Your local situation and your imagination will dictate what possibilities exist. Let me describe how my wife and I turned our company's arrangement with the Chamber of Commerce into a program that resulted in ten to twelve home sales a year.
When people are considering moving into a new community, they often write to the Chamber of Commerce for information. Our chamber maintained a file of those letters and shared them with local real estate agents who were members. That file turned out to be a gold mine of prospects. Once each week my wife reviewed incoming letters. During some weeks, there might be thirty or forty (and ours is a community of only about forty thousand). She read each letter and jotted down the essential information, such as name and address, along with any pertinent statements from the letters, such as, "We hope to be able to move to your city as soon as our home here sells." We would then prepare a cover letter and a packet of information that showed samples of listings currently on the market. Primarily, we used flyers from listings in our office (mostly my own). I wrote a personal note at the bottom of each letter, included a housing questionnaire, a stamped, self-addressed envelope, and my business card, and promptly mailed the entire package out to the prospect. If I were operating that system today, of course, I would be doing a lot of e-mailing also.
We mailed all the packets out by Tuesday of each week and Saturday morning I followed up with phone calls to the most promising prospects. Although the same information was available to every other real estate office in town, ours was the only one with a centralized program handled by a single agent. The result was that we accounted for the majority of all sales in the community from this source.
If your Chamber of Commerce does not have a program of this kind, start one. If they do, do not be afraid of the competition, because you will be going after a lucrative market. People who write ahead to a community in advance of their move are often well-organized problem solvers. They gather all the information available before making a decision. Chances are good that they have used these same skills in solving other problems, such as how to amass enough money to afford the home of their choice.
QUALIFYING BUYERS
Qualifying a buyer simply means finding out how much he can afford. It is your most critical immediate task. If you don't do this correctly, you do not pass "go," and you do not collect any money. Qualifying buyers is a step that is awkward for some real estate agents, even experienced ones. It should not be, because it will be impossible for you to work productively with buyers if you do not have the information. You do not want to waste their time or yours by showing them properties out of their price range, or by showing them anything, if they can't afford to buy at all. If they do make an offer and need financing, a steely eyed, no-nonsense loan officer at a lending institution will ask the same hard questions in conjunction with a loan application, so why not get the information at the start? Of course, the ideal situation would be for the buyers to prequalify with a lending institution or a mortgage broker before they even start looking at homes, and this is becoming the standard in the profession.
Do not judge buyers without investigation, because looks can be deceiving. The couple who drives up in the clanking pickup truck dressed like refugees from Skunk Hollow may be cash customers for the costliest item in your inventory. On the other hand, I once spent almost a week showing the most expensive homes in town to a couple who dazzled me with their big talk, wardrobe, car, and $100 hairdo (his). To be charitable, let's just say it turned out that their tastes exceeded their financial capabilities-by a very wide margin. The key is to ask the right questions and do some discreet checking of your own.
ARE PURCHASERS PREVARICATORS?
Buyers generally have a good idea of what they want. It is wise to ask them, take notes, and show them the kind of property they say they are after. All of this assumes, of course, that they can afford what they say they want. For some reason I do not yet fully understand, it is hard for many agents to listen to buyers. They seem almost compelled to dominate the conversation and tell folks what they should want. This is not to say that you should not be flexible, because everyone who has sold real estate has a story about people who say they are interested in one type of home and end up falling in love with and buying something quite different (in a worst case scenario from another agent, after you have spent untold hours showing them what they said they wanted). It would be dangerous to conclude, however, that buyers do not know their own minds, or are somehow being less than honest with you. In the normal course of events, they typically select something very close to what they indicated they prefer, assuming it is available.
It is particularly bad form to try to manipulate buyers toward specific listings in which you, your broker, or some other agent in your office has a vested interest. This does not mean you should not show your own listings, but it does mean that you will lose a lot of sales if your judgment is clouded by any factor other than selecting properties that best meet the buyers' expressed interests and qualifications. There are plenty of competent real estate agents who have the good sense to show buyers what they want, not what the agent or broker wants to sell them.
"WHAT A BEAUTIFUL VIEW!"
Something that was very difficult for me was to put my own tastes on the shelf. For example, I was once showing a young couple a home that bordered a huge wrecking yard. I would have never considered buying it myself, but it was a new home and in their price range. We went to the backyard and the three of us peered over the fence into the sea of rusting Edsels. They didn't mind at all. They bought the house. The phrase that occurred to me at the time was "not my will, but thine."