By Charlie Young, President and CEO, ERA Franchise Systems LLC
We’re seeing a massive shift in the real estate industry. Armed with more information than ever before, the power a buyer holds is growing. That means the customer decides what they value. If you can meet those expectations, great. If not, they’ll find someone else who can.
Now more than ever, your own value proposition – one you can flawlessly and consistently deliver upon – is critical to your business success. It’s what you will use to market yourself, win the listing and close the deal.
In my role, I have worked with companies of all sizes, business models, team formations and individual agent structures. One thing always lies of the core of their success – the value they bring to the table.
It’s ok if you don’t have a value proposition yet but it’s not ok to avoid developing one right away. Here’s a simple formula to get you started:
- Identify your target customer. Who can you best serve in your marketplace? In 2016, it doesn’t work for you to say, ‘I’m in real estate and I’m going to sell to or help everybody in the marketplace.’ You have to zero in on what area of the market you are going to be an expert in. First time homebuyers? High-end properties? Determine a segment in real estate and focus on it.
- Research your customer. Now that you know who you want to reach, you have to really understand what their needs are. Get to know the segment, what these types of buyers and sellers look for and what is critically important to them.
- Be unique. Now that you know what your target customers want, what can you do better and differently than anyone else in that segment to meet their unique needs and expectations? Narrow down your offerings to the most important things a client looks for into two or three sentences so you can articulate the value you bring to the table.
- Prove you can deliver. Saying you can deliver value isn’t enough. You must tell the customer what type of support and systems you have in place to deliver upon your value proposition.
When you have those four pieces of the formula in place, you’re ready to write and promote your value proposition. Here’s how we do it at ERA Real Estate:
Whether you are a brokerage company, team or individual agent, the concept of standing still doesn’t exist. As you can see above, ERA Real Estate targets real estate entrepreneurs who are fiercely independent and determined to grow their business.
With our customers’ goals and expectations in mind, we continually build our franchise network with companies that are growth-minded. And we are committed to growing our network to create more opportunity for our affiliates.
Being customer-first and uniquely collaborative are the strengths that differentiate us from our competition and make us valuable to companies and real estate professionals who want to be empowered to succeed with support that fits their goals. We understand that today’s real estate brokerage is grass-roots. So our approach is not in-your-face advertising and a for sale sign in the front yard. Instead, we know each individual company and each individual set of agents within that company have different goals and we enable our companies to adapt to their markets in order to accomplish their goals.
And finally, we can deliver on that promise to empower our affiliates to grow by providing them with innovative tools and proprietary systems as well as unique revenue streams, complemented by the benefit of a highly collaborative network for those entrepreneurs to draw upon.
As you determine your goals, who to target and how to get there, I strongly encourage you to use the formula above to create your own value proposition. And when you do, stick with it. But above all else, deliver upon it. In other words – execute, execute, execute.
