via activerain.com

What separates Rich Real Estate Agents from the Poor Real Estate Agents? Check out this awesome infographic and survey from Active Rain. Lots of striking information in this, definitely worth checking out.

Posted via email from megbarberva’s posterous

Megan E. Barber is a Real Estate Virtual Assistant, and owner of Barber Virtual Assisting Solutions. With over 10 years of experience working within the real estate industry, Megan and her team Virtual Assistants provide top notch real estate support services such as marketing, lead follow-up, social media, WordPress websites, and more. Megan E Barber is also the creator and author of The BVAS Connection and VA Mommy

Attention Agents, you need to combat this memory loss! Again, these past clients are your best source for referrals and repeat business, so you must keep in touch. It is super important to have a Post Closing follow up plan. One place that I like to direct my clients to use is The Personal Marketing Co and their ProPower client follow up program. It is what I like to call, “Post-closing follow up made easy”.

The plans from TPMCo include a 5 year follow up option full of postcards and magazines that will be mailed to your clients. One nice touch the program includes: In the first week your happy new home owners will receive a set of labels with their new address as well as a photo “keepsake” of the new home with a thank you message from you. And following that will be a series of postcards and magazines over the next 5 years (23 touches in all). All you have to do is enter your clients in the system, and they are taken care of without a second thought. All this is offered for $25 per enrollment.

Using something like this, along with your online marketing and social media efforts will help keep that front of mind awareness. Hitting them on all fronts will help ensure that your past clients will not suffer from amnesia later when someones asks them for a recommended REALTOR to help buy or sell a home.

You can reach The Personal Marketing Co at 800.458.8245 or online at www.TPMCO.com

Disclaimer: Megan Barber, The BVAS Connection, and Barber Virtual Assisting Solutions is in not an affiliate, not an employee, or not in any way a representative of The Personal Marketing Company. We received no kickbacks or money to promote them. We just like their product/service and thought it a good resource. Please do your due diligence before purchasing or using any product.

Megan E. Barber is a Real Estate Virtual Assistant, and owner of Barber Virtual Assisting Solutions. With over 10 years of experience working within the real estate industry, Megan and her team Virtual Assistants provide top notch real estate support services such as marketing, lead follow-up, social media, WordPress websites, and more. Megan E Barber is also the creator and author of The BVAS Connection and VA Mommy

Holiday Mailing Assistance

Need assistance with your real estate marketing this holiday season? BVAS is here to help!

We have reached the time of year that is a great time to touch your clients for the holidays with a token of thanks, gratitude, or good tidings. Not everything is done online. Some people like the more personal approach of a personalized greeting card, calendars and more. But I am sure as a busy real estate professional you hardly have the time to gather all the cards, stuff envelopes, and affix the labels and postage. That is where your Real Estate Virtual Assistant comes in. Send us your mailer pieces and we will process and send your holiday mailer for you in First Class style.

Holiday Mailing Rates

We can order or design your mail pieces depending on your needs. Then send us your mailing list and have your pieces delivered directly to us where we will process and get out in First Class Mail time for your selected holidays.

(Client is responsible for the costs of the mailing pieces, postage, etc.)

Greeting Cards, Letters, or Calendars

• Ordering Set-up Fee – $45 This is only if you need us to order your greetings for you. Includes helping your find the desired mailer pieces and ordering all the materials needed for us to process.
• Mailer Processing -$110 per 100 mail pieces (greeting cards or magnetic calendars) This includes folding, adding business cards, stuffing envelopes, affixing mailing labels and postage. Postage and labels costs are additional
• 1st Class Postage for greeting cards or letters – $44 per 100 (or $0.44 per piece)
• Custom Design from us – $85 design Fee. Printing quoted on case by case basis.

Please keep in mind that materials need to be ordered in time for us to process, by December 10th. Any time after that, additional costs in rush delivery with your vendor will have to be made.

All materials and mailing lists need to be in our hands for timely delivery by the following dates:

Deadline for delivery by Christmas- December 17th.
New Years Day – December 24th

Postcards

• Custom Designed Postcard – $85 design fee
• Printing and mailing cost – $58 per 100 4×6 size – $90 per 100 for Jumbo size – Includes full color printing on both sides, addressing and postage.

Deadline for ordering postcards for timely delivery

Delivery by Christmas Day – December 18th
Delivery by New Years Day – December 26th

**Referral Bonus** Refer a new client that signs up with us and receive a $60 discount on your holiday mailing processing order!

To get started, contact us here or call us at 856-896-0318 today!

Don’t spend your valuable time trying to get your holiday greetings out! Let us at BVAS handle your holiday mailings for you!

(Edit)

Need to get out your holiday greetings to your clients and sphere of influence? This time of year is busy enough with shopping, gatherings, preparations and more. So why give yourself the extra work of processing your holiday mailings to your clients when you can outsource to your Virtual Assistant?
Check out our holiday mailing plans here on my website to see what we can do to help you rest easy this holiday season and make sure you make contact to your client database.

Posted via web from megbarberva’s posterous

The theme here for spring is items that your client can plant, and will be quite memorable.

• Mail a Tree Seedling- Brought to you by Green World Project… Impress your clients and prospects by mailing them a tree seedling for them to plant.  This company has many options to send different kind of tree seedlings options in different kind of packaging. My favorites are the birdfeeder trees! Prices range from $2.50 a piece to $20 a piece depending on which tree package you want to send.  Green World Project will even manage the mailing part for you for an additional fee.

