Working with Realtors

Search:

Back to the Purchase Market: Creating Satisfying, Productive Relationships with Realtors

By Coach Bob on 12/22/2009

Working with Realtors

By Bob Williamson

In this article, I explain how loan originators can establish mutually satisfying relationships with Realtors. After reviewing the reasons why agents typically have little respect for loan officers, I show you how to identify the right agents, and how to approach them with a joint marketing program Realtors will respond to.

I’m a sucker for those nature shows on TV. One of my favorites is the one where they show the bears gathering by the side of the river in anticipation of the arrival of many thousands of salmon, swimming upstream to reach the place where they will spawn the next generation before they die.

One imagines this is a bittersweet experience for the salmon, but for the bears, it’s a seemingly unending all-you-can-eat buffet. The river is so thick with fish that all Bruno has to do is find a spot on the bank, stick his paw in the water, and – voila – lunch!

I could not help but be reminded of this scene during the last few refi booms. It was salmon season, and every lender with a cell phone and a rate sheet was a happy, well-fed bear.

But when salmon season ends for the bears, they just waddle off to hibernate for the winter. Loan originators don’t have that luxury. If you were filling your pipeline with refis until a year or so ago, perhaps thankful that you didn’t have to go searching for the roots and berries of dealing with Realtors® and their purchase transactions, it’s time to face reality: Salmon season is over.

If you want to still be in this business a year from now, you will almost certainly have to generate business from the purchase market. And for most of you, that means working with Realtors®.

Why? For one thing, they’re involved in almost 90% of all residential real estate transactions. They will probably spend more time with your customer than you will, so they’re in a very good position to steer your borrower/client to a competitor if they don’t feel comfortable with you.

Also, most homebuyers still contact a Realtor® fairly early in their decision-making process, even if they don’t ultimately buy from that agent. So, having positive relationships with multiple Realtors® is a good way to identify the people who are thinking about buying homes. In short, the reason you should be working with Realtors® is a lot like the reason Willie Sutton gave for robbing banks: That’s where the money is.

I’ve been coaching mortgage lenders for 15 years. So I have heard all the complaints about Realtors® being arrogant, disloyal, unethical, etc. Mike Moffitt had a good article in Loan Officer Magazine a while back (“Forget the Donuts! Here’s a Program That EARNS Your Realtor®’s Business”) explaining why Realtors® don’t always put on their best face for lenders. Their income depends on how well they satisfy their customers (and how many of them they can satisfy in a given time frame), and it’s not an easy job. They get blamed for everything that might go wrong, and sometimes loan originators are convenient scapegoats for their frustration.

Realtors® live in a sales culture in which Production is King. Top Producers – the people who consistently prove that they’ve got what it takes to close -- get the respect, the money and the glory. (You’ve probably noticed it’s the same way in our business!) As a loan originator, if you get the feeling that the Realtors® you call on don’t respect you, maybe it’s because you’re always showing up in their office with your hand out, and you never bring any deals of your own to the table! In any organization, the person who can deliver the business ALWAYS gets respect. When you start adding to the Realtor®’s business, they will respect you. If you don’t, they’re going to see you as a vendor. And vendors don’t get much respect. Only Partners get respect.

Targeting the Right Agents
In Karen Deis’ article -- also in Loan Officer Magazine (How to Interview a Realtor®), she explains that there are 4 kinds of Realtors®:

Listing Agents
Buyers (or Selling) Agents
New Construction
Relocation

Your first task is to focus on one or two of these groups and develop a marketing plan for becoming indispensable to the type(s) of agent(s) you want to work with. Market conditions vary with your geographical location, but for purposes of this article we’re going to focus on listing agents and buyer’s agents because in most markets, they are responsible for the majority of transactions.
The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80-20 Rule), when applied to Realtors®, predicts that 80% of the transactions in a market will be handled by 20% of the agents. I have tested this rule in dozens of markets and found that it is invariably true. If there are 1,000 licensed Realtors® in your town, the top 200 will be doing about 80% of the business.

Once a business relationship has been established, it must be nurtured. This takes time. It will take almost as much time to maintain a relationship with a Realtor® who can send you 2 transactions a year as it will take to maintain a relationship with one who can send you two a month. So which is a better investment of your time?

If 200 Realtors® in our hypothetical marketplace do 80% of the business, the top 10 will be superstars in that market. They will be busier, harder to get to, and most likely to have long-established relationships with a favored lender. Whether you attempt to convert these “top 10” Realtors® to your side might depend in part on who you are. If you are a superstar yourself, the top 10 agents will know who you are and will be more receptive to your approach. If you’re not a superstar, you’ve still got 190 agents in the top 200 you can approach with a reasonable degree of confidence.

It is also true that the most successful Realtors® will receive proportionately more attention from your competitors. So it comes down to classic marketing strategy: if you are going to prevail with these successful agents, you will have to offer them more of what they want than your competitors do.

Your Offer: Why a Realtor® Should Do Business With You
The traditional approach lenders have taken with Realtors® incorporates one or more of the following talking points:

The quality and/or variety of your loan programs
Your experience and integrity
Your exceptional service and reliability
Your competitive rates/pricing

While each of these points may be important, or even essential to a Realtor®, you must understand that virtually all of your competitors will be making exactly the same claims. And by their very nature, all of these claims would be very difficult, if not impossible, to prove – especially to someone who has heard it all before.
You need more than that. You need to be able to make a persuasive case that, by forming an alliance with you, the Realtor® will be able to close more transactions than he or she would be able to close without you.

In short: If they work with you, they will make more money. There are two main arguments to substantiate that claim.

You will generate leads, and you will develop them and refer qualified, motivated prospects to the Realtor®.
You will meet with their prospects and turn them into qualified, motivated, decisive buyers (or sellers/buyers), thus reducing the time it takes the Realtor® to complete a transaction, thus creating time for the Realtor® to do more business.

Let’s look at each of these arguments in more detail.

Generating Leads & Developing Them Into Prospects You Can Refer to a Realtor®
In a traditional Lender-Realtor® relationship, the Realtor® refers a buyer to you. Let’s say there’s a problem with the appraisal, or with satisfying an underwriting condition – something that doesn’t get discovered until late in the process. The Realtor® blames you, and stops sending you business. Sound familiar?

But what if you are sending as much business to the Realtor® as he or she is sending to you? If the Realtor®’s average commission on a sale is $5,000, and you are referring one transaction per month, your relationship represents $60,000 a year in income to the Realtor®. Are you going to get dumped over one transaction gone bad?

