Help-U-Sell Heritage Real Estate's Debra Schmidt
One of the leaders of the Winter Warm-Up Contest, Debra Schmidt of Help-U-Sell Heritage Real Estate lives and works in Owatonna, Minn., a town of just over 25,000 residents.
Being smaller has its advantages, such as the ability to offer the personal touch. Schmidt maintains a database of past clients and sends them an item of value each month. This usually consists of timely information about home-care topics such as winterizing your house. Her office takes this one step further and occasionally goes door-to-door with gifts. Recently, Schmidt handed out pizza cutters emblazoned with the phrase “great service any way you slice it” and the Help-U-Sell logo. In the past, she has delivered Christmas cookies, Valentine’s candy and pumpkin bread.
Her eventual goal is to get 90 percent of her business from referrals. For now, half of her business remains foreclosures and short sales. Schmidt said the market is picking up in Owatonna. Her goal for 2012 is to increase the number of listings and sales by 50 percent over 2011.
Schmidt attributes her office’s success to and pins her future growth on the following simple-but-effective tactics: “Do what you say you’re going to do. Keep in touch with buyers and sellers. Know what’s going on in your market.”
For new brokers, she advises, “You need to be in real estate for more than just the money.”
If you have advice for new brokers or agents, please share it with us in the comments section.
Starting Jan. 31, our friends at Excel Printing & Mailing will officially launch a new program just for us. Called Help-U-Mail, it is more cost-effective than door hangers, and the bulk of the work is done for you.
Excel will work with you to customize your 8.5” x 11” mailer and place their bulk rate postage permit on each one. You pay for the printing up-front and pay for the postage only when you mail out the flyers. You will be required to mail to at least one full carrier route each time you send the flyers, but you can choose to order as many flyers as you like ahead of time and mail them out in batches. After you take them to the post office, the flyers should be in mailboxes within two business days.
If you order 10,000, the cost will be $0.11 each for printing. If you order fewer, the cost per piece will increase. The postage per piece will be $0.142. However, Mike Paholke of Excel told us today to expect an “aggressive offer” on the launch date, so look for even lower pricing then.
John Powell of Help-U-Sell Galleria Realty and Craig Flint of Help-U-Sell Flint Realty have tested the program already. Powell is planning not to mail out half of his 10,000 order but to insert them into a local newspaper instead. You can see Flint’s flyer below. He has mailed out 9,000 so far and garnered several calls and a few likely listings.
One side of Help-U-Sell Flint Realty's new mailer
The other side of Help-U-Sell Flint Realty's new mailer
To get started on Jan. 31, go to www.husmailnow.com.