Monthly Archives: July 2014
Welcome TOM PELTON & congratulations SANDRA DEERING!
I am pleased to announce that effective immediately, Sandra Deering will be returning to the role of Broker of Record for the Southern California Company full-time. With today’s ever-changing challenges and continued strategic growth necessary, having Sandra dedicated wholly to the Broker of Record functions is essential. Sandra will be housed in the main offices in our Irvine Support Center.
It is also with great pleasure that we welcome Tom Pelton as the new branch manager in the Laguna Niguel and Dana Point/San Clemente offices. Tom joins us from the Prudential California Realty office in Brea where he has held the position of Branch Manager since 2007. Prior to that, Tom was a top-producing sales associate with over 50 transactions annually and close to $1 million in GCI. Tom is a leader who practices what he teaches, and his passion to lead and build a culture around positive productive energy and agent collaboration has created much success for his agents. He is an innovative industry leader and trainer in the areas of technology, social media, online lead generation, and agent productivity. Tom brings many attributes to real estate coupled with 25 years of public speaking, both nationally and internationally, on topics such as personal development, sales, marketing, spirituality, and leadership. Tom is thrilled to be back in the Coldwell Banker family where his father and his wife’s mother were Coldwell Banker sales associates in Northern California.
Please join me in thanking Sandra for all she has done in her multiple roles and congratulating Sandra as she returns to her dedicated role of Broker of Record. Also, join me in giving Tom a hearty welcome to Coldwell Banker and our management team. I am confident that the focused roles and the people in them will continue to lead Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage to new heights in the local markets.
Sincerely,
JEFF CULBERTSON
Executive Vice President
NRT, Southwest Region
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Win with Expired Listings! by Brad Pearson
It’s 8 in the morning and you start your day (hopefully) by running that days expired listings. You review each listing and
after years of being taught that if a home failed to sell, “it must be the price” so you start to figure out how big of a price reduction is needed to make each listing salable, subject to seeing the home of course. Then you start making your calls or visits to set appointments to get the opportunity to try and get the listing at lower price so you can sell it. In this blog post I will offer you a much better strategy to get these listings and actually show the seller that YOU are the best choice for them to provide the opportunity to sell their home.
Let’s start with a addressing the elephant in the room… PRICE! The LAST thing these sellers want to hear is that they need to list with YOU and drop the PRICE. If PRICE was the only reason their home failed to sell, then they really don’t need to change agents, they just need to change the PRICE. So how much sense does it make to tell a seller that you’re the best agent with the best company, best marketing, advertising, etc. but they still need to drop their price $25,000? The whole scenario begs the question “If you’re so great, and we should list with you, then why are you telling us to drop our price?” This is why any agent worth their value propositions, should be willing to take that listing and at the least give everything they’ve got to try and accomplish what the other agent couldn’t do before even discussing price. A simple comparison to going right after price would be if you went to the doctor with a stomach pain and the immediate diagnosis is surgery. Any good doctor would try everything they could before deciding that surgery is the answer. In the same way, we as Realtors, should do anything we can to make absolutely sure that when we recommend a price reduction that we’ve exhausted all other options because to a homeowner, a price reduction is major surgery to them.
Let me suggest a simple, yet powerful strategy:
1. Run the full printouts and examine all of the data, photos, accessibility, location, commission, unnecessary hoops to jump through in agents remarks, etc. and look for reasons, other than price, that could have contributed to the home not selling.
2. Once you’ve discovered the areas that YOU could and would do BETTER, then go to the sellers home and share this with them with the following script;
“Mr. & Mrs. Seller, I’ve reviewed your previous multiple listing information and have determined that with some changes and improvements to the marketing of your home and the exposure that my firm and I can provide, that I may be able to get your home sold. What I can assure you is that IF I cannot sell your home in the next 30-45 days, then we will be able to accurately make the determination that price is the issue. But only after I do everything I can to properly expose your home to the market would I even consider suggesting a price reduction. I’d love the opportunity to sit down with you and show you everything that I and my firm do differently to get top dollar for our listings.”
With this approach it completely supports your entire listing presentation and value propositions. It also provides with the seller a solid and legitimate reason to list with you over re-listing with the previous agent who was likely pushing for a price reduction for weeks before the expiration.
