Real Estate Data Is One Simple Hyper-Local Tool To Create A Successful Seminar
As a broker or agent if you ever considered offering a home buying or selling seminar, we recommend you include one critical element – local real estate data.
Sure, with all our Androids, iPads and Tweets society today is knee-deep in a high-tech world.
But most real estate professionals know the high-touch benefits of speaking to people directly. A live presentation can yield tremendous benefits in leads, referrals and brand awareness.
Here are some reasons why:
– People still want to get out of the house. This gives them an excuse and when you talk about a subject as important as investing in a property, a compelling reason to attend is certainly obvious.
– Real estate, finance, contract law and other aspects of buying or selling a home are complicated. People still grow up in a classroom setting and still believe in the power of listening to a speaker in order to truly understand what they are discussing. And they need a way to ask questions comfortably.
– In this high-tech world of viruses and fake news, making decisions is surprisingly more difficult than ever. It’s not easy to trust everyone you meet on the web or what they say. People still want to be able to evaluate people face-to-face.
All those reasons sound legitimate, a broker or agent might say, just as the sweat beads up on their forehead.
But geez. How do I meet the expectations of people today?
There are actually some easy solutions.
For one, the best formula for organizing a successful seminar is to take any idea of a sales pitch and pitch it out the window. Ironically, the less you make your seminar sound like a sales presentation, the more likely you are to generate sales from it.
To do that, you must have a program that educates people, holds their attention, and is flexible enough to answer individual questions.
So you need material. Really solid material. Material that is geared locally, for the people sitting in front of you, and not some canned speech developed by a corporation 1,000 miles away.
The best way to do that is to have a real estate data feed in your toolbox. Nowadays, with big data technology offered by companies such as Home Junction, an agent can tap into a gigantic storehouse of neighborhood data.
They can embed an API into their website that gives them instant access to a vast and current database of local property sales, trends in home prices, school data, local demographics, crime data, cost of living indices, boundaries, local businesses and much more.
More than enough information to fill any hour-long seminar.
It gets even better. Here’s where you can create your “wow” factor.
With this big data technology, an agent or broker has the ability to go granular, so they can address the needs of John Doe on Maple Street and Jane Spain on Oak Terrace.
For example, start the seminar with some visuals on local market conditions for the county.
Show trend lines in charts for Recent Home Sales. Show some individual sales and how much the homes sold for per square foot.
Here comes the wow factor.
Ask a member of the audience where they live. Then go into the database and pull up the real estate data for just their neighborhood. Not the county, which is too big to be truly relevant. Not even the zip code, where market conditions can vary.
But the neighborhood. Their neighborhood.
Think how impressed that person in the audience will be to learn what is taking place next door to them.
Think about how ALL those people will be eager to go home, visit your website, and pull up the real estate data in their neighborhoods that is relevant to them.
Also be sure to round out the presentation.
Invite a colleague with a real estate specialty to speak as well. Perhaps an attorney, or a loan officer or a home inspector.
Provide plenty of visuals. But don’t provide a ton of PowerPoint slides with too much text. People don’t want someone to read to them, they want someone to talk to them. Get out from behind a podium and work the crowd.
And be sure to provide plenty of time for questions and answers. That’s a big reason why people are there – to get answers in person to their specific needs. Answers they can’t always find in the jumbled and screwed up digital universe.
Put all this together and you have one powerful seminar that is simple to put together.
Many people don’t like to speak in public. One of the big obstacles is trying to figure out what to say.
With today’s technology, you don’t need to write a prize-winning speech on local real estate.
Your extensive, hyper-local real estate data feed, will supply you with most of the talking points you’ll ever need.