You have to find a way to generate your own leads – leads you “control” and refer to Realtors® who reciprocate. If you want to be seen as a partner instead of as a vendor, you have to do your share of the heavy lifting.

Here are some of the ways you can generate your own leads:

Mine your database – communicate regularly with your past clients and ask them if they or someone they know is thinking about buying (or selling) a home. A database of 500 past clients, properly mined, can generate 1000 leads per year.
Market your services directly to home sellers – 80% of sellers will buy a home within a 10-mile radius of the home they’re selling, and less than half of them will use the same agent who listed their existing home.
Target first-time homebuyers by mailing to apartment complexes where rents are comparable to what a mortgage payment would be on a decent starter home
Farm for prospective sellers in neighborhoods where property values have appreciated and there is a high buyer demand for homes.
Set up a call-capture system and offer it to Realtors® who advertise their listings – prospective buyers can call your 800 number and listen to a pre-recorded message telling them about the home – without having to talk to a Realtor®.
Attract buyer leads by advertising a Free Report like my “How to Negotiate the Lowest Possible Price for Your Next Home”
Prepare financing packages for Open Houses – include bio pages on the listing agent and yourself, information about the home, financing information, and testimonial statements from some of your past clients. Sponsor a drawing for an attractive prize so that visitors to the open house will register to win the prize.

Turning the Realtor®’s Leads into Qualified, Motivated, Decisive Buyers
In our business, time is money, and that is equally true for Realtors®. They may make more money on a single transaction then we do, but they also invest more time per transaction. Much of that time is spent showing the buyer homes and trying to find them the right home.

Many buyers look at homes for months before making a serious offer on a listing. The Realtor®’s enthusiasm for working with the buyers can diminish with the passage of time. This change of attitude is not lost on buyers.

The most common cause of a buyer’s indecision is the fear of making a mistake; the fear of buying the wrong home, or of paying too much for the right one, is enough to give anyone pause, even when it is not their first home purchase.

As a lender, you are in a position to alleviate and even remove this fear. You can help homebuyers clearly understand their budget and the costs that will be associated with a home purchase. You can also give them objective advice about the local housing market, and help them get the information they need to enter that market with confidence that they can protect their own interests. A confident buyer will be much more decisive, and the Realtor®’s timeline from start to closing will be shorter and smoother. (To find out how you can actually fill this role to the point that your homebuyer clients will become raving fans and refer their family and friends to you, go here.)

You can separate the lookers from the buyers by recommending they proceed with a full loan preapproval. Most people won’t commit the time and energy required unless they are serious about buying.

Once you’ve taken a loan application, you can refer the buyers back to the Realtor® – with a solid statement of your confidence in the Realtor®’s integrity and professional skill.

And after you’ve taken the application and referred them back to the Realtor®, you can (and should) call your buyers regularly (once a week would not be too much) to check on their progress and offer further encouragement and guidance.

If you take the time to explain this process to your Realtors®, they will be able to see that if they send all their prospects to you immediately, you can play a vital role in turning lookers into buyers, reducing their average time investment per buyer, and making them more profitable. Everybody wins.

If you'd like Bob Williamson to help you become the top purchase loan originator in your local market, find out how you can get a free, private, 1-hour coaching session.

How to Get Appointments with Realtors

By Coach Bob on 2/25/2009

Working with Realtors

About 80% of all home buyers are introduced to their mortgage lender by their real estate agent. So, if there were 500 purchase transactions in your market last month where the buyers did not use their own cash, 400 of them were referred to their loan officer by a Realtor®.

Unless you want to focus exclusively on refinance business (not a good idea in my opinion), it would be difficult for any loan officer to succeed in today’s environment without developing productive, win-win relationships with Realtors.

Your ultimate business goal is to control your own destiny by creating a superior product, and getting the message about your superior product out to as many potential homebuyers as possible. To do that, you have to find the people who are going to be buying homes in the near future.

Since what they want to buy is a home (and not a mortgage loan), they’re looking for homes! To attract prospective buyers, you need listings. And who has the listings? Realtors do!

That’s one reason why you should develop productive partnerships with Realtors. Another reason is that you need your customer to buy a house before your mortgage loan is going to do them any good. And you don’t sell houses. So sooner or later they’re probably going to be dealing with a Realtor, and it might as well be one of your Realtor partners, because your clients are probably going to end up spending more time with the Realtor than they do with you. If that Realtor happens to be someone who doesn’t like you, or even if they’d just rather somebody else did the loan, the chances are better than even that you can kiss that client goodbye.

Yet many loan officers resist the idea of working with real estate agents. In more than 20 years of coaching originators, I’ve heard all the stories about the nasty, mean, lying, cheating, double-crossing, unprofessional, cheapskate, disorganized idiot Realtors. But there isn’t a Board of Realtors in the country that requires its members to be nasty, mean, lying, cheating, double-crossing, unprofessional, cheap, disorganized, or idiots. In fact, one might reasonably argue that the real estate industry would discourage such conduct, since it’s bad for business.

Besides, if you think real estate agents are bad, then you should meet some of the loan originators I’ve encountered! Every profession has its bad eggs.

Do You Have a Low Opinion of Realtors?

If you’ve had mostly unpleasant experiences with real estate agents, and that affects your willingness to contact them about the possibility of working together, consider the following:

· Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? It’s amazing how often you get what you expect to get, especially when you expect it to be negative. If you have a low opinion of Realtors, do you think they might possibly be picking up on some of your vibe? An expert in reading human body language can look at two people and unfailingly tell you how those people feel about each other. While most of us don’t have that kind of training, we all have a kind of internal radar that usually tells us something about the way we’re perceived by another person, especially if we’re face-to-face. So if you’ve got some negative preconceived notions about real estate agents, or even if you’re ambivalent about them, chances are pretty good that they will pick up on that at some level.

· Over-Generalizing from Limited Experience. Sometimes a client will tell me, “I tried that, but it didn’t work.” Invariably, it turns out that the “trying” represented a minimal effort, followed quickly by giving up. Since we’re talking about getting appointments with real estate agents, I recall a recent conversation with a client who said that he’d “tried” to make some calls to get appointments, but that “it” didn’t work. So I asked him how many calls he’d made. “About 10,” he said. “You talked to 10 agents and they all said they didn’t want to meet with you?” I asked. “No,” he replied, “I called 10, but I only talked to 2. One of them said she wasn’t interested and the other one said he would have to check his schedule and get back to me.”There are close to 1,000 full-time real estate agents in this client’s market area. He had concluded, on the basis of 2 actual conversations, that what he was doing “wasn’t working.” In other words, he had reached this conclusion on the basis of a statistical sampling of 2 tenths of one percent of the entire sample size. Let me give you an analogy that illustrates the fallacy in this line of thinking:

You ask someone out on a date.
You are rejected.
You do it again with the same result.
And, you stop asking, assuming that every single one of the other 4 billion people of that gender will have the same response.

