Deborah Fisher

JACKSONVILLE AREA AGENTS:

Are you interested in Exposing YOUR Listings on the NEW Zone 1 Mandarin/San Marco Caravan?

The SUCCESS of the Zone 1 Caravan DEPENDS on YOU!

SHOW MORE-SELL MORE!

1. Submit up to 3 homes of your homes listed in MLS Zone 1 in order of preference for inclusion on the Caravan list. Send your 3 homes to dfisher@fishercopa.com by 3 PM this WEDNESDAY. Please provide:

a. MLS Number

b. Property Address

c. Current Price

d. Your Name

e. Contact #

f. Firm Name

2. The number of your listings that make each week’s caravan list depends on how many submissions we get. FIRST COME FIRST SERVED! Each week we will attempt to include at least 1 listing from each agent. Any listings that do not make this week's listing will have the first right to be on NEXT week's caravan.

3. We will start the first Caravan THIS THURSDAY if we have any INTEREST from YOU.

4. You MUST attend the Caravan the week of your showings so that ALL OF OUR SELLERS (& US!) may benefit from participation.

5. TO BE FAIR TO ALL: You MAY NOT DROP OFF the caravan once we have caravanned your listing. Doing so may cause your future caravan requests to lack preferential treatment & be pushed back.

6. The GOAL is to EXPOSE ZONE 1 LISTINGS to a broader group of agents than the agents that are just in your office. We will do this each THURSDAY via a multi-agent caravan.

7. Any questions: Call Deborah Fisher, Broker, Fisher & Company, P.A. at 904.545.5204.

I will gather the listings, map the most logical route, print the route and hand out the route at the designated meeting spot Thursday morning. You will know which of your homes are on the list Wednesday evening by 5 PM & the times that we anticipate arriving at your listing.

We will meet in the KMART parking lot on San Jose near Old St. Augustine Road at 9 AM Thursday. This is a reasonable, central Mandarin/San Marco location that is fair to all.

Please let me know your interest / disinterest in a Zone 1 Caravan.

Even if you do not have any listings, please participate on the caravan. You will then be able to tell potential listing clients that YOU participate in the Multi-Agent Zone 1 Caravan to expose THEIR listing to the broadest audience PLUS you will know which homes to talk about and show with/to potential buyers. Now more than ever WE NEED TO PLAN AHEAD TO BE PREPARED.

This will be another benefit to your sellers, so I hope that you will participate!

The problem with "Christians" is that well . . . they are so fallible.

Fisher's Law # 3: Email boxes are vacuums that when emptied will be refilled at a rate faster than the previous emptying.

Here it is Friday, I have a to-do list the size of the old woman in the shoe's grocery shopping list, and I have just emptied my email in-box. 422 emails not including the canned spam-ham. (My filter does a nice job of grabbing those spam things and stuffing them through the garbage disposal before they ever get to me.)

So, here I sit, Friday, what really should be a legal skip day in all 50 states, and after just having emptied the email bin on my very sexy MacBookPro (Gosh I luv that thing!) the darn email in box is filling up again at a rate that is making my head spin.  

I have created a monster & it is social networking.

Great. I just received an email blast from a BIG builder (you know who you are!) on another expensive campaign that is going to do little to advance their number of sales for the quarter. (And after being in the home building industry for so many years . . . I am well familiar with trying to make those numbers for Wall Street.)

Here's my wonderment: I can not believe how poorly designed some of the marketing strategies are that are rolling out of the home building industry. Who is running the home builder's marketing?? Who's coming up with this stuff??? Guys, is this the best that you can do?? Do you really think that one band aid - one program - will fix a lack of sales across the board? Is this something you came up with or the lame attempt of some advertising agency that doesn't have a clue about home building and buyers?

Sorry if I spout off and foam at the mouth, but really, people, what are you thinking, and why do you still have your "BIG" corporate jobs? For the love of God and all that is holy . . . wake up and get to the heart of the matter! You are wasting time, money, and the energy of your sales team on "promotions" that have little value and no substance. And we know that our sales teams have very little energy to spare at the moment. They are emotionally and mentally exhausted. Giving the sales team a promotion that builds them up but will do little to help them achieve their numbers (and yes, it is about the numbers) will only make them crash even further and harder than before. This type of sales management and marketing platform is tantamount to you being the pusher and your site team being the junkie. Oh, these are hard, hard words, but the facts are the facts.

