Real Estate Team 2.0: Creating, packaging and presenting excellence
Friday, May 30, 2008 at 07:08AM 
The most inexpensive and effective intranet arrangement should be used by the team to hold online meetings and have a place to collect ideas and information. Twitter, or whatever else comes along, should be used for in the field communication. Then there should also be a social site where all clients are encouraged to join for an informal discussion of general topics related to the real estate areas of concern. Including the input of clients (and people you know from certain neighborhoods who are willing to participate) will be a powerful way to begin building a network and sharing information regarding neighborhoods and local current events. The marketing person should head up the social network but all team members should be active participants.
The information gathering should be ongoing and systematic and the marketing person should also head up this ongoing project with the goal being information manangement packaged in useful presentations so that when a potential client has questions, information can be sent lightning quick in a sleek package that adds value to the information sought.
The marketing person's responsibilities will be expanded to include SEO and information management. However, every team member ought to be fully trained in information management and understand its vital importance to the success of the business. Each day agents ought to inputing useful information they have gathered -- and also photos and videos. The team should start gathering a huge collection of photos and videos to be arranged by the marketing person on the website in a way that adds power to the images through categories and text.
Ideas should be be gathered on a constant basis and the leader should take the most promising ideas and hold online meetings, or in-person meetings, and begin micro-modeling the ideas to determine their effectiveness, then begin testing the ones that make it through the micro modeling phase. Each tested idea should be monitored closely to determine results, and according to results should be nurtured or eliminated. Remember, the advantage over competition is to learn faster than the competition.
During the micro-modeling phase, scenarios should be built and role-playing should be a part of the process. Team members will put themselves in the shoes of a real estate consumer, or someone from outside the team, and the real estate profession, could be invited to give their reaction to a certain idea. Would local free classes on home maintenance be a good idea? How should the social site be set up and should it be tightly moderated? How should the information packages be packaged and presented for full effect? What if we presented video listing presentations? so on and so forth.
The idea is to start "idea" dialouges which are ongoing and brought to the team, prioritized by the leader, managed by the marketing person and modeled by the whole team. Marketing ideas and service ideas will be the same, everything involved in eliminating waste and fostering excellence will be market-concerned. It does little good to have the best service if people don't know about it, so the whole process is aimed at getting the news to the real estate consumer that here is a company doing something different and getting better everyday and this company wants YOU to be a part of it.
Once the team gells, all these activities will become natural and the collective results of talented individuals working together will be a power to be reckoned with. This is no hype. I can see it as clearly as I can see the magnolia tree outside my window.
More this afternoon on team efforts to increase market share through the delivery of value-added service using the lastest technology.
Reader Comments (2)
mike, i like your thinking in this post. a social site for clients would be a great value-add... especially if you offer areas for video lessons in homebuying/selling along with the live classes that you mentioned. position it as "banzai university."
the social site would also create a strong level of social proof ("look at all these other people banzai has helped. they can no doubt help me too.") it would also allow you to publicly celebrate wins (and add more social proof)... "JoeClient's house just sold. Check out his banzai university profile where he talks about the experience (use a video/audio testimonial) and discover the one change we made that attracted all the offers."
anyway, good stuff, man.
Thanks, Mark. I see the social sites including clients as a perfect way to build a powerful network that will help everyone involved. Bringing people into the company zeitgeist will create an expanding viral effect.