6 Creative Ways to Find and Win New Listings in a Low-Inventory Market (Part 2)

Enjoying this episode? Be sure to follow The Walkthrough to get future episodes delivered automatically: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | YouTube

Jim Remley is back with part two of our series on finding inventory in a low-supply market. Last week, you heard Jim talk about unsolicited CMAs and a unique way to turn a pre-listing kit into a referral-making machine.

This week on The Walkthrough, Jim shares four more creative ways you can proactively find new listings no matter how low inventory is in your market. Be ready to hear specific scripts, tactics, and websites you can use to execute on these ideas. This is part two of a two-part series!

Join our Walkthrough Listener Mastermind

We’ve launched a private Facebook mastermind just for listeners of The Walkthrough. If you’re not a listener, please listen to a couple episodes and then join. (You won’t get much value out of the group if you’re not a podcast listener.) If you are already a listener, come join us to mastermind with other listeners, connect with the guests that you hear on the show, learn from other agents and share your knowledge, get exclusive content, influence future episodes, and more. You can find the group here: HomeLight Agent Mastermind – The Walkthrough.

Links and Show Notes

• eRealEstateCoach – Jim’s coaching program
• Jim Remley at John L. Scott – Jim’s real estate website
• TheRedX.com – mentioned in this episode
• PropertyRadar.com – mentioned in this episode
• EZTexting.com – mentioned in this episode
• Join our Facebook mastermind for The Walkthrough listeners
• HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center
• Subscribe and listen to The Walkthrough: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube

Full Transcript

(SPEAKER: Matt McGee, Host)

There’s a thing going around Twitter these days, maybe Facebook too. It says, “Name something that isn’t an Olympic sport but feels like an Olympic sport.” First thing that came to my mind when I saw that? Real estate.

[Sound: Start of track race.]

Right? Especially with inventory so low, the competition for new listings is more intense than ever. I mean, it wasn’t long ago you saw that stat: We had more real estate agents in the U.S. than we had homes for sale. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s still the case.

That’s why our current Walkthrough series is so timely. Just like coaches help their athletes win races and gold medals, Jim Remley is back with me today to help you find and win more listings. This is actionable stuff that you can start using right now to grow your business. This is part two of our series.

This is “The Walkthrough.”

(INTRO MUSIC)

Hello there. How are you? My name’s Matt McGee. I’m the editor of HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center. And I can hear you right now saying, “Matt, I’m fine. But the question is, how are you? You sound awful.” I don’t feel awful. I apologize if my voice does sound strange. I’m fighting that cold/sinus infection thing that’s going around. But like I said, I’m feeling okay and ready to get on with this episode. So thanks for putting up if I sound a little bit off today. I’m feeling just fine.

Welcome to “The Walkthrough,” this is a weekly podcast. We have new episodes that come out every Monday. This is the show where you learn what’s working right now from the best real estate agents and industry experts in the country. At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.

If you want to get involved in the show, if you want to get in touch with me, you can find me in our Facebook listener mastermind. Just go to Facebook, do a search for HomeLight Walkthrough and the group will come right up. You can also leave a voicemail or send me a text. The number to use is 415-322-3328. Or if you prefer email, that’s fine as well. The address to use is walkthrough[at]homelight.com.

Here’s a quote, “The market doesn’t determine your success, your daily strategy is what determines your success.” You heard Jim Remley say that last week in part one of our two-part series on finding new listings in this low supply market. You have to have a strategy.

Well, we only covered two of Jim’s six tactics last week. One of those ideas was the creative suggestion to turn your database, your sphere, into advisors. Jim suggested that you make a pre-listing kit and send it out to your database for feedback.

Jim: The reason why you do that is as soon as somebody gives you their opinion, they’ve just taken a little bit of an ownership position in your success. So if you give me your opinion, then you’d say, “Oh, now I want Jim to succeed.” And guess what happens when you start giving those opinions is you as a human being are much more likely to be vested in my success, you’re much more likely to refer to me, to do business with me, to help me in other ways.

Matt: So that’s a taste of part one last week. If you missed it, be sure to go back and listen. You can wait until after today’s episode. It doesn’t matter which order you go in, I think.

