Jeffrey Bastress of Startpoint Realty in Massachusetts is the special guest on HomeGain Radio’s June 3rd show.

Jeffrey discusses how home buyer and seller expectations have changed over the past year, how it’s making things more challenging for today’s Realtors, and what real estate agents and brokers can do to avoid or overcome lost transactions due to this expectation gap.

Listen to Jeffrey Bastress’ call:

Jeffrey Bastress has been a HomeGain AgentEvaluator member for many years, ranking #1 in Massachusetts and nationwide, is a HomeGain Advisor, and a HomeGain Blog contributor.

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I recently wrote a marketing piece called Members Only – The Costco Way.

In the article I touted Costco’s extreme focus on its customer and employee satisfaction. Costco spends most of its budget buying merchandise in bulk at wholesale prices for the sole benefit of their members. By aggregating Costco members’ purchasing power, Costco is able to achieve for its members something they cannot do on their own – purchase quality goods at near wholesale prices. Costco does little formal marketing. Its success is based upon the word of mouth of satisfied Costco members.

Costco also treats their employees well. They do not have the union issues that plague WalMart because they provide generous benefits and pay substantially higher than minimum wage. Theft of merchandise by employees at Costco is also low.

By treating their customers and employees well and making them true partners in their endeavor, Costco has been rewarded by their customers with millions of referrals.

At HomeGain we believe the Costco model is worth emulating. Continue reading this post

When showing a home, it’s often easiest to run through the particular set of features within the home, but, you may be missing the best opportunity to show off differences that can help a home sell.

Benefit marketing plays a fundamental role in separating the good from the great in sales and real estate is no different. Just about everyone can walk into a home and see the features, but, buyers are often trying to take everything in quickly when visiting a home so running down a list of features that they can already see does not help them discern why a particular feature may be important. This is where benefit marketing comes in to play.

As you walk through a home with a client, explaining the benefit of a feature can greatly improve the desirability of the home.

For example: a home has a tankless hot water heater. Many buyers today know that this is a new technology, but, not necessarily what it means to them. Taking a moment when highlighting the feature by explaining how that feature benefits the home buyer gives a meaning to that feature. In this case, it means lower monthly utility bills and endless hot water for a shower. For a family of 5, this would be a significant benefit and could be the difference maker between two similar homes.

Another example of benefit marketing might be explaining why new windows in an older home are important rather than simply stating that there are new windows. “Green” building is one area where benefit marketing is important, but, it encompasses just about all features within a home. Continue reading this post

On June 4, HomeGain treated its employees to a trip to AT&T Park to see the San Francisco Giants play the New York Mets.

Classified Ventures Chief Executive Officer, Dan Jauernig, and President of Classified Ventures Real Estate, Tim Fagan, flew in for the company baseball event.

“As HomeGain enters it 10th year, we look forward to continuing to delight our customers and employees,” said HomeGain General Manager Louis Cammarosano.

Although the San Francisco Giants lost 5-3, HomeGainers who attended seemed to have enjoyed the beautiful day and a fun time out at the park.

Last year we celebrated HomeGain’s 8th anniversary by going to an Oakland A’s game at the Coliseum. Continue reading this post

I spent some time today looking at other real estate agent websites and landing pages both of HomeGain clients and in the search engines. I will say that most HomeGain agents are doing it correctly or are close.

However, this email is really for the others who are not doing it right, or if you are marketing on the Internet and still use your home page as your landing page.

It’s amazing to me how many Realtor and Broker websites don’t even try to capture names, emails, and phone numbers. Their [home buyer and seller] visitors come to their websites, use their tools, and then call another agent.

Firstly, do you understand what a landing page is?

I know, some of you might be smirking right now, but there are a lot of people that don’t have any idea what that means. A landing page is the page in which a customer coming to your site lands on.

For instance, if a customer comes to your site from the Internet and when they click on a link they end up on your Continue reading this post

If I am showing homes to a buyer and have plenty of notice—this is usually with out-of-town home buyers—I preview the homes I haven’t already seen. This has saved me from many embarrassing situations.

Working with buyers entails knowing the area and having an idea of what the house is about, but more importantly, you discover all the quirks about getting into the home, surprise dogs, surprise odors, surprise messes, and so forth.

At times I have gotten busy and didn’t preview and invariably there were surprises—wrong showing instructions being one, alarms not noted in the listing info being another—one time it was four Great Danes in the master bedroom. I thought the buyer was going to have a heart attack.

Stumbling on these surprises with the home buyer is not a good idea, because it causes the buyer to start having doubts. When you preview and take notes and you inform the buyer ahead of time of what to expect, it makes you look prepared, which you should be. Continue reading this post