Why Realtors Need to Market to Professional Referral Sources
As real estate agents, you are mostly taught to market back to your sphere of influence, friends, family, etc. You should be marketing to these people to get qualified buyer and sellers leads, but there is another segment of potential clients that most Realtors don’t think to market to. People who are vendors, and professional referral sources in similar businesses who help to create business.
In this blog, I’m going to discuss how to create another silo of inbound referrals from people you are more than likely neglecting. It’s not a strategy most agents use, but when I have brought it up to my fellow clients, they raise their eyebrows and a light comes on. Let me share it with you!
There are three major pieces to the Title business that affect the real estate transaction. The first piece is sales and marketing…” business development people”. We are the “gas in the car” and make things GO on the front end of things. The last piece is our closing department. The last people a Realtor and home buyer/seller see in the transaction. This person goes over the closing documents and makes it as fun and uplifting experience as possible. The middle piece is the long lost hero of the Title business. They are the Title Company escrow officer. These people work their butt off doing everything necessary to get your transaction to the finish line. They get little love, yet bare the brunt of all parties in the transaction.
One weird issue in our business that we deal with is 
I was in a large real estate office recently, meeting with two new clients, and it was teaming with people walking up and down halls, doing all kinds of “Realtor” activities. I had a thought as I walked to my meeting room…” most of these people aren’t going to be successful long term.” Many of them need help and guidance to not go the way of the dodo bird. It seems every month something is trying to disrupt the real estate industry and change upon change is coming right at us. Many people forget to dodge and weave when these adaptations and changes find our business. These people are heading towards extinction in the real estate business, but they don’t know it. Here are 5 traits of the soon to be extinct Realtor.
Every month, there are thousands of new Realtors entering the profession. Statistically, most new real estate agents won’t make it a long career–many won’t make it past the first 18 months. Why? There are many reasons, but the main reason is new agents don’t know how to generate their own clients. This is information they don’t teach in real estate school. You pass a test and they say “good luck!” This is also why many new agents join teams so they can gain experience, work with active clients, and learn to generate their own business with guidance from a team leader. If you don’t want to join a team or work at a brokerage where teams don’t exist, then you better be a self-starter and eager to become a marketing king. I want to cover some of the basic ways new real estate agents can have a banner first couple years and get their business off the ground by generating their own clients at zero to little cost.
One way to know the real estate market is doing well is when you hear Realtor teams mentioning they are going to open their own Title Company. Now, I must preface by saying I don’t hear this on a regular occasion but in reality, I should hear this zero times…ever. There are many Realtors who don’t fully know or understand the full scope of what a Title Company does, let alone under the full scope of detail and liability they will be assuming by having ownership in…or fully owning a Title Company. Many see us Title Companies like the “piggy bank” and we rarely pay claims so we must be swimming in cash. That statement is far from the truth. In the hierarchy of real estate, we make less profit than the Realtor and the lender on a transaction. With this said, here are what Realtors don’t know about opening their own Title Company.
Instagram has been around for a while, but really took off once it was purchased by Facebook back in 2012 for $1 Billion. Looking back it was a smart move as Instagram now has over 500 Million active users worldwide. One of the best features that’s added to the platform are its “stories.” Stories are a series of 15 second videos or pictures that are posted for 24 hours then disappears. If you are thinking this sounds like SnapChat, you would be correct. Instagram has done a great job of pulling over the SnapChat users who want the luxury of posting on a larger platform that also allows content to funnel to Facebook. Hence touching a much larger audience for their content. Users have discovered it’s more effective to keep producing short-term content on a regular basis, than post a picture or video that sits on your account indefinitely.
It’s always interesting when I speak with buyers or even Realtors who think Title Insurance is something that is not needed. A scam or a worthless cost to a real estate transaction. I hear–“yeah, but what are the chances I will ever use this policy?” I tell them that just like other types of insurance, you don’t need it–till you need it, then you are really glad you have it. We see all kinds of hair on transactions in our office and we are currently resolving one of these hairy issues. It’s the very first transaction a new client of mine sent us, so of course, I’m working with all parties to make sure all ends well. The story behind it is a good instance of why you need Title Insurance when buying a home and how it protects you.
I got an interesting email the other day from a person new to the Title business. He had “discovered me” online and wanted to know–can a Title sales rep make over six figures per year? Having been in the business since 2005 I thought perhaps the answer to this question was well known–but then again perhaps not? There are several variables to production and income, such as your market, average fees per file, your own compensation plan, and more. With that said, the overall short answer to this question is YES. I want to preface this by saying many people who enter the Title Sales profession fail. There are a variety of reasons for this which I have 
I get asked a lot of questions over the course of a week. Many of them involve real estate marketing, websites, or how to do something. In some instances, I direct a Realtor or Lender to another website that can help them with that question or 