Now it’s important that you actually can improve the marketing and offer improved exposure and presentation to the market! Here at Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage we have incredibly powerful tools as well as an in house marketing expert that you can utilize to actually demonstrate to your prospect that you CAN and WILL dramatically 
increase the advertising and marketing for the home when they list with you. Tools like the View Magazine with 1.2 million copies distributed each month, the View China for international exposure, our exclusive FAB+ program, our powerful and free Social Made Simple social media program, professional photography, staging, Quickview internal exposure program, YouTube On Location exposure, etc. etc. etc. will set you apart from every agent in your marketplace and instill confidence in your seller that you have what it takes to drive traffic to their home.
As always, I am here to offer ideas, strategies, and coaching to help you grow your business. For more information on Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage please feel free to email/text/call Brad.Pearson@camoves.com or 714-782-2723.
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Brad
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Here we come! July 25th Coldwell Banker Yorba Linda office update!
About 9 months ago, there was no shortage of those who said it “couldn’t be done”. They said “the chances of opening a new office in Yorba Linda amongst some formidable intrenched competitors was a long shot”. And to be honest, and to make a little public confession, there was a little part of me that believed them at first. I mean, let’s be honest, who doesn’t have some doubt when tasked with a huge undertaking, risk, and a huge audience of people that plan to work hard to ensure your failure, called competitors. With that said, I am incredibly thankful for those who not only said “it CAN be done and we CAN do it”, but especially for those who said “we are with you!” I am also thankful for the foresight of such a great company to entrust me to lead this great undertaking and provide us all an amazingly professional and respectful environment that allows for everyone to grow and enjoy their career in real estate. And I would be remiss not to mention my incredibly supportive family who have had to endure many early mornings and late nights to get to this point.
So where are we now? With tremendous pleasure, I can say that we are now at 83 Independent Sales Associates, with many more
great people affiliating each week that goes by. We have consistently had “record months” so many times that the bar just keeps getting higher and higher. And the month of July is another one of those record months! This amazing group of agents already have 50 sales with over $30,000,000 in volume and are on track to potentially pass 60 new sales and scare $40,000,000 for the month of July! To put this in perspective, this represents over $1,000,000 in projected Gross Closed Commissions that will be paid to the Independent Sales Associates in one month! Now for a group that is working out of two separate, temporary facilities, and for all intent and purposes, “camping out” until the new Yorba Linda flagship office is opened, this success speaks to their skill, talent, and tremendous focus. While many in the real estate business right now are lamenting that it is “slow”, we are experiencing quite the opposite.
The theme for this weeks video that I’m posting below is “Here we come!”. While we are still in the rear view mirror of several of our competitors, our front license plate is becoming very clear as you’ll see in this fun video!
If you are not yet with our great firm and would like to find out why so many great people have affiliated with us over the past 9 months, then please feel free to email or call/txt me at Brad.Pearson@camoves.com or (714) 782-2723.
Thanks for following the progress!
Brad
To view video be sure to visit the blog directly by clicking the heading of this post if you are reading this in your email.
Video:
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Over 2000 people will see this post! >Click here!<
I hear it all the time… “I don’t care about Facebook, I don’t have time to write a blog, Twitter is a waste of time, Instagram is for kids, Social Media is a fad, Social Media isn’t my thing, I’m too busy to do Facebook, I can’t figure it out, etc. etc.” I even hear from agents interviewing with me, that some of my competitors are adamant that they not only do not “do social media” but that they don’t “believe in it” and in some cases they even elaborate extensively on their reasons why. In this blog post, I want to address the whole social media allergy that appears to exist in the Real Estate business in hopes to bring some common sense to the importance and necessity of this incredibly powerful medium.
First and foremost, I want to make the most direct and impossible to argue with statement with regard to the reason to 
utilize social media in your business….. It has NOTHING to do what you think, feel, or believe about it… It simply and only matters what your CLIENTS think about it. I hope that makes sense. My simple point is that whether you are using social media or not, the first thing that you must accept is that your clients ARE. The decision NOT to participate in the social media revolution is the same as deciding that you do not wish to be where your clients are. It takes an immense amount of either ignorance or arrogance to believe that you can grow a business efficiently without the use of social media nowadays. It only takes a minute to Google “social media stats” to figure out that the quickest and most efficiently effective way to connect with large amounts of people at a very low or NO cost, is via the many different social media sites. Whether we like it or not, if we want to be “relevant” to a large segment of our own customer base we need to be where they are. Especially in the Real Estate business!
