Luke:
I love the fact that you've been in business for that long because it enables you, like you say, to really help the growth for your clients because you can see what has been and what can be.
Sandy:
Yeah. 30 years of experience, we've probably seen it all kind of thing. And we can help clients a lot of times figure out what's the best course of action for them. Maybe it's not what they thought originally, and maybe pricing has something to do with it, but our experience in how to print different things short run, long run printing, how best to mail product, maybe even to the extent of they're not quite sure that they're even got the right product sometimes for what it is they're trying to say or trying to advertise. We've got an awful lot of experience in that. So we do a lot of branding and a lot of top producing clients and agents that really utilize marketing services a lot in their business. That is our kind of key client, I guess if there's a key client for us, it is somebody that really needs some help. I mean, we know the right places to even market too, and we can help them determine that from point A to point B. So a lot of experience.
Luke:
Tell me this then, Sandy, who would you say, let's stick to a brokerage and their collective sales associates? Who would you say that's really pushing things forward or you think is at the forefront of what they do?
Sandy:
I think BHHS is probably the closest, we deal with an awful lot of brokers and a lot of different brands and maybe motivations from a corporate side. BHHS is a very large brokerage house, but they're also very committed to client marketing, client farming, which is intrinsic to real estate. Farming, meaning sustained activities in one geographic area of homes. They're very committed to their agents utilizing those services in order to further their success. So BHHS pours a lot of time, energy, and money into marketing and farming programs, maybe a little bit unlike some of the other corporate clients. Who, maybe their focus is more to the social media side, or maybe their focus is a little more to the print advertising side. Newspapers, magazines, publications. But BHHS seems to kind of have every level taken care of. They've got their Lux division, but they also have their regular BHHS division that they put just as much time and effort into, sometimes, I think, even more so, to be honest. So I think BHHS is probably a really good hallmark client, so to speak. Sotheby's does a great job, also, of promoting the brand and helping the agents try to utilize their product line and features.
And then, of course, smaller brokers are always great at what they do with branding and how they help their agents, because their niche is a little bit more of a personalized service, than the big brand brokers. So they do interesting brands. They sometimes do a lot of fun stuff with their agents. They'll cooperate with a lot of marketing stuff. So it really kind of depends.
Luke:
Hhow important is print marketing in the real estate industry, especially right now?
Sandy:
So, print used to be the only way anyone would ever get anywhere, right? I mean, they'd never get invited into someone's living room to take a listing unless someone actually knew to call them. So, back when we first started, I actually started in an office of Prudential California Realty, which Prudential California Realty no longer exists. It is now Berkshire Hathaway Home Services. After all these years. But we started in an office of only about 45 agents. I was brought in by the owner, and he said, Look, I think print marketing is how we get our foot in the door. I want to support the agents doing this. I want to cooperate with payment on some of its cooperative marketing efforts, and I want to hand select clients, agents that will do this, that will put their money where their mouth is, and print market. We did a sustained program for 52 weeks, every single week on 30 select agents. That office grew from only 40 agents when it started to the largest single listing office in Orange County, California. Wow. When we were done, after two years, there were over 350 agents in that office, they literally controlled the marketplace, and they controlled that marketplace off of print and direct mail.
So they were the ones getting the calls. They were the ones sitting in the mailbox of the clients. When they were ready to list their home, they were the ones doing it. Over the years, there's been a lot of noise, social media noise, a lot of different advertising. Everything wants the agents money. Everything is asking for. Spend it over here. Look at this new product. Let's see how we can take your money right over in this direction and then get you more leads that way. There's been a lot of beneficial things that have come out of that, but at the end of the day. There's so much noise created by all the social media. The print marketing still hasn't been supplanted by anything because it's still the only way to directly get to a seller of a home sitting on the dirt on a street in a neighborhood that you want to sell property in. So you can't get them by social media. You can't get them by any other targeted means. You can't easily get email addresses that are accurate. You can't easily continue to mail to them, email to them. So print marketing has never gone away, and I would probably say in the last 36 months print marketing has come so much back into vogue. It's kind of like the top story now, right? You’ve had less competition in the mailbox over the last couple of years because so many of the companies who were producing products stopped marketing the product because they couldn't sell it to the client. So less competition opened up a new avenue there for people to get back in the mailboxes, and people that were really looking forward to walk to their mailbox every day. And print marketing has never gone away, and it's never going to go away as a kind of tried and true advertising vehicle for real estate agents, ever. I mean, it's going to be there forever.