I don't want to be rejected.
You don't want to be rejected.
We don't want to feel the regret of looking bad and feeling rejected.
Therefore, we stop asking.

If you stop asking, you may spare yourself the pain of being rejected, but you’ll never succeed, either. You will fail to get 100% of the appointments you never ask for.

· Prior Bad Experiences with Realtors. Maybe you got blamed for something that wasn’t your fault. Maybe a Realtor (or more than one) was extremely high-maintenance during the course of a transaction. Maybe some of them treated you like they thought you were the hired help. Maybe you were refused entry into a real estate office. Maybe an agent pressured you to cut your commission (which you assume he did in order to “look good” to the client). Maybe you referred a client to a Realtor and she tried to steer your client to a competitor. Any of these experiences would be discouraging, but are they really representative of the way most Realtors behave? (See the section above.) Moreover, we all have a tendency to view our past experiences through a perceptual filter that renders us blameless in the matter. Could some of these negative experiences have been prevented if you had been better prepared, or had more to offer? Could you have communicated more clearly your expectations of the relationship with the agent? As a mentor of mine liked to say, “Did you ever notice that whenever there’s a problem, you’re there?”

Before You Call for the Appointment …

In a moment, I’m going to give you some scripting that will be very effective in getting real estate agents to agree to meet with you. Before I do, though, let’s look at the conditions that will need to be present in order for that agent to agree that he or she wants to meet with you.

Why would a Realtor want to meet with you? I think we can agree that most agents would have no such desire unless they believed there was a very good chance that the meeting would produce benefits for them. In other words, unless they think there is something tangible in it for them, there wouldn’t be much incentive to agree to an appointment.

What can you offer that would provide that incentive? What do Realtors want that you can provide?

Well, it would be darn close to universally true – especially in today’s market -- that real estate agents want to close more transactions; they want to make more money.

That means they’re not interested in listening to you talk about yourself, your company, your products, your pricing, or your service. They don’t even (gasp!) care about the wonderfulness of your personality. They want to make more money. Focus your attention on that (and them), and you have a chance of getting somewhere with them.

Following this logic, you can see that agents might agree to meet with you if you tell them that you have a way to help them sell more houses – but only if you have one more thing going for you -- Plausibility.

This may come as something of a shock to you, but there are actually people in this world who will promise you something and then not deliver on it! Realtors know this (a cynic might argue they know it because they themselves are among the world’s most expert practitioners of this art), so if you tell them you want to meet with them so you can show them how you can help them sell more houses, most of them are going to want some evidence that you can back up this claim. That evidence is what I mean by plausibility.

How Do You Provide Evidence that You Can Help Realtors Sell More Homes?

The most effective way to prove to a Realtor that you can help them sell more homes is to provide verification that you’ve done it before – that you have a record of originating transactions and referring them to real estate agents.

Every business has its own culture. In a “new-age” kind of company like Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, for example, the culture is egalitarian; the workers are told that they’re all members of a team. Roles are not as hierarchical as you might expect them to be at a company like General Motors, for example.

In most real estate offices, you’ll see what I would call a sales culture – where the respect and the “love” – not to mention the money -- are apportioned according to how much you produce. Here’s the way I put it in a previous article on the subject:

Realtors® live in a sales culture in which Production is King. Top Producers – the people who consistently prove that they’ve got what it takes to close -- get the respect, the money and the glory. (You’ve probably noticed it’s the same way in our business!) As a loan originator, if you get the feeling that the Realtors® you call on don’t respect you, maybe it’s because you’re always showing up in their office with your hand out, and you never bring any deals of your own to the table! In any organization, the person who can deliver the business ALWAYS gets respect. When you start adding to the Realtor’s business, they will respect you. If you don’t, they’re going to see you as a vendor. And vendors don’t get much respect. Only Partners get respect.

When loan officers are unable to make headway with the better agents in their marketplace, it is usually because they have not made themselves valuable enough for a successful Realtor to want to give them the time of day. If you want to be respected by a real estate agent, be a player – prove that you can carry your weight in a business relationship that lives or dies on the ability to generate leads and close sales.

So, you’re about to call a Realtor for an appointment to make your presentation -- can you prove you have a record of referring business to Realtors? Can you give this agent the names of other agents you’ve helped to become more successful? When was the last time you found a buyer or seller on your own and referred them to one of your agents?

Maybe you don’t have any proof. Maybe you’re new to the business, or maybe you never saw it as part of your role to feed business to real estate agents, but you recognize now that this is why they don’t respect you or treat you very well – and you’re willing to change your strategy. If that’s your situation, you can still get appointments with agents. Here’s how:

First, you paint a picture for them, using a combination of facts, persuasive logic and inspirational vision, which enables them to see that you truly understand their situation and the challenges you face, and that you have developed a plan to make them more successful.

Second, you fortify your analysis by being able to cite outside authorities that lend credibility to what you’re saying.

And finally, you lower the perceived risk associated with their agreeing to meet with you, compared to the potential rewards of such a meeting. If they see that there’s a reasonable chance you might be on to something that would really help them, and they have very little to lose by giving you a chance to make your case, you’ll get the appointment.

What to Say to the Realtor®

Here are some examples of what you might say:

One Approach: Hi, this is Mary Smith; I’m a loan officer with Fantastic Mortgage, and I have a question for you: If I could show you how I can help you close 1 or 2 more transactions per month, over and above what you’re already doing, would you be willing to give me about an hour of your time so I can show you how?

This approach is straightforward; you promise Realtors® you’ll show them how to close more transactions if they’ll give you an hour of their time. If you can sound confident, professional, and conversational (as opposed to sounding scripted), you’ll probably succeed at getting an appointment about 25% of the time, maybe more than that.

In some cases, the agent might answer your question with a question, probably something along the lines of “What’s this all about?” They’re not saying “No,” – yet --but before they agree to give you their time, they want to know, in a nutshell, how you propose to help them close 1-2 additional transactions a month. It’s a fair question, one you yourself might ask in a similar situation. How would you answer it?

