estate agents like you have to have a marketing program to get the word out to other realtors. And I focus a lot, I categorise my marketing presentation around those four categories, how do we attract people in the top four ways. I don't care about way number 10 or 12 I want to take the big four and be the best at those four things. That's music to my ears. What are your plans going forward then? You've got your three years behind you, what are your plans going forward here? World domination (evil laugh). I love that. I just posted this on the message board. If you look at your investment options out there and I know you've talked about this too is that you could put money into mutual funds or stocks, you could buy an investment property or you could invest in this program or your business. And we talked about this too 20% is probably like a fantastic return. If you got 20% on your stocks you d be thrilled but the thing is this program for the last three years has given me 1000% return, it's given me ten to one return not point two to one or one point two to one. It's significant so that's been a lot of fun for us and so the hesitation for me is I realise that the systems weren't tight enough to extend to other areas so in December of 08 I reviewed all of our process, I looked at everything and said how can we make this simple so that we could extend to another area in less than three hours of total work. So our report used to be something that would take an hour to an hour and a half to do, it's now down to 30 mouse clicks and about 10 minutes to put a new report together. 19
That's beautiful, that's the process, the process mapping to figure out what the most efficient way to actually get that report done again and again. And just looking at where are the parts that hold us up and just smoothing those out, just ironing them out. So we added two new neighbourhoods, we sent the first cards out in December and did another one in January and they've been going really well so we're doing about 9100 postcards per month, I think the next major benchmark for us is about 50,000. I've done the math on that and it's about 10 to 15,000 per month to do all of your postcards and printing and packages and everything, that's about $150,000 a year. But you figure if you're sending 50,000 postcards to people and right now I've probably got about eight to nine percent of the entire neighbourhood gets our report so if we had 5000 people getting these monthly packages that have raised their hand, that's easily half a million in listings every year. Yeah or more. Why would it be any different? You scaled down your expectation by expanding but in my experience it expands at the same rate. Yeah but if you look at those numbers, so if you said okay $500,000 and you spend $150,000 to get that your return on investment goes down right like you're actually are only maybe tripling your money which still is pretty amazing but it's $350,000 profit like whatever you spend if you can generate that profit I think it's really exciting. And that's something that's taken me nearly three years to figure that out, you know what it works well why am I not building this bigger. Yeah right, I'm getting tingles when I hear you talk like that. But it's funny because hopefully someone is going to listen to this and maybe I can short cut their three years to one year and make them see what I see now that it s a real magical program and the bigger it gets the more consistent it becomes. What would be your best advice then for someone to really get going or to get back on track and optimise their results? I think you need to definitely have some kind of lump sum of money that you say I am going to invest it for at least six months, pretend it's locked into an investment and you can't touch it, open a new bank account, treat it like an investment, run the system and what I've seen is that there's usually three mistakes people make, three reasons people fail. The first one is 20
that they don't follow instructions, we've seen on the message board where people have said I sent them some things every month but they missed something really important, it's like they didn't put in the house price report, they just sent the Top Dollar newsletter so you have to follow the instructions, you've got to be really clear about doing the basics, all of them consistently. The second thing that I've noticed is that people don't add personality so they're doing the basics and that's good, if you can get to the basics in maybe three or four months that's perfect but then you have to add some personality, you've got to make it your own without changing those fundamentals, adding on top. Like some of the things we do like the match game from the 30/30 program and we had two listing appointments from the match game last year. The gift giver, again from the 30/30 program, things like that. A letter from the heart is something that you could add into this package. So the third thing is they don't run it long enough, I see a lot of people oh four months I tried it maybe I need to change my neighbourhood and that's not the solution. The solution is almost like if you image someone stays in line at the cafeteria, they're right there they're about to get their food and then they go oh you know what I'm just going to find somewhere else to eat. Right exactly. Yeah and you see that a lot. They've spent all that time in line and they've progressed all the way, they're almost to the buffet and they don't quite make it. Yeah and then they're like I'm just going to grab a burger. Oh that's so funny but it's true, those are the big three that I would say I mean that's exactly what happens. And I think the other thing that holds people back from this is that they want to get something before they give and I think a good philosophy going into this program and sticking with it is to give We talk a lot about return on investments and what first, don't have any expectations. happens and what's happened for me and countless other people but I think that if you really give 21
value without anything hoping in return, I mean you usually get that, for us it has been coming back 10 fold for years. Chuck this has been really fantastic, I appreciate you sharing all of this, I think this is going to be a great encouragement for people and I mentioned to you getting together a reunion call from our very first Getting Listings class from November of 2005 and seeing what's happened three years later. I stay in contact with you so I see what's happening with you and it would be exciting to encourage people who have access to all that same information to see what's possible. We'll have to hold those people accountable. I remember you asked for a list of 20 people that are really committed to this program so it will be interesting to see how many people stayed on the wagon. Yeah you're absolutely right, I remember that because the way I opened the teleclass I had 100 people, we had 100 participants in the first one and that was my opening remarks to people that I fully expect that 20 people out of this 100 are really going to take this and run with it and then there'll be some that don't do anything and so you fully expect it. But I think you might be at the top of the class, you might be the number one guy, we'll see on the reunion class. We'll have to see. Yeah tease out other people and see what other people have done but I sure appreciate you sharing and you've got a real giving spirit and I really appreciate that. Thanks Dean. 22