So, here’s the breakdown of my heading to this post and why I’m such a believer… Only 350 subscribers to this blog, the blog auto posts to over 1000 of my LinkedIn members, and to 150+ twitter followers, Google+, my 1000+ Facebook friends, I have two business Facebook pages that I can repost this to and share with up to another 2100+ people, then I can choose to “Boost” the post and specifically target thousands more people by location and/or interests. So at a bare minimum, if I do nothing but simply hit “Publish” I’m connecting to several thousand people in my sphere of influence and beyond. By writing one post per week on average, I’m staying top of mind to a lot of people on a very consistent basis with solid content, information, updates, ideas, news, etc. And it doesn’t cost me a dime! As a cool bonus, I can even track my visits, views, and overall traffic to this post so I know how many people took the time to read it. I can also see where they came from, i.e. email, facebook, twitter, google, etc. and what geographic area their IP address is where they accessed the blog. Oh, and I can also see if they clicked via a computer or a mobile device!
Click to download 80/20 business plan!
With all of that said, I don’t want anyone to read this and think that they should run out and spend all of their time on Facebook and Twitter. As I describe in my business plan(available at http://www.BradPearsonOnline.com), I believe that a healthy business should have a solid plan that consists of 80% of business development strategies to be conducted OFFLINE, and 20% to be geared towards a solid and consistent ONLINE strategy. The better the online strategy, the more effective your offline strategy will be.
Here’s some ideas on how to combine offline and online business development:
-Connect with your entire Sphere of Influence and Past Client list on Facebook and Twitter. Actively interact with them and their posts. Post relevant, fun, interesting posts, and always present the best “YOU” online. Not too personal, but not too much business either. Use common sense. You can learn so much about your sphere on social media just by paying a little attention. Nothings better than already knowing so much about your friends and clients and having a warm opening the next time you meet offline!
-Connect on LinkedIn with all of your clients, past clients, prospects, SOI, etc. This is a great place to share each others businesses and support those who support you.
-Gain followers on Twitter by first following those with similar interests, those you know, meet, etc.
-Create a blog on Real Estate and invite all of your clients, past clients, prospects, SOI, etc. to subscribe. Then take 30 minutes per week to write an informative post on the market, and other topics related to Real Estate. Promote your blog on other Social Media as well as all offline marketing.
-Create a YouTube channel and post videos on Real Estate, your listings, marketing, etc. and promote on all other media offline and online.
-Create an Instagram account and post fun pictures of your Real Estate activities, your marketing, listings, etc. Connect with other social media so posts go elsewhere. Add the Instagram logo to your marketing with the others. Look connected and cool at the same time!
Very simply, combine everything you do offline to an online version! Always be thinking about how you can combine one with the other!
In the end, I challenge you to set some time aside and implement a solid online social media strategy to dramatically enhance your business, stay connected with your customers, gain knowledge, and share knowledge!
As always, I am here to help you grow your business regardless of company affiliation by sharing posts like this, other social media sites where I post, as well as offline in a free coaching meeting upon request. If you would like more information about affiliating with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage, feel free to call/text or email me for a confidential appointment at Brad.Pearson@camoves.com or cell 714-782-2723.
Thanks for following my blog! Check out the video below for some fun info on the power of social media and the internet!
Brad
Video:
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July 18th Video Update – Coldwell Banker Yorba Linda
Another week has gone by and huge progress has been made! I must admit that I’ve learned a lot through this incredible process of transforming a vacant medical office building into the beginnings of a luxury Real Estate office. The facilities folks here at Coldwell Banker are just plain amazing. During the demo and construction process, I’m finding that it is inevitable that we will run into obstacles here and there with surprises that come up. What is impressive is that the team not only expects these little surprises/obstacles, but they are prepared with almost immediate remedies and solutions to every situation. Something as simple as a support beam that was discovered and immovable, goes from being an eyesore requiring a complete redesign of our lobby, to a perfectly positioned redesigned modernistic curved reception desk with 
an inviting walkway to the bullpen and conference rooms. It literally is the mindset with these pros that where there is an obstacle, it can easily become an opportunity to use creativity, collaboration, and plain teamwork to not only resolve the challenge but improve the original design/plan. And this is what happened last week! So along with the beginning of framing some offices upstairs, our lobby has been modified slightly and frankly improved from the previous plans. What I know is that while our move in date is still fluid and subject to many variables, we are making huge progress and the best people are on the job to make this office an incredible showplace once opened!