Assuming you’ve prepared a presentation, you might be tempted to give them the highlights, or an executive summary – and that might be a mistake. Consider this scenario:

Realtor: What’s this all about?

You: Well, I have a call capture system and we use that in conjunction with sign riders on your listing signs, and with your listing ads to capture buyer leads. I follow up with them and prequalify them, and then refer them back to you to sell them a house.

Realtor: I tried call capture before, and it didn’t work. But I’ll keep you in mind. Thanks for calling.

No matter what you tell agents about what you have in mind, there’s a good chance they will simply use it as a hook to compare it with something they’ve already “tried”, or something someone they know has “tried”, that didn’t work.

But what if the conversation went something like this?

Realtor: What’s this all about?

You: I just got the results back on a study I commissioned on what’s going on in our local real estate market, and as I’m sure you’re aware, there are some pretty serious challenges facing us right now.

The findings of our study go a lot deeper than just describing the statistical problems with real estate sales -- they actually identify the 6 core reasons for declining sales, and recommend a set of pretty powerful strategies to deal with these problems. Since my success is linked to the success of agents like yourself, I wanted to offer this information to some of the better agents in the area so you can start getting out in front of these problems in our market.

I’ve put this information into a very concise executive orientation, and I’m in the process of presenting it to some of the top real estate agents in town. I wanted to make sure you also got a chance to see this important information.

The findings take about 38 minutes to cover, and then usually you’ll have some questions, so most of the sessions last about an hour. We can meet for breakfast or lunch or coffee, my treat, but I only do these at a time when you won’t be disturbed, so we can both get in & out quickly. When’s a good time when you can sit and have a good educational experience without being interrupted?

If the Realtor still pushes for details of what you want to talk about, you can respond with something like this:

You: John, I appreciate your interest and curiosity. I hope you can understand that this is proprietary information I only want to share with Realtors who have an interest in working with me and would give me the time to show them my research and explain my findings and solutions. I can promise you this, though: I’m very conscious of the value of your time and I respect you and would like to work with you, so the last thing I would do is waste your time, because that would be counterproductive for me too, right? So is there a time this week when we could meet?

See what we did there? You politely gave the agent a credible reason for not going into detail over the phone (you’re not going to waste your good ideas on people who won’t give you the time to properly explain them), and you’ve tied that to a recognition on your part of the value of their time, and you’ve let them know that you realize it would be foolish of you to get them to commit to spending an hour with you, and then not be able to deliver something worthwhile! It would be a lot harder for a Realtor to say “No” at this point.

(Just be very sure you’ve got a strong presentation to show them. I’ll have a lot more to say about that in my next article on working with Realtors.)

Here’s a variation on the first approach:

Second Approach: Hi, this is Mary Smith; I’m a loan officer with Fantastic Mortgage. I noticed that you’ve closed 12 transactions sides last year, and I have a question for you: If I could show you how I can help you close 1 or 2 more transactions per month, over and above what you’re already doing, would you be willing to give me about an hour of your time so I can show you how?

The second approach is similar but adds this wrinkle: you’re showing the Realtor® you’ve done enough preparation to know how much business they’re doing. That will impress most people. (You’d need to have, or know someone who has, access to your local MLS system, and you’d need to know how to run reports in it, in order to know their production, but it will probably be worth the effort, because the MLS has a wealth of information about your local real estate market that you can use in all kinds of interesting ways.)

Anything you might mention to agents that shows you’ve taken the time to learn something about them personally before you called them would have a similarly positive effect on the way they receive you.

Now for a third approach:

A Third Approach: Hi, this is Mary Smith; I’m a loan officer with Fantastic Mortgage. I’ve been working with a preapproved buyer who’s qualified to buy in the $________ range, and they’ve asked me to refer them to a buyer’s agent. I’ve heard good things about you, and I understand you’re familiar with the _______ area, which is where they want to buy. Before I make the referral though, I would like to meet you and get to know you a little better, is there a time we can have coffee or lunch in the next day or two?

In 20 years of coaching loan officers, I’ve never seen that approach fail to get an appointment! Of course, to use it, you have to be generating your own consumer-direct buyer leads. If you’re not doing that, and you’d like to, take a look at my 12-week course, Double Your Loan Originations, here.

Other “Objections” and How to Handle Them

Here are some other things you might hear from Realtors when you call to schedule a presentation appointment:

“I’m not interested in (or don’t think I need any) additional info.”

“You know, [NAME], I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve only closed _ sides so far this year. But I’ve heard good things about you and I think you’re better than your numbers are indicating right now, and that’s why I called you. Are you saying you don’t think you need to learn better strategies for succeeding in this tough market?”

“I don’t have my Day-timer with me.”

{Laughing} “[NAME], If I were a hot buyer calling and I wanted you to take me out to see a house I’m really excited about, would you be telling me you don’t have your Day Timer? What I’m telling you is that the information in this briefing could change everything for you, it can literally double the amount of business you do this year. So if you need your Day Timer to schedule a time for me to show you this information, here’s what I’ll do for you – do you have a pen? I’m going to give you three days & times I have open right now. Here they are, write them down. [GIVE 3 TIMES]. I will hold these times open for you until 5:00 pm today. Check your schedule and find out which one works best for you, and then call me. If you get my voice mail, leave me a message and let me know which time you want. Do you have my phone number?

“Call me back in a few days.”

“[NAME], in a few days all of my presentations will have been scheduled. [SEE ALSO ABOVE RESPONSE & USE SIMILAR VERBIAGE]

I’m already working with a lender.

Yes, I assumed that someone who’s gotten to where you are in your career has already established relationships with one or moredependable lenders. As someone who is on the other side, I can tell you that I appreciate your loyalty.

What I want to do is see if there are some things you and I could do together that wouldn’t interfere with any of your current relationships that would produce additional business for you over and above what you’re already doing, fair enough?

YOU COULD ALSO ADD THIS:

My ultimate goal is to earn all your business, because you know, loyalty is a two-way street. Any competent lender will take care of the business you send them, but do your current lenders work hard to send you business? Do they spend their own time and money trying to develop clients to send to you?

Next in this Series: How to make a presentation to Realtors that will have them wanting to work with you.

How to Turn Realtors into Business Partners

By Coach Bob on 4/23/2009

Working with Realtors

If you’ve read my previous article on getting appointments with real estate agents, you know that there are two elements needed in a successful appointment-setting call:

· Relevance – If you want to get Realtors to agree to meet with you, you have to make the meeting relevant to them by answering the question, “What’s in it for me?” If you can show them, for example, that meeting with you will result in more income for them, it’s much more likely they will agree to a meeting.

