What's your plan?

By Steve Murray

The Market is Shifting-Again .What's Your Game Plan?

Historically, top sales professionals marketed heavily to get listings, to get calls, to generate prospects, to drive their businesses. A few years ago a shift took place. With the exponential growth of social media and online marketing along with the surging importance of the buy side, prospecting for buyers took hold in a big way. Prospecting through these new channels because the modus operandi for growing your business. It didn't help that distressed inventory took over many markets.
Now the leaders of some top teams indicate that listings may be moving back into a position of importance. Why? According to several leaders of top teams from around the country, the growing strength of such sites as Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia along with strong traffic on Craigslist and some of the national branded sites, having listings online is driving an increase in traffic to sales professional websites. Also with the general improvement in the economy (slight but headed in the right direction) and consumer confidence (ditto above) buyers in the last few weeks are starting to be interested once again in the investment in housing either for personal use or as investment property.

This is but one finding of the research REAL Trends and MarketLeader are doing in preparation for the release of a new book, "Game Plan--How Real Estate Professionals Can Thrive in the Future." Months of research and over 60 interviews with leaders from every aspect of the residential real estate industry will be featured in the book, as well as a companion video that will outline where the industry is likely heading and how brokerage firms and sales professionals can grow their businesses and profits in the years ahead.

One large challenge mentioned by every leader is that brokerage firms and sales professionals will have to sharpen their business tools and systems should they want compete at the highest levels. Focusing on ways to articulate one's value to the counter party in a relationship (whether a brokerage to a sales professional or a sales professional to a housing consumer) is absolutely at the top of everyone's list. "Game Plan" will lay out several paths to building the value proposition at every level of real estate brokerage.

As real estate professionals and housing consumers have access to more and more content along with the tools that provide analysis, the importance of systems will rise relative to the importance of relationships. While relationships will have a high importance to consumers, real estate professionals should be prepared to compete on the basis of their knowledge at deeper levels than ever before