For those of you who did miss last week, let me give you a quick background on my guest. His name is Jim Remley. He’s a real estate veteran, got into the business at age 19. He opened his own brokerage at age 24, grew it to 17 offices. It was the biggest independent agency in the state of Oregon before he sold it. Today, Jim runs a three-office brokerage in Medford, Oregon. They have more than 200 agents, and together collectively, they did about a billion dollars in volume last year. Jim also has a successful coaching program. It’s called eRealEstateCoach.

Well, last week, Jim introduced two tactics, the unsolicited CMA and that creative way to use a pre-listing kit that you just heard a bit about.

Today, Jim has four more tactics to share. You’re going to hear him talk about pre-listing letters, how to take advantage of losing a multiple offer situation, something he calls a total market overview, and more. We’ll also have a question from our Facebook listener mastermind. And again, Jim is going to share some scripts, some website URLs, and stuff like that. So be ready to jot down some notes as you listen.

Let’s dive back in. Here’s part two of my conversation with Jim Remley on finding and winning listings in this low inventory market.

(BEGIN CONVERSATION)

Matt: Jim, the number three item on our list of tactics that agents can use to find listings in a market like this, you talk about the pre-CMA letter. Why don’t you explain what that is?

Jim: This is such an interesting story. We have a marketing director at my company who’s a rockstar. And her name is Tiffany Wilkerson. She’s now become the general manager actually. But Tiffany was at home one morning and she went out to her mailbox and she got this piece of mail in her mailbox. But the mail was very interesting because it wasn’t a traditional postcard. It also was not a traditional piece of folded mail. It was a flat. And if you’ve heard of what a flat is, it was an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, but hard stock. So it was like a letter on one side and on the other side, there was the mailing insignia and everything else you’d expect. But imagine you’re getting a piece of mail in your mailbox that’s a letter, but it’s not folded. It’s just a straight letter. It looks like it was put in your mailbox. So that was interesting number one.

But when she “took out the letter,” what it was it was from a company that was in her neighborhood that was a tree-trimming company, basically a landscaping company. And the landscaper said, “Hey guys, I’m going to be doing some work in the next couple of days for one of your neighbors. And I just went out there and did the bid, but you’re gonna see our workers back out over the next couple of days come in to do the work. Since we’re going to be in the area, if you’d like to have us bid, you know, some landscaping work for you, tree-trimming whatever you need, let us know because we’d love to do the work since we’ll be in the neighborhood anyway.”

So it triggered this thought in her mind because we all traditionally do just listed, just pended, just sold postcards to varying degrees of success. Most of the time, they’re very kind of not…they have a low success rate, but the idea here is you’re going to go one step beyond that. You’re going to do a pre-CMA or excuse me, a pre-listing letter. So the pre-listing letter, I’m going to read you very specifically what we’ve used for this. And this is using what we call the power of curiosity, okay? So, curiosity is the salesperson’s best friend. Everything we do in a marketing sense should engage some level of curiosity, right? When I talked about that pre-emptive CMA, right? That’s curiosity. Somebody did me a CMA, I’m not gonna not look at it. I want to know what they think my home looks like, right?

Matt: Exactly. Yeah.

Jim: That’s curiosity, right? If somebody sends me something that say, give me your opinion, I’m not going to not look at it. I’m gonna look at it because I’m curious what they want my opinion about. When I read you this letter, I want you to think about the power of curiosity if you would receive this piece of mail in your mailbox. So here’s what it says. It says, “Good morning, homeowner,” whatever their name is. By the way, it can’t actually say good morning homeowner. It actually has to say, good morning, their name. So you need to do a mail merge and learn to do a mail merge in your…if you don’t know how to do a mail merge in this day and age, you need to take a class on it, okay?

So, but what you’re gonna say is, “in the next week or so, I’m going to be listing, or I will be listing one of your neighbor’s homes for sale. It’s actually why I’m reaching out today to you. I’ve done some extensive research in the area on home base and found some very surprising data. If you’d like a quick update on your home value or considering selling, now would be a great time to talk. Based on recent market activity, when my marketing begins, I’m anticipating multiple offers and showing opportunities. I’ll be back in the area several times over the next few days. If you have a few minutes to talk, please give me a call or text and we can set up a time to chat in person or through a virtual meeting.” Now we can also probably take off the virtual meeting because you know, things are starting to go back to normal in most parts of the country, but there’s many, many curiosity points in this letter. So the first curiosity point is if I’m the homeowner in that neighborhood, I’m going to wonder, “Which of my neighbors are selling?”