I think it's the one direct channel. And I think most agents we work with are from about 95% of the top 1% of agents in the country, so we work with some heavy high producers. It's the one thing they've never abandoned over all of the market turmoil, ups and downs over the years, no matter what the market's done, they have stayed steady with their print and direct mail marketing, and it has paid off for them tremendously in how their ultimate success has turned out. So I don't need to say it. We've got proof in the pudding of our clients.
Luke:
I'm glad you answered it that way. I'm listening to what you're saying and digital has obviously shaken up a lot of how people communicate in this industry. But you know, if you have something physical that's tangible in your hands versus something that you see in this never ending scrolling on your phone, for me, that's completely different.
Sandy:
It's a huge difference. You know, you're asking someone to trust you with their largest single investment, the sale or purchase of real estate, and you've got to somehow convince them that you're the right person, that they need to invite you over the threshold. We call it into the living room. Invite you into the living room and then trust you to sell this incredible asset that they may not have anything larger than right then or ever again. You have to build a certain amount of trust to do that. You don't build that trust over blind mail throw outs. You build that trust over showing them what you do in print, on paper, who you are, testimonials of people that you know, the area, market updates, conscientious information given to them to say I'm the reason you want to call me. Because I know more about your home than XYZ does or than you do. And you can trust me because I have your best interests at heart. It's almost like writing a novel in chapters. That's kind of how I look at direct mail. You're giving them an entire picture of you and an entire book to read about you in chapters.
This just listed. This just sold. I had ten multiple offers on this. This is the latest testimonial of my client. Here's what's recently sold in the area and how long it's taken. You're giving them chapter and verse of who you are. That builds a picture after a while. So direct mail, I will say this. It's not for the faint of heart. I've had too many people come into this with the wrong mentality. They want to throw a lot of money at this, and they want to say, okay, I want to mail 10,000 pieces to this whole wide neighborhood. I want to take the whole zip code. And they want to do it once. And they think for some reason that once is going to get them their ROI on that endeavor. And it's not. This is a prolonged adventure cultivating. They call it farming, by the way, because that term came from way back in the day when farmers used to sow seeds in the ground, and a crop would result after a certain amount of watering and a certain amount of nurturing, you get a crop to result in real estate. The term farming actually came from that.
You are planting seeds every time you contact them, and you are growing that over time to achieve a crop that continues year after year to produce revenue. So for me, the direct mail, it is a story. And if you tell it properly, and if you present yourself in a good light and you present yourself in the I am the expert light, the way that you are, and you keep doing it over and over and over again. And don't just drop 10,000 once every five months and hope somebody's looking at you. You will have your crop at the end of the day.
Yeah, it's effective. It's why they call it farming. If you talk about that term outside of real estate, we have a lot of business clients, as well. All the time. It slips out of my mouth. I'll say, what areas do you farm? It just comes so naturally to me to say it. But they'll look at me and they'll be like, where do we farm? I meant where's the demographic influence that you market to! And they will always ask where that term comes from and they always love that story because it's very true. I mean, not just for real estate, but it's very true all the way around. The more you go after something and the more they see you and it's the repetitiveness of it. It's the repetitive, consistent nature of it. I tell my clients they've got to get so sick of seeing you in their mailbox and every time they throw you away, they look at you. Another postcard from that person, they throw you away. It's the one time on a Sunday morning over coffee that they don't throw that postcard away and they say to themselves, gosh, I've seen this person for years, right, sending me stuff. I'm going to call them because it's time for us to list our home. That's what the consistency factor does and that's what a good brand does. I mean, MAXA is good at that. MAXA’s branding for the brokers and how it looks every time it's got to look substantially the same, no matter how it goes out. It supplants that same subliminal message every single time I've seen this person again and again and again and I may never read that message on the card until the very day that it finally interests me to read the message. So every time it's got to be the right message, every time it's got to be on point.