• Plantable Shapes- These cool plantable shapes look like little ornaments, and have seeds embedded in them so people can just plan them as is. The best ones for real estate is the one shaped as a house, but you can go with any shape you would like.

• Flower Stakes  w/ Seeds – The cool thing about these unique flower stakes is, you can put your inprint on these stakes and they already have the seeds attached to them.

• Folded Notecard with Plantable Paper-  How cool is this? It’s a notecard you can have printed with your logo/message and has a paper attached with seeds embedded for planting. Or try Bookmarks with the same concept.

• Mailable Seed packets – Then of course there are mailable seed packets that you can put your imprint on, put on the postage, and mail as is.  Here are several vendors that provide great ones:
• http://www.sanzospecialties.com/index.cfm?action=cat.catalog&categoryID=105
• http://www.reamark.com/catalog/mailable_seed_packets.htm
• https://www.sparrowandjacobs.com/index.php?pageId=4

So this spring, plant those marketing seeds with your past clients, present clients, and sphere of influence.

The Fall is a great time for marketing, with many ideas or excuses for you to reach out and touch your prospects. And it is always helpful to send them something of value, that they would appreciate and hold on to. The following are a couple ideas to get you going on your fall marketing.

1. Fall Events Calendar – Send your sphere a postcard containing fun fall events going on in your neighborhood or town. Let them know about the hayrides, pumpkin displays, fall festivals, or costume contests going on in your area. And be sure to attend some of those events to meet your prospects and show them that you are not ALL about real estate ALL of the time.
2. Fall Time Change Reminder – The most popular fall time marketing opportunity is the fall time change reminder. It is a simple thing, but clients appreciate it, and it’s a great excuse to get in front of your contacts.
3. Winterizing Tips – Homeowners appreciate a good home improvement tip. Remind your clients to keep one of their biggest investments, in top shape. Before the sting of winter takes it’s hold, send your clients a few tips on how to winterize their homes and get ready for freezing temperatures.
4. Thanksgiving – Sending Thanksgiving wishes seems almost an obvious choice for fall marketing, but I recommend you do it with twist. Use it as a client appreciation opportunity and work out a discount coupon with a favorite local shop or restaurant (local business love cross promotion). To “give thanks” to your sphere, they can bring the postcard to said local business, and appreciate a discount on you. You may even get extra cards printed for that partnering business to display for you.

Do those get your creative juices flowing? Need to know how to implement something like this? Barber Virtual Assisting Solutions has your answer. Let us coordinate your fall postcard marketing with our custom designs and we arrange the printing and mailing for you too!

Announcing our “Pre-Vacation” Special – Order your Fall Time Change postcard from one of our exclusive designs before the deadline on October 6th, 2008*, and receive 10% off the design fees we normally charge. Contact Megan for more details on this and other postcard marketing opportunities.

*Orders received after October 6th for the fall time change are not guaranteed to be sent out in the proper time. Please act fast!

Megan Barber is a Real Estate Virtual Assistant, owner of Barber Virtual Assisting Solutions, LLC, and publisher of The REAL Advantage E-Zine. Megan has spent 9+ years doing the “behind-the-scenes” work in the real estate industry assisting agents with their real estate marketing and transaction needs.

The above scenario is a huge myth and a big mistake in my opinion. Believe it or not, there are agents and whole real estate companies out there that are abandoning their newspaper advertising, direct mail advertising, and farming to sink all of their marketing dollars into the internet and internet leads. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent on fancy websites, lead capture software, search engine optimization, pay-per-click ads, and lead generation companies. Real Estate agents and brokers are looking for the next big technology tool that will bring in a boatload of internet leads without them having to do much work to get them.  The problem is that internet leads are likely to cost more time and money in incubating these as leads and abandoning a well rounded marketing plan to solely depend on these internet leads can end up hurting more than helping.

Internet consumers searching for real estate are not necessarily ready RIGHT NOW to buy a home or sell real a home.  For many, the internet is where they go upon first searching homes and feeling out the marketplace. The internet gives them the opportunity to scan ads and do a “drive-by” of available listings without having to leave home. They want to remain anonymous for as long as possible until they are really ready to take the plunge. And even when they do fill out a web form for property information, statistics show that those leads can still take 6-12 months or more before they become active real estate buyers or sellers. I do not believe that the return on investment that many of these internet lead generation companies will convince you of, is as good as they promise.

According to NAR’s 2006 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 80% of buyers used the internet for their home searches. But in stark contrast, only 7% of buyers found the agent they used on an internet site.  40% of buyers used agents that were referred to them by friends, relatives or neighbors and another 13% used an agent they have worked with in the past.

Those statistics affirms my belief that you cannot dismiss the idea of having a well rounded marketing plan that involves not only the internet, but also the traditional farming and marketing methods to your friends, family, past clients and your neighborhoods you serve.  People are more likely to use someone they trust or is trusted by a close friend or relative, not some stranger on the internet that sent them an auto-email. When you continuously market to your past/present clients, friends, family, and neighborhoods through newspaper, direct mail marketing , even email if you can, you will stick out in their minds as the one they trust and the neighborhood expert.

Technology in real estate is ever growing and ever changing and there will always be something “bigger an better” that promises to generate tons of leads without lifting a finger, but they never quite live up to the hype. Don’t fall into that trap. When revisiting your marketing plan think about going back to the basics. Never underestimate the power of basic farming and advertising in your community and service area and watch the leads and referrals roll in.