Matt: Who’s selling.

Jim: Who’s gonna go on the market soon, right? By the way, we never tell anybody who’s the actual seller, right? And we never lie about this. It’s always, truly, we’re actually taking listings in the neighborhood. The other thing we said is we found some very surprising data. When we say we found some very…like, what does that mean? What’s the surprising data? I want to know what that is, right? And then I’m anticipating multiple offers. Really, multiple offers. That’s pretty interesting. So you can see, there’s just a lot of curiosity points baked on this letter. The students that I work with, my coaching students around the country that are using this strategy are crushing it because remember 1 in 10 homeowners in every neighborhood you drive through in your local city is thinking about selling. I mean, it’s on their minds. And 63% are gonna sell in the next six months. So, if they receive this letter, 1 in 10 people receive this letter, highly likely they’re gonna, you know, pick up the phone and give you a call. So it’s a really good strategy.

Matt: If I’m an agent listening to this right now and I just heard Jim say, “I have surprising data that I want to share with you,” I’m wondering to myself, “All right, how surprising does the data need to be?” Do I really need to have surprising data, Jim? Is just, you know, the fact that home prices have gone up so much, is that enough to like follow through on that promise?

Jim: Yes. I mean, right now the surprising data would be in my market, home prices are up 26.4% over the last year. So that would be the surprising data. And for most of us in most markets, that’s a surprise enough. It could be the surprising data is also fast market times. You know, in my market also, a piece of surprising data would be our median market time’s five days, lowest it’s ever been in history. So that will be some surprising data. Or that the average homeowner in our market’s receiving, you know, eight offers, that’s surprising data. So there’s a lot of surprising data I could have in this market. In a future market, it could change, you know, but that’s the data we have now.

Matt: Okay. Let’s go on and talk about the fourth strategy for finding listings in this current market. We talked about this idea of taking advantage of a multiple offer failure. Tell me how that works.

Jim: Love it. So all of us are in a market where we’re working with buyers and they’re going out and they’re writing offers on properties and failing. I mean, it’s like we have to write three or four or five offers to get to a success, right, if we’re lucky. So, a lot of times when we look at these failures, we look at it like, argh, you know, I’m kind of done. But when we have a failure, we should look at it as an opportunity. It’s the opportunity to lead generate within that neighborhood.

So imagine you write an offer on a property, you fail, you don’t get it. What is your next step? Your next step should be to identify a very tight group around that home that you just failed on. Five, 10, 20 homes around that property, and now I’m going to pick up the phone or stop by in person or do a mailing, but the phone is the best because it’s direct communication. It’s active communication.

So what I’m going to say when I call these homeowners is I’m gonna say, “hey, my name is Jim Remley. I work with ABC Real Estate, and I just wrote an offer on your neighbor’s home. You probably noticed the one for sale a few days ago. You probably saw it on cards over there because it was super busy. The reason I’m calling is my clients wrote an offer on the home, but we weren’t successful. In fact, there was 10 offers on that home and we just didn’t get selected. So, but my buyers just love the neighborhood. They want to live in this neighborhood really, really bad. So they asked me to just go out and talk to homeowners, see if anybody was interested in selling. So, a crazy question for you guys, would you guys consider selling for the right price, your price, if we gave you plenty of time to find your dream home?” Now that’s the script that you have to use. “If we gave you your price and we gave you plenty of time to find your dream home.” The biggest hesitation that sellers have right now is that they have no place to go, that they’re not gonna be able to find what they want. We’re gonna let them off the hook with that strategy. Now, again, we can’t lie. This always has to be in truth. It has to be with high integrity. So we’re always doing this when it really happens to us. It’s a great strategy that’s working. It sounds simple, but simplicity often works, right?

Matt: Does the type of contact matter? I mean, you mentioned picking up the phone and calling. I mean, could you door-knock, whatever it might be like that?