Luke:
So I'm glad you mentioned that because I now wanted to ask or really say a statement plus a question. At MAXA, we know that the platform and the company is number one in direct mail design and marketing as a whole in the real estate industry. So what do you think makes MAXA the leader in that way?
Sandy:
Well, we've been through a lot of platforms, including our own. We tried to develop our own and actually have a couple of sites up with real estate companies of our own custom design for years. But at the end of the day, we are not a software company. Primarily, we are a printing and execution company. Right on that vision, I think I can probably tell you after all my years of going through this with brokers and us doing it ourselves, the reason MAXA is as good as MAXA is, is the simplicity of the site. It is the UI of it. The product is stellar. I mean, the look, the brand, the feel, the translated brand. From envelopes to business cards to letterheads to postcards to flyers to brochures, the translated cohesive look of it is what makes MAXA that platform. The platform, because you can put it all under one hood and turn the key and it all kind of revs together. So the direct mail component of that is definitely there. I mean, they can mail flyers, they can mail postcards, whatever. They're all compliant. They're all a variety of sizes and choices based on what the broker is limiting you do.
But you also have your social media components for people who can absolutely channel the same message in a couple of different ways. Everything for me about MAXA speaks number one direct mail, number one marketing platform because it has the bells, the whistles, but it also has the ability to easily execute it. So it's the one thing that you guys have really just hit the nail on. I mean, agents are very low to adapt new technology. They don't like the DIY stuff for the most part. You've got to overcome that hurdle with, oh, look, it's not that bad. You don't have to set aside 3 hours of your day, right, to create a postcard or a flyer. And most of the internal real estate platforms are that bad. I mean, they are clunky, they are very difficult, they are slow. It doesn't have intuitive controls inside. It won't snap things into a grid. It lets them produce bad stuff on the internal side. MAXA’s site doesn't allow it. MAXA’s site has got all the stuff that they messed up, locked down. And that's part of the reason it's growing the way it's growing and it's appealing to users the way it's appealing.
Luke:
What trends are you seeing right now for print and marketing or print marketing in real estate?
Sandy:
Simplicity. So everything's going back, I like to say everything old is new again. Especially in real estate. Way back in the day, it was like uncoded papers and no coding on stocks and that was kind of the way that it all went out. And then UV high gloss coating and the shiny stuff we call it came out and that was all the rage. Everybody had to do that. And foils were a big deal. And the more different you could be about, the better. It was like the stranger stuff you could put on the piece, the better it was. And the shinier it was, the better. And in the last four or five years, we've had a return to some normalcy, I'm going to use that term we've gone back to what really works is messaging. What really works is typography. What really works is less is more. Instead of loading newsletters, 1117 newsletters with every single space, white space on the page taken up, we're seeing breathing room right on pieces. People like to highlight one property with very limited description on the property. We've taken away a lot of the high gloss coatings and gone to more matte shine coatings. We've seen a lot of tone down colors in a lot of the design elements.
So you used to see some crazy stuff. I mean, going out on crazy colors with brokerages. Now we're getting back to the more grays, blacks, white with an accent color. So a red, a purple, whatever accent color. There's a lot more sophistication coming out in design. That is a definite trend. The sophisticated design looks like easily readable, easily digestible information. That's a humongous trend, and I don't see that going anywhere anytime soon. I think that has to do with consumers' appetite for how long it takes them to go through something. They want it now right in front of them. Don't make me hunt and find it. Seeing a couple of other interesting trends I really like. And I like the way it's been received, and I like some of the ROI I'm seeing on it with some stealth. Marketing agents are doing things like sending out QR codes alone on the page. So they're on it, but they're on it way down at the bottom with just their name and required information. But they're sending out a do you know what your home is worth? Take a look at this new home that's listed in your neighborhood.