Lastly, the office and desk count is going to allow us to grow with room for over 100 great Independent Sales Associates! We will have a full compliment of staff and services to provide the support that our agents and clients deserve. The office will be staffed as follows:
-Full time office administrator
-Full time office admin assistant/receptionist
-Full time Marketing Coordinator on site to support and assist agents with their marketing, advertising, farming, design, and more!
-Weekend reception coverage Saturday and Sunday…when real estate sales happen! Few if any of our competitors are staffed on the weekends anymore, yet we believe our clients and agents deserve to have professional reception and assistance on the weekends. Our office will be the busiest in North OC on the weekends!
-Full time Transaction Coordinator
-Full time Branch Manager/coach/leader
-Full time Assistant Manager/coach/leader
-On site full time professional Escrow and Mortgage staff
-2 full time on site mentors
-On call IT support as needed
-Client Concierge Services on demand
As you can see, we are committed to a level of service and support well beyond the average real estate office in the area.
So, not only will we have an amazing facility, but we will be delivering a high touch, high service option right here in North Orange County to those who are looking to grow their business in all price ranges, but especially the high end!
Below is my newest short fun video update. Take a moment to watch it and you’ll see the progress coming along beautifully!
Don’t hesitate to reach out to me with any questions at Brad.Pearson@camoves.com or text/call 714-782-2723.
Brad
Video:
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A smooth launch into North Orange County!
Corporate Headquarters Irvine California
It is amazing what can be accomplished when a group of properly motivated, and talented people are inspired by a goal and objective and empowered by great leadership at a phenomenal, professional, and financially strong company to execute on a near perfectly thought out plan. While that was a bit of a mouthful, it pretty much sums up perfectly what has taken place here in North Orange County over the past 8 months with the launch of the new Yorba Linda Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage/Previews International office.
From the moment I joined the company, I was introduced to great people with smiles on their faces and a genuine desire to support the mission that I was tasked with out in the field. From the great people in facilities, accounting, marketing, operations, relocation, administration, and the many vendors, to the executive leadership team, everyone is clearly focused to support the mission of launching this new branch. Without exaggeration, I was made to feel like every one of these great people were doing nothing but working to execute on our Yorba Linda plan, when in reality they are all working on a multitude of other projects and office additions and expansions, acquisitions, etc. One thing I realized really quickly with this company was that everyone is focused on removing all obstacles that could slow the execution of the plan. Information was thoughtfully requested to assemble a solid move forward budget, obtain all approvals, and make solid decisions to enable everyone to simply do the job they were tasked to do. Very few meetings, zero conflict, and absolute clarity and follow through with open communication. This whole process was so impressive to me that at first I almost couldn’t believe it and was waiting for something to go wrong. When a decision was and is made, that decision has been well thought through and there’s a solid plan to execute. Well, it finally hit me, these people were the “real deal” and with over 700 company owned offices, the depth of experience in launching new offices was apparent yet humbly showcased with class and professionalism.
The core of the entire process was and is always grounded in this one simple philosophy; “Will this be the best thing for our Independent Sales Associates, attract more great Independent Sales Associates, and create an environment for them to grow and succeed?”. Everyone was clear that if the answer was yes to the above question, then we all would win and we would move forward!
New Yorba Linda Office at 21580 Yorba Linda Blvd. during construction.
All of the above is what has lead to where we are now. Our spectacular 10,000 square foot, luxury, state of the art, office is well on it’s way to completion! With 26 private offices, luxury spacious work areas, finely appointed conference rooms with the latest technology, and a jaw dropping lobby to greet your valued clients while offering them a choice of 10 different beverages from espresso to hot chocolate, any professional Realtor will be proud to show up to work here daily! Needless to say, the excitement has become contagious and the anticipation is exhilarating! Every single week that goes by, the office is transforming into what will be the premier real estate office for some of the best Realtors in North Orange County. This beautiful facility will be much more than a grand showplace of beautiful design, gorgeous decor, and modern technology, it is and will be the culmination of a positive, professional, fun, and collaborative culture with high standards that will ultimately define it. The people who embrace and seek out this culture are what will make this the greatest place to thrive and grow a real estate career in North Orange County.
Over the past several weeks I have made a couple of short fun videos showcasing the progress of the office building transformation. I am posting the links below. I am sure you will feel the energy!
If you would like information on affiliating with Coldwell Banker please do not hesitate to call/text or email me at (714) 782-2723 or Brad.Pearson@camoves.com. Aggressive transition packages available for qualified Independent Sales Associates! Make your move with zero costs! Call for details!
Brad
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