Jim: It would be, you know, phone or in-person is always best. The beauty of being in-person, unlike a lot of cold, you know, in-person kind of things that would feel really uncomfortable, the power of this is that you’ve had what I call a trigger event. And the trigger event has a sense of urgency and a sense of immediacy because this is an event that truly just happened yesterday, right? I’m not waiting a week. I’m doing it right now. It could have happened that morning and I’m back out there that night. So when I’m at somebody’s door or I’m talking on the phone, but we’ll stop at the door for a second, I can actually say, “Hey, I wrote an offer on your neighbor’s home” — and point to the home — “yesterday morning. And we were, unfortunately, competing with nine other offers, my buyers still want to live in the neighborhood.” You see the immediacy and the urgency, and it doesn’t feel as much like a cold sales kind of approach. And so, there is some benefit to that, for sure.

Matt: Okay. So, so far we’ve covered four different strategies here. We talked about the unsolicited CMA, using pre-listing kits to ask your sphere for advice and feedback, we talked about the pre-listing mailer to the neighborhood, and we just covered the multiple offer failure. The next one that we’ve talked about, you talked about it’s this idea of what you call a total market overview. Explain what that is.

Jim: So, it’s what I call and we’ve kind of pioneered this concept of what we call a TMO, total market overview. So we always talk about a CMA in our industry. You know, I’ve been in the business 32 years, and I don’t know when CMAs were invented, but 100 years ago maybe, maybe 200 years ago, I don’t know or during the civil war or something. So the CMA is like the ham sandwich of real estate, right? Everybody’s offering a CMA. It’s like the least…it’s the most commoditized thing in the world. Every single agent on earth offers a CMA. It’s the most boring thing ever.

So the TMO is taking a different tactic and it’s saying, hey, I’m gonna offer you something completely unique. And it’s a total market overview. What it is is a 360-degree view of the market, rather than just an old-fashioned kind of boring, very basic CMA, I’m going to give you a CMA, but on steroids. It’s going to be a really, really in-depth analysis of everything that’s happening in the market. And that is such a powerful message. If I put it out on social media, if you know anybody considering selling, don’t let them just rely on a CMA. They want to get a total market overview instead.

My TMO will blow their minds. It will give them a complete 360-degree view of the market, not just the basic CMA. And so, you position yourself against every other agent in the market that’s not using one cause you have a differentiation tool. It’s another thing you can put out through a postcard to your database or postcard to an entire neighborhood if you’re doing farming.

(Announcer: There’s one thing that nearly every real estate agent can agree on. Well-informed buyers make purchase decisions faster. When buyers are well-informed about a property that you’re selling, you’ll create more competition around your listings and you’ll get offers faster. HomeLight’s revolutionary listing management software can help make this happen for you. It’s called disclosures.io. It helps you market your listings and manage all of your incoming offers in one location. You and your clients are kept in the loop at every step of the process from on-market to offer accepted. And everyone will love the simple, consistent, and secure experience. Sign up now for a free basic membership at disclosures.io/homelight.)

Matt: Okay. We are right in the middle of talking about the total market overview. Jim called it a CMA on steroids. It’s a much deeper analysis of everything that’s happening in the market. It’ll set you apart from other agents who are trying to find and win listings right now. And you know, I love stuff that helps you stand out from the crowd of agents in your market. So let’s get back to the conversation. Jim is about to go in-depth on explaining what it is and how it’s different from a regular CMA.

Jim: So what is a TMO, right? Someone says like, “Okay, walk me through what is a TMO.” In our coaching program, we have a complete model for this and we walk people through actually building it, but I’ll give it to you the broad strokes here. So a TMO starts with looking at the nation, what’s happening across the country nationally. And so we give people links to find that data through NAR. And there’s a lot of good, solid data that comes out every month that we can go tap into. So we train people, you know, let’s go find that data. We’ll show you exactly where to go to get it. And that’s the first page of your TMO. Here’s what’s happening in the nation. Then I break it down by region. So what’s happening in my region. The NAR breaks our country down into four distinct regions. We break down that region, what’s happening in our region on sales basis? Then we drill down to the state level, then we drill down to the regional level or your MLS level. Then finally, we drill down into the actual neighborhood. So then we get to the hyper-local level, which is basically a CMA, but then we train you how to do the CMA at a much higher level.