· Plausibility – Of course, the other part of the challenge is getting them to accept that you have enough credibility to back up your claim that meeting with you can result in higher income for them. You need to answer the question, “Why should I believe you can do what you say you’ll do?”

I addressed these points in detail in the previous article, How to Get Appointments with Realtors. (To read that article, go here.)

So I’ll work from the assumption that you know how to get appointments with agents. What is the outcome you want from those appointments?

· Do you want them to smile and be nice to you, and tell you they’ll definitely keep you in mind. or promise they will call you with their next deal?

· Or do you want them to agree to specific, concrete actions that each of you will take to move the relationship forward, and set a date and time for your next meeting to keep things moving?

Only the second outcome implies that an agreement has been reached that the two of you will work together in a partnership to improve each other’s businesses. The first outcome is only designed to make you feel better. It may lead somewhere eventually, but the odds aren’t that good. And if your presentations produce the first outcome, and not the second, then either your presentations aren’t very convincing, or you aren’t asking for what you want – in other words, you aren’t closing the sale.

The Typical LO Presentation to a Realtor®

Unless you’re new to the mortgage business, you have probably made presentations to Realtors in the past. What was the main message you tried to communicate?

· Did you try to educate them about the loan programs you offer?

· Did you tell them how good you are at returning calls?

· Did you discuss your respective golf handicaps, or your mutual interest in the local minor league baseball team’s fortunes?

· Did you tell them about the time you got that really tough loan done for another Realtor, and did it in 3 days? (If so, congratulations, you’ve just volunteered to be the one they call for the next crappy loan nobody else wants to touch – and they’ll expect you to turn it around in 48 hours!)

If you understand loan products well enough to know which program(s) best suit a particular borrower, and if you return calls and stay in communication with the parties to a transaction, and if you’re capable of going the extra mile to get the occasional difficult deal approved, then you have met the minimum, basic requirements for being a professional mortgage loan officer.

But using your precious presentation time to make those points to an agent is like showing the admissions officer at Harvard Medical School your high school diploma.

The Realtor® you’re meeting with already has a lender who meets those requirements. Plus, they have actual experience with that loan officer getting their deals done. All you’re doing is making an unsubstantiated claim that you have the same skills. Can you blame that agent for thinking, “What else you got?”

Strategy for a More Effective Realtor® Presentation

Let’s identify some clear objectives you’d want to accomplish in an effective presentation, and see if we can develop a strategy for a presentation that would accomplish those objectives:

You want to do a presentation that:

· Gets the Realtor’s full attention

· Proves you understand their problems and can provide some solutions

· Earns their respect

· Lays out an approach to lead generation and follow-up that involves you and improves the percentage of leads that convert into closings and commission checks for both you and the Realtor®.

· Gets them to commit to trying your approach for 90 days

If you were to accomplish all of these objectives in your presentation, you would have far more to show for the time you spend with agents, wouldn’t you?

But in order to accomplish these objectives, you have to understand the context in which you find yourself when you meet with a Realtor®:

As I explained in the previous article, Realtors live in a sales culture (where production and the ability to close = respect)

The heart of the problem lies in the way LOs are perceived by real estate agents. Realtors tend to see loan officers as supplicants.

· You’re always asking them for a deal; you never bring them one

· You’re a Vendor; which means they think you work for them

· They have little or no respect for you as a sales professional; they see you as an order-taker.

All the things you don’t like about the way Realtors treat you, stem from this perception. Change the perception, and you change the reality.

In order to change the perception of Realtors (and perhaps your own as well), we’ll need to debunk three pervasive myths. You don’t have to attack these myths head-on in your Realtor presentation. You do need to deflate them in your own mind, so that your recognition of the fact that these are myths informs your thinking and your attitude when dealing with real estate agents.

Myth #1: Realtors are “Better Salespeople” than LOs. It’s easy to understand why Realtors (and even some loan officers) might buy into this myth. From the Realtor’s point of view, the real selling takes place when an agent persuades a prospect to buy a house. The mortgage loan is something the buyers need in order to finance the purchase, but the real accomplishment is in convincing them to make the purchase in the first place. When the buyers meet with the loan officer, they’ve already made the really tough decision (with the help of the agent). Deciding which loan they want is like deciding what color they want after they decide they want to buy a specific make and model of car. Hence the perception that loan officers are “order-takers”, or “vendors” who “work for” the Realtor®.

Let’s be honest: if all you do is help people decide which loan they want after they’ve already made the decision to buy a home, then the Realtors have a point. But it doesn’t always work that way! For about 10 years, I have been teaching my loan originator clients how to do a Strategy Session® with prospective homebuyers – many of whom have not yet decided that they are going to buy a home. In the Strategy Session®, these loan officers position themselves as the consumer’s “Homebuyer Coach” – someone whose mission is to help them make an informed choice about homeownership, and if they decide to proceed, are coached on how to find the right home for the lowest possible price – in addition to obtaining the best possible financing for their situation.

In these cases, the loan officer/homebuyer coach actually has more influence on the decision to buy a home than the real estate agent does.

Obviously, no profession has a monopoly on great salespeople.

When you think about what separates average salespeople from the best, one measure is the ability to “get the appointment”.

According to the National Association of Realtors, agents fielding incoming calls from prospective homebuyers (usually looking for information about an advertised listing) enjoy about a 5% success rate in getting appointments with these callers.

My loan originator clients track and report to me very week the number of leads they generate, how many of those leads they are able to contact and speak to, the number of Strategy Session®/Loan Application appointments they complete as well as other critical results. I compile these results so we can work together to alleviate bottlenecks and improve performance. Taken as a group, in 2008, my clients averaged a 22.6% success rate in selling leads and prospects on the benefits of a Strategy Session® and loan application (to get preapproved for financing) – and that 22.6% success rate includes outbound calls to leads responding to our consumer-direct marketing, in addition to incoming calls.

So who does a better job of selling – real estate agents who get the appointment 5% of the time on incoming calls, or loan officers who get the appointment (and the loan application) 22.6% of the time on all contacts?

Myth #2: Realtors Help Buyers Get the Best Deal on a Home. Oh, my. Where to start on this one?