People, today's home shoppers are not delaying the buying decision because of the monthly investment. A mortgage buy down across the board from 5 % to 2.875 % for the first year is not going to convert traffic. You could drop the interest rate to ZERO and it is not going to spur urgency! IT IS NOT ABOUT THE PAYMENT!!!

People are afraid to purchase today because they are unsure that the value of the home that they are buying will keep that value in the days ahead. Who wants to buy a home for $x and have the home home valued at $x-y in the months to come? That difference between $x & $y is what the buyers are worried about! Who wants to be on the hook for more money than a product has value??

Folks, I could go into a litany of reasons people are not buying homes. It is different buyer by buyer, and I do not have the space in this blog to address each OPPORTUNITY that is preventing your prospects calling one of your homes THEIRS. Let me just say this: do what I did and do on a regular basis. Review your prospects/leads community by community and person by person, and come up with a way to get that person off of the fence and into your home.

Please stop trying the "one crummy idea" will generate sales across the board and be all things to all people. Those days are gone. People took those promotions at the time because they were going top buy from you regardless. It was a BONUS to them. The buyers that went for those promotions are having their homes auctioned off at the courthouse or are mailing the keys back to the bank. Start looking for REAL promotions to real buyers.

It's what I am doing, and probably why WE ARE SELLING HOMES!

So, I am hitting the delete button. Email me when you can figure it out.

I have (well-meaning) cyber-friends who send me all of the promotional stuff the builders send them because they know I am a marketing junkie, an analytical one at that. Thanks for sending me stuff. Keep it coming. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

PS. I don't care if you are offering a Realtor 10% commission. 10% of nothing is still nothing. I think the Realtors would prefer even 2.5% of something. It is still more in their pockets than they had before. Use your money to make purchasing your home IRRESISTIBLE to THE BUYER.

PSS. As a sales and marketing professional in the homebuilding industry for more than two decades, and president of a marketing company geared to builders and developers, please consider using our services. Not only do I teach at the NAHB's IBS and the SEBC the very stuff I am talking about, stuff that works, but I am portable. Besides, you really, really need someone outside in the real world not worried about their job to tell you how it really is.

My parents had it easy. They really did. After a day at the office, Dad came home and had the role of Jim Anderson in "Father Knows Best". Smart, never raised his voice, always dispensing tidbits of wisdom, dad, a general contractor, left the office behind at the office.

My mother, a June Cleaver type, ("Leave It to Beaver"), was patient, a great home maker, and always telling us to 'wait until your father gets home'. Her two pieces of advice, God bless her, were "Always look nice when your husband comes home" and "Always have a bank account that your husband knows nothing about". I know that I am a BIG disappointment to her.

There was a time when my mother worked outside of the home for the Ministry of Tourism, but even with her "career", she just didn't seem to be as busy as I see myself today. How is that? She didn't have a microwave, electric rollers, Starbucks, and I remember we had a sit-down dinner cooked from scratch at 7:30 PM every night.

I am busy trying to grow my real estate and sales and marketing businesses. Two separate things, yet they are one: just two revenue streams. Both are tied to the housing industry. (What was I thinking?)

As a marketing professional, I recognize the importance of Social Networking. After all, it's free publicity, it expands my web of contacts, and while I can't quite attribute any income to it yet, I know that eventually it will pay off. Besides, this beats standing at the corner of Baymeadows and Phillips Highway in the hub of Jacksonville Florida with a sign that reads "Will Market Your Home for $695".

However, that being said, how on earth do people find the time to 'touch' each one of these social networking interfaces on a daily basis?

I am twittering (@DeborahFisher), Blipping (@FishCO) on Blip.FM, raining on ActiveRain (debfisher.activerain.com), and I am now hooked up to SalesBlogcasting. Okay, so I like Blipping because one of my childhood dreams was to be a DJ. (The other was to be a black gospel singer, and I just don't see that happening, do you?)

So, social networking has become my "significant other". I am not sure if I can claim an extra dependent deduction on my taxes, but social networking has become such a chunk of my time that I am questioning my legal marital state and wondering if this "marriage" is illegal in all states except Nevada.

To quote an illiterate friend with a Phd . . . "How do one do it?" In the meantime, I am going to pop over to Hallmark.com and order a special e-Valentine for my "significant other". Preferably one that is easy to download.