So we give you some ideas on really diving deeper into CMA. I’ll give you a couple of tactics there real quickly. So with your CMA to get…even if you stay with your traditional CMA, let me give you some ideas there. What a lot of agents don’t do with their CMA is they don’t look at the history of the property. So the property history of what happened to get to the sales point is super important. So, a lot of people are just looking at property sold for this, right? Property sold for that, property sold for that. What I want to look at is days on market and what happened during those days on market. So there was this property on the market for 2 days, the next one was on the market for 32 days, had two price reductions, and then sold. Was this property in the market for 15 days, had one price reduction, and then sold. That history is absolutely critical for the seller to make good decisions. So, we walk them through property histories.

We also look at something I call the appreciation rate effect. So, if we look at our marketplace, like in my market where we’ve had a 26% increase in prices over the last year, we could say and this is a conversation we have to have with sellers is what CMAs do is they look at the past, not the present. And appraisers do the same thing, appraisers look at the past over the present. So by nature, when you’re looking at sold properties to make your decisions, those sold properties are three months old, six months old, you know, that range maybe a couple of months old. But when you look at those numbers, they’re not accurate because prices are rising so fast in our country. So if I take my 26% market, you know, gone up in the last year and I divide that by 12, that means on average, in my market, home prices are rising a little over 2% a month. So if I take a sold property closed three months ago, I would need to add 2% each month for the last three months to get to a relatively honest answer on what that property is worth. So factoring in appreciation rates is another part of elevating those CMAs to a higher level.

And there’s a lot of other tactics. I’ll give you one more here. We also do something that’s really interesting, I think, that I learned from one of my coaching students is we do a survey around the house, quarter-mile, half-mile. And we look at what is the selling commission being offered to the selling agent? So we do a selling agent commission survey. So we say, okay, this is interesting information … on average in this, you know, half-mile around your house, selling agents, people working with buyers are being offered 2.5% on average or 3% on average. We gotta think about that when we’re positioning your home in the market. We certainly don’t want to be below that because you’re gonna be the last one shown. Some people want to be right at that, or maybe a little above to try to incentivize people to come out and show your property. So those are all things that traditional agents typically don’t do.

Matt: And tell me again, how is this being pitched? Is this … you’re mailing this out, sending this out to specific neighborhoods that you want to farm?

Jim: So you could do in a lot of different ways. You could do it, I think multiple channels again, but as a postcard, you could be sending this out as a postcard where you’re saying, “Hey guys, if you’re considering selling, I got this great product called a TMO. It’s much better than a CMA.” I walk them through that process. I might show a picture of mine, you know, versus an old-fashioned CMA, which would be hilarious. So that would be another thing I could do. And I could do the same thing on social media through that channel. And let me give you one other quick tip that we can call it number six here, okay? So the TMO’s being one, but when you’re talking about marketing, marketing is starting to change in a lot of different ways, but one of those ways is text-based marketing. So text-based marketing is becoming much, much more prevalent and I’ve had this happen like several times over the last two months because I own a lot of real estate. And so, what happens is people are texting me instead of calling me.

So I get calls too, but texting is becoming much more prevalent. So what they’re doing is they’re going to companies like TheRedX.com or PropertyRadar.com, and they’re putting a pin in a map and they’re going, “Hey, I want to harvest all the phone numbers around this area that I’d like to capture.” I capture those phone numbers, I load it up into EZTexting.com, which I mentioned earlier. Then I send a marketing message to everybody that lives in that neighborhood. And I just say, “Hey, Jim Remley here, local real estate agent. Just wanted to offer my services if you ever considered selling. I got something special called a TMO, which is a total market overview. No cost, no charge, let me know if you’re interested. Happy to help.” Something super simple. Or you can make it highly specific to their home and just say, “Hey, Jim Remley here with ABC Real Estate. Quick question, I know it’s out of the blue, but would you consider selling for the right price if we gave you plenty of time to find your dream home?” So, I mean, it could be that simple too. So, give it some thought, text marketing becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.