Realtors – especially Buyer’s Agents – do have certain legal and ethical responsibilities to buyers. The vast majority of real estate agents take these responsibilities seriously. They will, for example, disclose any information they may know about the condition of the property, the seller’s reason for selling (if known), etc. They will, if asked, research recent comparable sales in the vicinity of a subject property. If asked by a Buyer to present an offer on a home, they will make a good-faith effort to present that offer in its best possible light. They will endeavor to see that the Buyer’s interests are protected in the aftermath of an offer being accepted, all the way to the settlement. But there is nothing in any of the buyer’s agency agreements in use today that requires the agent to negotiate the lowest possible price for their buyers.

Most Realtors would tell you in all sincerity that they do help their buyers get the best deal on a home. They believe it, and moreover, many buyers and maybe the majority of the general public believe it.

On the other hand, it would be inaccurate to say that the Buyer’s Agent works for the Buyer, because both Realtors are paid a commission – by the Seller -- on the sale of a home. The National Association of Realtors commissions a survey of homebuyers every year. Here’s one of the key findings of a recent survey: “Of greater concern to the homebuyers surveyed was the lack of incentive for a [Realtor] to negotiate the best possible sales price. The buyer cares most about getting the lowest price, while the perception is that the salesperson is motivated to complete the transaction and be paid a commission based on the final price.”

It’s not that the Buyer’s agent would deliberately try to jack up the price the buyer pays in order to earn more commission. The buyer’s agent’s share of the real estate commission is usually 3% of the sales price. Getting a buyer to pay $10,000 more for a house would only be worth about $300 to the buyer’s agent, and most agents are honest and genuinely like their buyer clients. They just wouldn’t do that. So what’s the problem?

Part of the problem is that the agents spend somewhere between 20 and 40 hours with a buyer before they close on a transaction and get paid. By the time the buyers get ready to make an offer, their agent has already invested quite a bit of their time with them. Most agents will try to determine whether the buyers like a particular property, and if they do, agents will encourage them to make an offer. Because they see themselves as “representatives” of the buyers, they will usually expect to be consulted as to an appropriate offer price. Because most buyers also believe the myth, they may very well ask the agent how much they should offer.

And this is where it gets a little sticky. The agent wants the buyers to buy a house (otherwise there’s no commission and they don’t expect to do all this work for free, nor should anyone else expect them to). The buyers appear to want to buy this house, and the Realtor® genuinely wants them to have this house, so the question as to what they should offer tends to get interpreted as, “What should we offer to be sure we get this house?”

Even if the buyers specifically ask what the lowest price they should offer might be, the agent is likely to be conservative in giving the answer, because both the agent’s natural self-interest in wanting to get paid and their sincere desire to help these nice people own this home – both motivations are going to be pulling the agent in the direction of suggesting an offer price that the agent is confident will either be accepted by the seller, or will be close enough to what the seller wants that it will at least produce a counteroffer. And that is almost never going to be the same thing as the lowest price the Seller would have accepted or would have been willing to negotiate from.

It’s not Realtors’ fault that they inherited a system in which they get paid by the seller. It’s not their fault that they have to spend so much time with buyers that by the time they’re finally ready to make an offer, the Realtor is really invested in that being an offer that leads to a closing. But none of that changes the fact that it is simply not true that Realtors help buyers get the best deal on a home. It’s not even true that it is their job to do so.

Do you need to rub that in a Realtor’s face? Absolutely not. But you’d damn well better know it yourself if you don’t want to be treated like the Realtor’s vendor in purchase transactions. This leads us to our third myth:

Myth #3: The LO’s Only Job is to Do the Loan; It Works Best if the Realtor Takes the Lead. This myth flows from the first two. If Realtors are considered better sales professionals, and if buyer’s agents are believed to be effective at getting the buyer the best deal on a home, you might also conclude that the real estate agents should be in overall control in managing the entire transaction. But given that the first two myths are, in fact, myths, you have to ask yourself whether having the Realtor® be “in charge” and having the loan officer take a back seat and concentrate solely on doing the loan – whether that really is best for all concerned:

· Is it best for the Homebuyer? Ultimately, the Homebuyer is the one in “control”. Buyers choose their Realtor® and their Lender. The only way the Realtor ends up in charge is if the Homebuyers give their power to the real estate agent. And that won’t happen if homebuyers are educated and informed about the dynamics of a real estate transaction, and they understand that it is their responsibility to see to it that they get the best value for their money when it comes to both the home and the loan.

· Is it best for the LO? Unless the loan officer enjoys taking a subservient position to the Realtor in the transaction, this is not going to be a satisfying arrangement. A professional loan originator will want to be treated with respect by the other parties to the transaction. You won’t want to have a real estate salesperson telling you how to do your job. And a professional LO will also want to help make sure that the Client’s overall financial well-being is served by the transaction. That means that your interest will extend beyond the financing to also include the question of whether the Clients have gotten good value for their money in the purchase of their new home.

· Is it even best for the Realtor? Much has been made of the perception that real estate agents feel the need to “control” all aspects of the transaction. It’s easy to understand why many Realtors feel this way – from their point of view, their commission is at stake. The last thing they want, after all the work they’ve done to put the deal together, is to have a loan officer screw it up and blow the deal. But obsessing about the details and status of the loan approval is time consuming for the Realtor® (and the LO). It’s also completely unnecessary if LOs don’t promise things they can’t be sure of delivering, and if the Realtor® trusts the LO, and if the LO is proactively communicating progress and status to both the agent and the buyers. When Realtors are able to trust their LO partners to handle their part of the job, those Realtors have more time to sell their next home and make more money.

Now that we’ve established a context for your approach to Realtors, I’d like to share some ideas on the content of your presentation.

Your Realtor® Presentation – Defining Their Problem

You want to begin by getting the Realtors’ attention, while simultaneously giving them a compelling reason to want to keep listening to what you have to say. One of the most effective ways of doing that is to begin by telling them about the serious challenges all Realtors face in today’s market. If you can get them to focus on the fact that they have a problem, they will be much more open to hearing about your solution. Nobody cares about solving a problem they don’t have.

What are some of the problems and obstacles confronting Realtors today?

