Bradley Real Estate Going after Listings with Effective eProspecting Campaign

Jason Lytz, Vice President at Bradley Real Estate, operates in Northern California, a market experiencing extremely tight inventory. He spent time with us to explain a new process their company is putting in place to engage potential home sellers.

Jason explains Bradley's company-wide campaign to help their agents build relationships with potential sellers by arming them with detailed neighborhood data and teaching them ways to encourage homeowners to contact their agents if they are considering selling.

Read the interview here:

We are eager to hear about your concentrated focus on listings. What provoked your decision to shift efforts to sellers?

It's a low inventory market right now, it's the hot topic. Prices are going up and there are fewer things for sale. If we can generate more listings, then we have more inventory and the agents will then be able to procure more buyers through their listings and essentially make more money. So we are putting a program together.

How do you get the attention of potential sellers?

We are involved in the community. It's one of the things we do that differentiates us. We sponsor local events. We do branding so that our customers and prospects know that we're selling properties in their neighborhood.

If you keep those messages consistent, then when it's time for someone to sell a home, they know that we are the person or the company that they're supposed to call.

What is your trigger for this, your call-to-action?

Let's talk about this offer to get a Market Snapshot. We recently made this available to our agents company-wide. There was a time when the agent provided all market-price information to homeowners. They brought the comparables over to help sellers set the price.

Now there's available online comparable information. However, people get the estimates and they're more confused than when they started.

People want to know what's going on in their neighborhood. They want to know what the house down the street just sold for. They want to know what's going on with that property that's been sitting on the market for several days—why is it not sold.

We use the Market Snapshot as a way to transition delivering information to a means of confirming that what they really need is the professional advice of someone who understands the community and the nuances of the properties.

Once they transition to being a potential client, do you still send them the information?

While we invite prospective sellers to receive information, that is only one step in the process. It is also something that an agent can give to a prospective client to make sure that they're informed and that when they are making that decision to buy or sell that they've already had lots of information about what's going on in the market.

We all educate ourselves now deeply before we do anything. If I'm going to buy a refrigerator, I'm going to research the heck out of it before I am walking into a store. With Market Snapshot, we continue to provide information of value to people in a convenient manner once a month or once a week. A potential seller can customize it to expand the search and know what's going on outside their area.

Walk me through it—can you break down the steps you envision to kick the program off?

Here is how I see it coming together:

1. Targeting: You have to target where you're going to push your message out. So you have to think about what your sphere of influence is. You have to look at your database, your CRM, or however you're organizing yourself as an agent, to make sure that you're targeting the right people. Our agents may have somewhere between ten and 150 clients, as an example, of people that they're going to start targeting this information to.

2. Monitoring engagement: Once you start sending out Market Snapshot, they will look and see who's engaging with the reports, and view how much they're looking at it. Have they made any changes to it? If so, you're able to continue and start a conversation with those particular people.

3. Provide local expertise: The Market Snapshot is just one piece. Our agents also want to give people information on what's going on in their neighborhood. We support them to use the content that's being generated by our brokerage or a professional writer. They need to be expressing their own voice as an agent on what's going on in the neighborhood. As examples: Discuss what's going on with the local train that's being built, what's going on with the commute situation, what's going on with the local schools. Put information out there that shows you as an expert in the local area.

4. Build personal connections: Speak about who you are and who the company is from a branding perspective. Whether it's posting information on your social media accounts—your LinkedIn, your Facebook, your Instagram profiles. Keeping your face and that information in front of people to let them know that you're that local expert that they're supposed to contact when it's time for them to sell their home.

This sounds promising. How are you getting your agents on board with this?

We have a very good group of agents. We are providing more training to communicate their own brand and expertise and express more of their voice. We're helping them become more engaged with their CRM products, including Top Producer, which we also provide.

We look at the data on which agents are logging in and using Market Snapshot and realtor.com and how well that it's working. The objective is to see if are they getting more listing appointments.

But, really, it's a long game. It's not just about getting one more listing; it's really about being able to build their business including a repeat client business.

How will you judge whether this is a success?

If every agent can get one more listing out of it, I would consider the launch of the product successful.

I would hope that we would be able to see an uptick in percentages of our listings going on the market. There's obviously some constraints with market conditions and times of year, but if we look at it over a month to a six month to a year period to see where those agents are that are really engaging with the products that we're offering, I think will give us some really valuable information. Not only will we be able to congratulate them for putting in the hard work, we will be able to demonstrate to them that what they have been doing has been working. We can then also show other people that these products have really worked. Our other agents who did not participate at the outset, once they see this plan has really worked, may adopt it as well.

This is part one of a series on Bradley Real Estate's seller campaign featuring Jason Lytz, Vice President of the Bradley Real Estate offices.

Bradley Real Estate is the largest independently owned local real estate brokerage in the North Bay Area, with 11 office locations serving Marin, Napa, and Sonoma counties. They have a team of more than 400 brokers and agents.

Market Snapshot® neighborhood market reports are provided by realtor.com operator, Move, Inc., and its affiliate, Top Producer Systems Co.