Matt: Jim, we have a Facebook listener community and I asked in there, does anyone have any questions for Jim Remley about tactics to find listings in this kind of market? Keenan Gottschall is an agent in the Detroit, Michigan area. He said, “What do you think about focusing on niches that may have a motivation for selling — divorcees, probate, absentee owners? Do you have any tactics that work with those groups?”

Jim: Great, great strategy. I call that key moment marketing. And I think it can be very, very effective. First of all, you have to be tactful. Your tact is essential, like divorces, pre-foreclosures, you know, those kinds of things where there’s a lot of emotion involved in it, you gotta be very tactful. So, I think if you’re going to do that, you have to become the specialist, number one. Don’t just touch this and try it for two weeks. You’ve gotta dive in and make it your mastery section, right? You gotta say like every one of us has, you know, our number one method of leads, of closings will always be your sphere of influence, that database of people that know they trust you. But you have to have a way to feed that database. Like, what’s going to make that grow? And so, part of what can make that grow is having a niche that you’re targeting. That niche could be like absentee owners, you know, investment properties. I think that’s very, very powerful. I think it’s a great, great strategy.

I’ll give you an example around absentee owners right now. So, absentee owners are great, and here is a strategy we’re using with my coaching students is absentee owners by default probably have been renting their house, right? And if you don’t live there, you’re renting it if you don’t sell it. So what we’re recommending is a letter that goes out to the renter and the owner. This is kind of radical, but a renter and the owner. And the renter letter says, “Hey, have you ever considered buying the house that you live in, you’re currently living in? If you’d like to consider buying it, I’d love to help. My name’s Jim Remley, I’m with ABC Real Estate. I specialize in helping tenants buy the homes that they’re living in. Here’s all my services that I can help you with. Please give me a call or text and I can walk you through this process.” Now, we don’t have any idea if the owner is interested in selling, right? We’re just trying to see if it’s a possibility they’re interested. And if they are interested, then we have a reason to contact the homeowner.

We can call the homeowner and say, “Hey, you know, it sounds like your renter may be interested. We’ve had a conversation. Would you consider selling? I can be a facilitator in that.” Now, why is this so important? Because a lot of renters, if you target the right absentee owner homes at the right price ranges, which means translates into higher rents, they probably could qualify to buy a house. They may be out actually looking for a house, but haven’t been able to find a house. They may have failed four or five times trying to find a house. And now if you say, “What if you could buy the home you’re living in?” They’re like, “You know what? That’s a great idea.” And you now eliminate all competition. You’re not competing. You’re just trying to facilitate a one-to-one transaction. So that’s actually been very successful for one of my students.

The flip side, same letter goes out to the homeowner that says, “Hey, have you ever considered selling?” A lot of them are not because they just don’t want to deal with the hassle factor of dealing with the renter. And you can say, “Have you ever considered selling your home to your renter? If so, I can help. I’m a specialist in facilitating this,” and you go the reverse route. And then you put together that sale. We’ve seen this be so, so successful with our students. So that’s an example of a tactical kind of strategy that works.

Matt: When I think about what we’ve just, you know, chatted about over the last 30 minutes or whatever it’s been, I just hear this idea of, you know, be creative, think outside the box, look for opportunities that you wouldn’t normally look for. That is what this is all about. Isn’t it?

Jim: Absolutely. You gotta be different and you gotta be unique because you gotta realize that there’s…you know, my market, we have 2,000 agents and a population base of 80,000. So our company is fortunate, we’re selling a billion dollars of real estate in a population basically 80,000 competing against 2,000 agents. But when we look at those numbers, you know, there are so many agents that are so alike and they’re just doing exactly the same cookie-cutter things. You gotta find a way to step out from that crowd and be the reason somebody would choose you.

Matt: Jim, this has been fantastic. I mean, we got really deep on ideas and strategies to look for listings and find listings in this market. What are your final words of advice? What would you want listeners to take away from this conversation?

