Don’t assume that everyone who is interested in your farm neighborhoods knows much (if anything) about what these areas are like.  This is especially true for foreign investors.  Make your neighborhood come alive and be more real to them than a bunch of brochures and numbers by doing a video tour of your neighborhood and incorporating it into your webinar.  Be creative and you can have a lot of fun with this!  Get some footage of some of the more notable aspects of the neighborhood, what kind... Read Full Story

For instance, you might ask a poll question: “Do any of you currently live in this neighborhood?”, that neighborhood being one of your farm neighborhoods.  For anyone that answers ‘Yes’ to the question, ask them to make some comments about why they live in the neighborhood and what they like and don’t like about it.  Most people will be more than happy to offer enthusiastic responses to these questions.  This interaction will go a long way toward building a rapport with these respondents as w... Read Full Story

One of the best ways to improve your webinars is by taking other people’s webinars.  You’ll see them doing things you would probably never have thought of and the experience will give you new ideas.  If you have an investor presentation, it’s an especially good idea to view any webinars of anyone offering properties to investors.  These presenters are often investors themselves and so they have a keen sense of what to present (and not to present) to investors to get them buying. Read Full Story

It’s really frustrating when you get a large number of registrations for your webinar, but only a fraction of the registrants show up.  One way of making them show up is by having them put their money where their mouth is.  Have your attendees pay a substantial deposit to attend your webinar (at least $40) with the clear understanding it will be refunded once they attend the webinar or listen to a recording of it afterward.  You risk getting fewer attendees with this tactic, but you’ll know t... Read Full Story

Webinars are fast becoming one of the most cost effective, powerful ways of promoting your business and developing relationships with prospects.  You can tap into a far wider audience geographically speaking by having webinars than by having in-person seminars.  Webinars are also a great way of building your prospect email database.  Here are some ways you can boost the effectiveness of your webinars. Read Full Story

The walls of regulation in Canadian real estate are bound to keep tumbling down, so it’s no good complaining about it.  Our response to competitors charging less for their services shouldn’t necessarily be doing the same.  If your business’ calling card is low commission rates, you’ll attract people who are fixated on price, not on value.  That’s a losing game because any competitor can pull the rug out from under you in a second simply by charging less.  So your response to this de-regulatio... Read Full Story

The online discussion of this matter amongst real estate professionals and the public has been very heated and predictably polarized.  Most of the public who commented think the changes were overdue, chastising real estate professionals as being overpaid and underworked and not bringing much (if any) value to the table for their buyers or sellers.  Predictably, most Toronto area real estate professionals were vigilantly defending the status quo.  Most of them made very self-serving comments, ... Read Full Story

Several years ago, a Toronto real estate professional named Stephen Moranis (son of Toronto area real estate legend Sadie Moranis) teamed up with Lawrence Dale (a real estate lawyer) to try a new approach to selling real estate in Canada.  They realized the Toronto area’s extremely hot real estate market (which enjoyed an unprecedented 8 years of consecutive growth until recently), along with the increasing maturation of the internet and technology, had made the average home seller faster and... Read Full Story

One aspect I mentioned of viral marketing is the Stickiness Factor.  That is, how memorable a message is.  Your efforts to promote yourself as the local real estate maven will be much more sticky if you promote yourself as that and only that: a local real estate expert in one or a small number of local neighborhoods.  That is far more memorable than a competitor who claims to service a wide geographic area.  This is a key ingredient in Alan Domb’s success: specializing only in luxury condos i... Read Full Story

The researchers then made a startling discovery.  Once 100 monkeys on this one island had learned this behavior, suddenly the monkeys on other nearby islands started washing their sweet potatoes before eating them … even though they had never had any physical contact with the monkeys on the island of Koshima! Read Full Story