· A Declining Market. While some markets are showing hopeful signs of recovery and are doing a little better than others, just about every real estate market in the country is a long way from the peaks of 2005-2006. Values have dropped significantly. The number of sales has dropped. Inventories have been inflated by foreclosure and REO sales, putting further downward pressure on home values and prices, and making it more difficult for individuals to sell their homes without taking large losses. And the Wall St. Journal reported (on 4/15/09) that J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac all say they have increased foreclosure activity in recent weeks and that they have lifted internal moratoriums which temporarily halted foreclosures. Foreclosure-related filings increased by nearly 6% in February from the month earlier, and were up almost 30% from February 2008, according to RealtyTrac. March 2009 forclosures were up 44% from the previous year. The backlog of seriously delinquent loans has been growing. All of this suggests that foreclosure and REO sales will continue to be a significant factor in the months to come. We already have more than a 9-month supply of single family homes on the market (which means that at the current rate of sales, it would take 9 months to burn off the inventory we have today, not factoring in any additions to inventory. And we have over 12 months of inventory in the condo market nationally.

Do some research in your own market area to compare the number of homes being sold per month currently to the sales numbers from your market’s peak (probably in 2005 or 2006). If you have access to your local MLS, you can get this information for yourself; if not you can get a friendly Realtor or Appraiser to run the numbers for you.

Find out how many licensed agents there are in your area. Divide the number of sales by the number of agents to see how the “average” agent is doing today compared to a few years ago.

When you have completed your research, format the information into charts that graphically show what has happened in your local market.

· Homes Are Taking Longer To Sell. Compared to the peak of the housing bubble, homes in most parts of the country stay on the market a lot longer. Your area’s MLS will track the average number of days a house is on the market before it sells, and you should also convert this data to a chart comparing days on the market now to days on the market at the peak of the last seller’s market (probably 2005-2006).

Be aware that these “days on market” statistics do not include homes that were listed and eventually removed from the market after having failed to sell at all. The stats only track how long homes were on the market before they sold.

Also, although it is against the rules, some listing agents will remove a listing from the MLS for a few days, lower the price, and then re-enter the listing in the MLS as if it were a new listing.

Both of these statistical “tricks” have the effect of making the “Days on Market” numbers look much better than they actually are.

· As Underwriting Guidelines Tighten, It’s Harder to Get Buyers Approved. According to Inside Mortgage Finance, “Significantly tighter underwriting on conforming prime mortgages and the disappearance of refinance opportunity for non-traditional/non-prime mortgage borrowers as well as those with investor or jumbo loans has dramatically reduced the number of people who can take advantage of low rates. And despite record-low secondary market pricing, mortgage rates in the primary market have climbed in recent weeks as major lenders have been slow – if not reluctant – to beef up resources to handle the recent rise in applications.” Nationally, about 1 out of every 4 home sale agreements are being cancelled due to homebuyers’ credit problems, insufficient down payment or funds to close, the inability to sell their current home, or problems with the appraised value of the home under contract.

Of course, all this makes the skill and experience of the loan officer much more important to the success of a transaction. But it is at least as important to point out that the net effect of this trend is a reduction in the available pool of buyers.

· Buyers Are Taking Longer to Make the Decision to Buy. There has always been a time lag (on average, of about 3-6 months) between a consumer’s recognition that they may want to buy a home, and the actual purchase of a home (regardless of whether they are first-time or move-up buyers). But the collapse of the housing bubble, the credit crisis, the recession, the significant drop in stock values, and the dramatic rise in unemployment in recent months, have all combined to make prospective homebuyers even more cautious and risk-averse than before.

This new reality means that buyers may take as long as 9 months to a year to make a decision. For Realtors (and lenders), this means it will take longer and require more patience and perseverance to move people from the status of “lead” to that of “prospect” and “buyer”. The longer your buyers take to buy, the fewer you can close in a month or a quarter or a year.

This would be a good time to plant the seed in the agent’s mind that you intend to show them that you can expedite the process of getting buyers to the point where they’re ready to buy.

· The General Public Doesn’t Trust Agents. According to a nationwide Gallup Poll conducted last year, only 13% of the public believes that real estate agents have high honesty and integrity. That’s a pretty shocking statistic, especially if you’ve seen surveys (sponsored by the real estate industry) that show very high rates of buyer & seller satisfaction with the performance of their agents.

But these two kinds of surveys are measuring two very different groups of people. The Gallup Poll is measuring the general public. The NAR-sponsored surveys are measuring people who have just bought (or sold) a home with the help of a Realtor®.

The Gallup poll is showing what the general public thinks of Realtors in general. The NAR surveys are measuring the opinions of people who have just finished spending a significant amount of time working with and getting to know a specific agent. It makes sense that, once you get to know someone, and you have chosen to continue to work with that person, that there’s been a personal connection and a level of trust established.

There’s another psychological factor at work here, too: in the aftermath of making a major financial decision, people have a very strong tendency to make that decision, and everything related to it, “right” in their own minds. It’s not very often that people make a major purchase, and to turn around a week later and say, “Boy, was I dumb to do that!”

And it’s also true that, after completing the process and successfully concluding a transaction, clients probably have good reason to feel satisfied with the efforts and the professionalism of their agent. (The same would probably be true of their feelings about their loan officer.)

The issue that’s relevant here is that, before consumers have made a definite decision to buy a home, and before they have selected a specific agent to work with, they belong to the group represented by the Gallup Poll – in other words, they have a fairly high level of skepticism and distrust of Realtors in general. This makes it much harder for a real estate agent to establish any kind of trust or confidence in an initial telephone contact, for example. The skepticism with which real estate agents are viewed by the general public is only overcome when the agent has the chance to earn trust one-on-one with a client over a period of time.

The problem is that buyers agents – before the current crisis began – were already averaging 20-40 hours spent per client that they take to the closing table. Agents simply don’t have the time to effectively follow up and build trust with prospective buyers who aren’t ready to buy just yet. They can’t establish trust unless they spend one-on-one time building that trust, but the more time they have to spend to get a buyer to a finished transaction, the fewer buyers they have time to work with. It’s a real Catch-22 for Realtors.

Your Realtor® Presentation – Offering a Solution to Their Problem

To review: From the Realtor’s perspective, we have a declining market, characterized by an oversupply of unsold inventory, dramatically reduced demand, and falling housing values. The pool of available buyers is further reduced by tighter lending guidelines and practices, and consumer fear about the wisdom of buying a home in this economic climate. And to top it all off, the attitude of the general public toward Realtors means that an agent has to overcome a prospect’s skepticism by building trust over time – but agents don’t have the time to do that and still sell enough houses.

The solution you offer looks something like this: the real estate purchase market is under great stress right now, but homes are still being sold every month (just refer to your local market stats). But fewer homes are being sold than was the case at the last peak in the market, and that means that if the pie keeps getting divided the same way it has been divided in the past, every Realtor® is going to end up with a smaller piece of a smaller pie. The solution will be to team up with you so that your Realtor(s) gets a bigger share of that smaller pie. How?

