Lars Hedenborg, founder of Real Estate B School, explains why most broker websites fail to generate leads. He critiques common design mistakes and shows how direct response marketing principles can help agents attract better clients and close more deals.
Hey there, real Estate B School community. Lars Hedenborg here, the founder of Real Estate B School. Another message for y' all that hopefully serves you at a very, very high level. Today I want to chat about websites. Websites. There's so many options today and here is my warning, I'll put it out here early, is that 90% of the websites that are being sold to you are, aren't going to do what you need them to do. So that's kind of the preface here and I want to kind of just take you through what I learned early on in my real estate business. You know, for me, over a 10 year period I sold almost 2200 homes. Most of them were sold by other people, about 10% of those. I think I only sold 200 homes in my career. But the thing is I set up an economic model that really drove profits at a very high level. And my agents were super productive, you know, selling between 50 and 100 homes. 110 homes some years each them so really, really cool business. So little brief resume. If you haven't heard anything about me, I've done this at a very high level. And the thing about websites that I learned early on is that most of them don't do the job. The only purpose of a website is to bring you lots and lots of business. And by business I don't necessarily mean leads, although leads are good. I mean it's a sort of a leading indicator or something that may be good to come because you need a killer lead management system, lead follow up system, series of texts, emails, what to say, tricky, sneaky voicemail messages. We employ some technology that does some cool things, you know, high level things that get a better than average response on Internet leads. The point I'm trying to make though is that you need to have a website that has been designed specifically to bring you business high quality buyer and seller leads. That's number one. Number two is that the website doesn't need to be this flashy image branded. Look how great I am. Early in my business I learned, and I'm being brutally honest with you, there was like 11,000 agents. Maybe not quite 11,000. I think there's like 12,000 now. I think we got up just to about 10, a little over 10,000. Back in 2007 when I got into real estate, I knew that there was no chance I could compete with 10,000 agents. There was just no chance. So I basically, and the public doesn't think much of real estate agents anyway. I learned that, you know, and we're Right there with, you know, attorneys and politicians and car salesmen. You know, it's, it's sort of a funny business that we're in. We provide such a great service. The best of us do. The ones have the, that are professional agents provide a great service, but the public just does not think very highly of it. So I knew that early on that I wasn't going to take a really great, like, that wasn't even like a glamour shot. But you know what I mean? Agents focus more on their look and their brand than actually doing what they need to do to generate business. So I did not focus on any image, any, any branding at all for probably the first three years in the business. And all I focused on was I developed a process by which I would generate leads at very low cost. Direct response marketing. If you guys haven't done anything or studied any. Dan Kennedy, Old school, no BS Direct marketing for offline businesses. I think it's what it's called, it's like a bible of direct response marketers. So I, I learned early on is that if you're going to pay to have a piece of technology on the web, you better make sure that the technology is bringing you business. So everything was direct response marketing in terms of calls to actions and unique selling propositions and very specific way that we marketed. So your website has to employ those methods as well. And you have to be able to track of the people that visit your website, how many people actually take action and how many leads do you get and what happens to those leads. Real estate, B school. I built it because there's so much involved in that tracking from a dollar spent all the way to a closing in terms of how it runs through your website. So just be really, really careful. The technology that you use, there's lots of good options out there right now, but it has to be able to generate business on a consistent basis. If your website isn't generating business on a consistent basis, it is worthless. And it needs to be set up as a direct response website, meaning it has to have clear calls to actions. We call those CTAs, CTAs. And it must be some sort of unique selling proposition or we call those us. So, and here's my offer. So there's a lot that goes into all of this, even something as basic as a website. And then let me just throw out there that any website that you get from your broker, you know, whatever, whoever the broker is, I'm with Keller Williams, ReMax, you know, Century 21, whatever, call a banker, any Website you get from your broker is completely worthless. Completely worthless. So if that's your website, I don't mean it in a like trying to make you feel bad kind of way. Just to alert you to the fact that we need to get you running on a direct response website. That's the key. You need to spend a dollar and make $10 and do that over and over and over and over again. And so here's the offer is that I'm personally offering an opportunity to take advantage of jumping on the phone with me. There's no obligation. These are completely free coaching calls that I'm offering where you can basically go through three things with me. Where you are now, you know, what technologies are you using, what is your. If you have a team, what does your team look like? Your profitability? Where are you spending money? What marketing are you doing? Is it effective or not? Are you tracking anything? Do you have, you know, what are you, what does your team look like? Did you hire the right people? You know, kind of look at where you are right now. The second thing we look at is where you want to go. Let's call it two to three years from now, let's call it by the end of 2020. What do you want your business to look like? Everything works out perfectly. You know, are you in production? Are you not in production? Are you just working with listings maybe and not buyers? Do you have, you know, three or four buyers agents? Do you have 20 buyer's agents? Are you doing 100 million of production? 200 million production, 40 million production? You know, we've got economic models that will take you from ever you from wherever you are now to wherever you want to go. Because I've been there personally, I've suffered the pain ahead of you all. And that's the reason that I built Real Estate B School. So take me up on the offer and free, no obligation coaching call. We'll unpack those three things. So I think I forgot to mention the third thing. So where you are now, where you want to go. And then number three is what's holding you back. So get on the phone with me. I hope to see you there. I've got much love and respect for you for doing this work and even listening to this video and just contemplating what your business could look like again. I'm Lars Hedinborg, founder of Real Estate B School, and I will see you on one of those coaching calls. Talk to you later. Bye bye.