Jim: The biggest takeaway should be remove choice from your daily action plan and actually commit to a lead generation strategy, and don’t give up on it too soon. We have to accept that most lead generation strategies will not produce a result for the first four to six weeks. So you have to stay committed for four to six weeks before you can expect any level of results. And agents are trapped in a level of instant gratification, it’s just our society today. And you gotta let go of it, let go of outcome and just do the work. Just fall in love with the work and do it. Don’t bail on the trail, master the mundane and, you know, continually just be consistent. Consistency was what will win the day.

(Speaker: Matt McGee, Host)

Yes, love that. “Consistency is what will win the day.” I think it was a couple months ago, in fact, I did a One More Minute segment all about consistency. So, you know I love what Jim just ended with right there.

Hey, if you want to connect with Jim, there’s a couple of different ways you can do that. Let me share those right now before we get to the Takeaways segment. First and foremost, Jim has joined our Facebook mastermind group. And I will remind you in just a moment how you can join that. Also, Jim is active all across social media. He’s a prolific content creator. I love that. So just go to whatever your favorite social media site is and do a search for eRealEstateCoach and you should find him. If not, just look for Jim Remley. You can also visit his website, it’s erealestatecoach.com to learn more about his coaching program. He has an 18-week training program. The first two weeks are free. There’s also lots of great videos and downloads and more stuff like that on his website. I will link to that in today’s show notes.

All right, let’s do our Takeaways segment. Boy, there’s a lot of stuff on my list. So let’s dive right in. Here’s what stood out to me from part two.

Takeaway number one, Jim talked about the pre-listing letter. Now, in the conversation, I called it a pre-CMA letter. So apologies for the mix-up there. It’s a pre-listing letter, it’s snail mail. And Jim talked about, you know, that you can send it on this big 8.5 by 11 thick stock flat like cardboard. So it’s a letter that doesn’t have to be opened in an envelope. And part of what you say in the letter is something like this, “In the next week or so, I’ll be listing one of your neighbor’s homes. I’ve been researching homes in your area and I discovered some surprising data. If you’re thinking about selling, now is a good time to talk.” What you’re doing there is creating curiosity and using that to try to get homeowners to pick up the phone.

Takeaway two, Jim talked about taking advantage of a multiple offer failure. So after your buyers lose a bidding war, it happens, right, you call 10 or 20 homes that are immediately around the home that you lost. And the script goes something like this, “My buyers just lost when they were trying to win the bidding war for this home, but they really love this neighborhood. Would you be interested in selling for the right price if we gave you lots of time to find your dream home?” Now, Jim gave the full script during the conversation. So be sure to listen back. And he talked about how doing this in a live conversation is best. So use the phone, maybe door-knocking. He said don’t leave a voicemail with this message.

Takeaway number three, Jim introduced this idea of the total market overview. So, instead of doing just a standard CMA, you do a really in-depth analysis, national, regional, state, MLS level, and then all the way down to neighborhood level. And Jim shared three bonus tips that I really liked for talking to the homeowner. Number one, you want to share the full property history, not just what it sold for in the past, but how many days it was on the market each time, what price reductions were involved if any. Just everything you can find about the property’s history. He also talked about using the appreciation rate effect to get the most accurate estimate of home value. And then he also talked about doing a selling agent commission survey, where you let the homeowner know what other homes nearby are offering out to the buyer’s agent. That’s all part of this total market overview.

And then takeaway number four, if you want to try absentee owners and rental properties, Jim suggests that you send letters both to the owner and to the renter. In one case, it would be the simple, “Are you interested in selling your investment home?” But when you’re sending a letter to the renter, it would be something like, “Are you interested in buying the home you’re renting?

All right. If you have questions or feedback, there’s a couple of different ways you can get in touch. Leave a voicemail or send me a text. The number is 415-322-3328. You can send an email to walkthrough[at]homelight.com or find me and Jim in our Facebook mastermind group. Go to Facebook, do a search for HomeLight Walkthrough and the group will come right up.

Hey, that’s all for this week. Thank you so much to Jim Remley for joining me. And thank you for listening, thank you for putting up with this shaky voice that I have. I’ll do my best to be back to normal next week.

My name’s Matt McGee, and you’ve been listening to “The Walkthrough”. At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable. Go out and safely sell some homes, I’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye.

Header Image Source: (Andrey_Popov / Shutterstock)