Monday, February 21, 2011

Finding Expired MLS Listings

By Amie Greere


As a REALTOR, a great source of sales are expired MLS listings. Getting an expired listing to sign with you may be the result of a benign communication such as a listing letter, or as blatant as physically knocking on the door. Regardless of how you methodology the prospect, it is very important to understand the mindset of your target customer.

When approaching your target customer, it is necessary to understand that they may perhaps still be motivated to sell the home, but might feel that they have been burned by the REALTOR listing process. These prospects have heard the traditional REALTOR presentation and are open to anything that appears unique, different, or more effective than what their current real estate agent offers.

For these prospects, expired listing letters may not be very effective. Although these script are low cost and are usually sent out in mass, they repeatedly are received much later than the prospect's window of opportunity. It is not uncommon for an expired listing to receive five or more phone calls from aggressive real estate agents on the day that their listing expires. In consequence, expired listing letters are repeatedly received late.

For REALTORS that use expired listings as a source of business a more useful tactic might be to employ listing lead services such as the RedX (Real Estate Data Exchange) or LeadSenders to retrieve the leads in real time. Most successful REALTORS use these types of tools to capture leads and get listings ahead of their competitors. By means of these services, the real-estate professional utilizes a first mover advantage to capture the listing before the competition. Repeatedly, this small advantage is all that the agent needs to get the business.

In general, an expired MLS listing lead will sign with the first REALTOR that makes contact. Once again, this indicates that expired listing script might not be the most useful method in which to prospect mls listing leads. Accurately, the adage that the early bird gets the worm applies to these scenarios, and the successful REALTOR have got to fine-tune their lead generation strategy accordingly.




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