It's a QR code going on there. That's it. There's nothing else going on. The piece is a little bit of stealth, in order to attract detention. I'm seeing a little bit of a trend in that. Little more trend these days, too, to maybe being unique when it comes to print type. So print types, meaning the type of print you do on whatever paper you choose, we're using and seeing a little bit more of embossing, a little bit more of unique product, like raised foil, raised spot UVs stuff that kind of just tactile feels interesting. We do, like, a soft touch coating that feels like soft, velvet rose petals. And how can I get my stuff to kind of feel and look a little bit different than the guy next door, the guy in my competition mailbox? So there's a little bit of a trend to that, too. And of course, the print industry has got to keep up with an awful lot of, well, what can we do now? What can you do with foil after 150 years? Right? So now we raise it so it's lifted off the page, and we've got new ability to do holographic foils that are interesting.
They're Holograms. We can also now do something called an aqua foil product. It's a full color product in foil. So before, where it was gold, silver, copper, you could pick red, whatever. Now we can do full four color foils. So you can print a whole logo in foil if that's what you want, and it'll retain all the original color. So some unusual things will always make people stand out, and those trends don't go away. The more that we can develop, the more people seem to adopt them as they go along.
Luke:
I like that you said just halfway through that a lot of the trend is shifting back to or more of a focus on typography and space, on the print or the medium of what's being used and sent out. Because as you were talking, I was thinking, everybody's busy taking in information. If you can receive something through the mail and it's clean and you can instantly easily understand without having to try and read through everything, that makes complete sense.
Sandy:
It is. You've got 2.6 seconds to make an impression in direct mail. That study has been done over the years. They probably redo it every three or four years, strangely enough. I don't know why people spend money on studies like this, but 2.6 seconds is the new one. It used to be you had a little bit over 3 seconds. People would keep it in their hand a little longer. The 2.6 seconds means you've got to get a point across quickly. You've got to tell them who you are, what you are, what you're advertising right away. I mean, it needs to not be buried. In other words, don't bury the lead. It needs to be right there on the front. So the white space helps that a little bit. The focus on one singular thought helps a little bit. We used to have people that put out ‘just sold’, and don't get me wrong, people still do it, but not very often. You used to have people put out seven or eight or nine or ten properties, right, on one piece, on a card, a postcard, have them all little thumbnail rights on the sold. 2.6 seconds doesn't give people a lot of time to look at those just sold and say, oh, look, it was listed at a million one and it sold at a million 150. And then to correlate that, it's much more effective to put that listing up and say, list it sold for 50,000 more than asking price. Don't bury the lead. Don't make people try and figure out what you're trying to tell them or how you're trying to pat yourself in the back. Just say it. That's a significant trend. Just say it and just put it out there and do it one at a time. Tell that story. Do it one at a time and not ten at a time in thumbnails so small that you have to get Coke bottle glasses to see the text underneath it. Make it big.
That's what I like to tell my clients. If it's worth talking about, it's probably worth shouting about in direct mail. I mean, shout it. Ten offers on a property, 20 multiple offers. Say so. Tell people that that's what you're good at. So that is a definite trend.
Luke:
Can you give us one tip or one small piece of advice that a real estate brokerage or more specifically, sales associate could take and implement in their print marketing, or where they could start being better in their print marketing?