The buyers that are out there begin their market research and education process by looking at houses. These days, they usually:

· Start on the internet, and

· Eventually work their way up to visit open houses and /or

· Drive through neighborhoods, write down phone numbers on listing signs and call agents for more information about specific properties that interest them.

Every one of these three actions on the part of prospective buyers is an opportunity to begin -- and build on -- a relationship that would eventually lead to trust, and a sale. But the vast majority of real estate agents – due to a lack of time, systems, and marketing expertise -- are not set up to do this kind of longer-term follow-up.

Remember at the beginning of this article I exposed the myth that Realtors are better salespeople than LOs? I mentioned an NAR statistic to the effect that when agents get incoming calls from prospective buyers (usually to get information about a home for sale), they are only able to get an appointment about 5% of the time.

The reason for this rather poor result is a mind-set and approach that was an understandable strategy based on an earlier time. We know that Realtors spend a lot of time with a buyer from the beginning of the relationship until the closing – certainly much more time than a loan officer spends on the same transaction. In a seller’s market (where there are plenty of buyers), real estate agents feel they must weed out the tire-kickers and the nosy neighbors so that they are only spending time with what they consider to be “serious” buyers.

So they weed people out by asking a series of qualifying questions along these lines:

What kind of home are you looking for?
Are you working with an agent?
How soon do you want to buy?
How much do you want to spend?

If you’re a prospective buyer who hasn’t yet decided for sure that you’re going to buy a home now (much less that you’re going to buy from this agent), these questions will seem intrusive and off-putting. So you will avoid direct answers to these questions by saying something like, “I’m just looking.” And that will be the end of that conversation with that Realtor®.

So, if your goal is to identify and develop viable buyer leads, this is not a particularly effective strategy. But if your goal is to “weed people out”, it’s a great strategy. You’re going to weed all kinds of people out, including people who will buy a home – from another real estate agent – some time in the next 3 months to a year.

In your presentation, you point out the gaping hole in this strategy (we’re not in a seller’s market and we don’t have a problem of too many buyers right now), and you present yourself as the solution to the Realtor’s problem by offering to work with these “not quite ready yet” buyers so that you can get them ready while you are simultaneously building the reputation of the real estate agent in the mind of the buyer. The agent may not have time to overcome the negative stereotypes about Realtors and develop leads into true buyers, but you do. And what’s more, you’re in a much better psychological position to do so, for several reasons:

· In the aftermath of the subprime fiasco and the credit crisis, mortgage professionals may not be getting much more love from the public than Realtors get these days, but one thing we have going for us is that we are perceived by consumers as being more neutral because we have the ability to say “no”. People know that if it were up to real estate salespeople, they would sell a house to anybody that could fog a mirror. But to get a mortgage, you have to qualify, and they know that lenders sometimes say no.

· Buyers don’t have to tell the Realtor anything about their finances if you they don’t want to, but if they want to get mortgage financing, they have to be prepared to show their lender everything. This tends to create a much more level playing field between the client and the loan officer, and it also helps create trust, because an ethical loan officer will keep your financial information confidential. (In fact, the Financial Privacy Act requires it; remember that the next time a Realtor® tries to pump you for information about your client’s finances.)

· Because you are perceived as being more neutral, you are in a much better position to offer objective information (pros and cons) about the questions buyers have to resolve before they are psychologically ready to buy a home. Who believes Realtors when they say, “Now is the best time to buy”? But a trusted financial advisor can present objective information that will make a nervous buyer feel much more comfortable and confident about entering this real estate market.

If you’re familiar with my work, you may know that I developed a professional sales presentation for prospective homebuyers called the Strategy Session. One of the main objectives of that presentation is to calmly and credibly address each of the concerns and obstacles buyers have – concerns and obstacles that will prevent them from acting (buying) unless and until those concerns have been resolved.

While you are working with the prospect to get them both financially and psychologically ready to buy a home, you are also working to establish and fortify a reputation for your Realtor® Partner in the mind of your client. That way, when they are ready to buy, the referral to the agent is seamless and makes perfect sense to the client.

Think about it: If a real estate salesperson tells you they’re good, that’s an unsubstantiated claim. But if a third party (especially if that third party is a trusted advisor) tells you that this real estate agent is good, it means a lot more.

Conclude your presentation by suggesting that you and the agent work together for a 90-day trial period to do the following:

· Cooperate on lead generation

· Instead of “qualifying” prospects who call the agent for information on a listing, the agent will simply answer the caller's questions about the home and offer to show it to them, and if they prospect declines (as they will most of the time), the agent will offer them a free subscription to the MLS, where any listings that come on the market matching the person’s criteria, will be emailed to them daily at no cost or obligation, thus saving them hours of time doing internet searches on websites.

· You (the loan officer) will be presented as someone who will do a confidential consultation to establish the prospect’s comfortable price range, so that that information can be given to the agent so they can set up the automated MLS search, without the prospect having to share any personal financial information with the Realtor®.

· You (the loan officer) will also offer the client a personal Strategy Session designed to help them make a plan for finding out all they need to know about the market so they can make an informed decision, with confidence, about whether this is the right time for them to buy a home. You will work with prospects for as long as it takes to get them both financially and psychologically ready to buy a home so that the Realtor® can concentrate on working with buyers who are truly ready to buy.

· You and the agent will meet by phone weekly for 10-15 minutes to share information about prospects and transactions in progress, and to brainstorm additional ways to grow your respective businesses.

If you take this approach with agents, you will get their full attention, impress them as an equal (and not a vendor), and will soon be in a position where you can choose to work with agents who respect you, share your values and ethics, and will work hard to supply you with leads that you can develop into committed buyers so that both of you can close more transactions.

But Wait, There's More!

I have created a 39-slide PowerPoint presentation for Realtors, based on the principles I’ve laid out in this article. This presentation is included in my comprehensive online course, Double Your Originations. In addition to the fully scripted Realtor presentation (which you can personalize and use as your own), the course also teaches you how to position yourself as a Homebuyer’s Coach, and how to do a Strategy Session. It comes with a 260-page illustrated manual, plus 12 training videos covering everything from goal setting and results tracking to lead generation, how to become a Homebuyer’s Coach, working with Realtors, and time management for loan originators. Course materials include marketing pieces, drip campaigns, sales presentations, and more. For details on Double Your Originations, go here.