Sandy:
Yeah, they've got to start being more consistent. Cut down the number that you send to if the budget is real, which most people do have a budget they can spend on it if the budget is real. Take the budget reality number, cut the number of homes down that you're sending to, to start with and send them more often rather than sending the number of homes higher less often. It is the number one mistake that sales associates make. So they want to start with, let's say one neighborhood is 1000 homes and they want that neighborhood. They think because it's all one track of homes, they've got to do all 1000. You do not need to do that if the budget is not going to allow it. I'd rather see them send 500 homes every other week, which I would not do anything less than every other week marketing efforts to a farm. I would rather see them do that than mail the 1000 once a month. It just doesn't make any sense. So as they start to get listings and sales, add more homes, take another two streets and add it to the 500. As you get traction, as you have success, as you close escrows, do exactly what every good coach would tell you in real estate. Take a percentage of every sale and put it into your marketing budget and don't spend that and use it to go back into the farms. The other thing I would say, outside of farming for direct mail, I would say please don't forget the social list because it's the number one overlooked source of business. Every agent that I know has people that they know from some real world group, something they're part of or past clients that they've done business with. I don't know why this is, but people don't put them on a list and they feel like, oh, they'll list with me if they're going to list them. Oh, they'll refer somebody to me, friend or family because they've used me before. People have very short term memories and if you don't mail to your social list of people at least once a month and say, hey, by the way, I'm still out here selling, I would love a referral from you. I would love to help you if you're considering they are not going to remember you.
So I would tell them two things, mail more consistently and don't forget the social list.
Luke:
I'm glad I asked, because they're completely, genuinely things that are important. And I wouldn't have even thought about cutting down the amount of homes in that farm area and really focus on that before you start to then grow to what you and I can see that people or sales associates would want to go in all guns blazing and just kind of blast the whole area.
Sandy:
Correct. That's exactly what they do with a platform like MAXA. It makes it pretty easy to just maintain some consistency on it. Most agents get stuck on what to say. So I will say that most agents get stuck on what am I putting on my card every other week or what am I saying? I don't think most agents realize that the brokers actually own the listings. The individual agents that take the listings don't own the right to advertise them. So I always tell agents, if you don't have a recent listing or sale, your brokerage does, your office does. Go ask one of those agents for permission to advertise that listing as a new listing on the market, or do you know a buyer or, hey, this one just sold. It doesn't have to be you that puts it out. It just shows the area and general activity or put a message out about something in the community, something of interest that's going on in that area. Put out a market update at least once a month. You should be putting out a market update, saying that's what just sold and there's ten homes on the market or there's three or whatever the case is, just so people are aware and they get stuck on that.
MAXA makes it a little easier where they can just go in at any time and create that card. And now we have a schedule feature on there, so they could even schedule it out. But I would tell them, don't get hung up on the message either, because there's plenty of things to say.
Luke:
I love that you gave that extra bit of advice then, because sales associates could probably forget that they're actually part of this bigger organization. They would be very blinkered and channeled into what they're doing and focus on that, whereas perhaps they could just bring in some help or a listing or whatever sold recently just to keep that kind of like the person receiving it isn't going to know specifically that's correct.
Sandy:
They don't know that. It just looks like it and maybe they're interested in that house. Maybe they have some of your advertising, you could sell one of your officemates listings. There's worse things in the world than to do that. I've never had an agent tell another agent, no, I don't want you to advertise my listing. It just doesn't usually happen like that. Yeah, but messaging, too, is important. Community events are always around. And messaging is one of the options MAXA can add into the platform, where they could grab what we would call generics that we write for our clients every week. If generic messaging options that are still real estate related are available to them, maybe they'd grab one of those to use them. It's one of the things I think might be a help to the platform and people using it for this purpose, they do get stuck on what to say. And so what they end up doing is only logging into MAXA when they have a listing, when they have a just sold, when they need a property flyer, they don't think of it unless that triggers.
And it's like, oh, no, I got to go get a card. Oh, wait, I have to go get a flyer. If they were on a schedule in their own mind, they'd be logging in sooner, and then they'd say, okay, I got to pick one of these. I got to pick this message, or I got to go ask somebody to advertise their new listing.
I want people to adopt more of a this is my partner with MAXA. This is my marketing partner. Even though it's not a person, it kind of is a person. I need them to look at it as a solution all the time, not just the solution when an event triggers it.
Luke:
Sandy, I can't thank you enough for all of your fantastic inputs. You have a wealth of knowledge, which is incredible, and may you reign for many more years in what you do.
Sandy:
Thank you. We're enjoying our partnership with MAXA a lot. I love the team. Everybody there is super helpful, very knowledgeable, very talented. So, I mean, we're enjoying being the support on the back end of this.
