Kelley Skar

I am a second generation REALTOR®, SUCCESS Certified real estate coach, a real estate trainer with a proven track record as well as an international speaker (which means I’ve spoken all over Canada and the US).
I knew early on in life that I was going to be an educator; I started with University thinking I was going to be a high school teacher. Life took me in another direction. However, my passion for learning and educating has never left. I am a student of history, business and of life. My passion lies in high-level discussions around business strategies and helping agents & brokers build a bigger, better, and highly profitable real estate business.
I have been married to my beautiful wife for over 16 years, and we have smart, athletic and articulate 14-year-old twins. We enjoy hiking through the Okanagan together, spending time at the beach and on the lake as well as traveling the continent and hopefully at some point, the globe. I love to play golf, work out in the gym, hang out with my friends, and am a huge Green Bay Packers football fan.

The post Blogging is dead: Okay maybe not dead, but on life support appeared first on REM.

Getting clear on your value proposition will pay you, the broker/owner or team leader, dividends for years to come.

Over the last decade of coaching individual agents, team leaders and broker/owners I have come to realize that realtors will leave a team or brokerage for the same three reasons that they will join.

Before we get into that, though, if you are a team lead, brokerage owner, or manager, you need to ask yourself what separates you from every other brokerage and team in your region. What is it that makes you unique in your marketplace? What value do you bring to the table to enhance the experience of the realtor and, down the line, that of the consumer?

The unique sales proposition

If you are having difficulty articulating your unique sales proposition, you are not alone. A lot of team leaders and broker/owners lean heavily on what the brand can bring and use that to attract agents to the team or brokerage.

I certainly think brand recognition and the brand value prop are important, but that isn’t the only leverage you should have in your marketplace. I mean, how many other teams are there? How many other brokerages of the same brand in your city are there?

The differentiating factor is what YOU are willing to do for the agent.

Determine what makes your competition desirable for an agent to land and then measure that against what you offer. Take what they have that you don’t and improve on it. Innovate and bring something to your marketplace that no one else can claim.

I was one of the first teams in my market almost a decade ago to offer benefits to my team agents if they wanted them. No other team I knew of was offering that; no one was willing to go to those lengths to ensure their agents were taken care of. 

Zero in on your mission, vision and values

This is one of my favourite topics when it comes to helping agents, team leaders, brokers, and owners build or rebuild their businesses. Understanding what your values are and never compromising will help you with every decision you make in business and life. 

You will find yourself constantly measuring whether the decision you are about to make fits in with the values that you and your team espouse.

I typically recommend an eight-step discovery process that will help uncover your true values. It’s not an easy exercise and not something that can be done without a lot of thought and introspection. 

I will break down the steps briefly in the interest of time:

1. Make an extensive list of words that best describe who you are
2. Write down a list of six people you admire, important role models, mentors or valued connections
3. Look at your past experiences
4. Categorize your values 
5. Write a sentence or two to describe the categories and what those words mean to you and your business
6. Extract one word from each grouping
7. Write a sentence about what that word means to you and your business 
8. Rank those words in a matter of importance

Step one is pretty self-explanatory, write down a list of words that you feel describe who you are, and feel free to ask your partner (business or otherwise) or friends to help you out.

Next, I want you to list at least six people you admire, important role models, mentors or valued connections. Write down why you admire them and what values they have that you feel are similar to your own.

Your past experience matters, and it’s time to pull from that past experience and put down on paper your past business and personal accomplishments, where you get fulfillment from in business and personally, and lastly, what the greatest challenges you faced in business and personally. You will find a correlation in how you dealt with each scenario; this will help you further identify the values by which you live your life by examining your experiences.

Now it’s time to take all of your values and begin grouping them together based on their similarities. For example, you might group family, loyalty, relationships and intimacy. Take those categories and write a sentence or two to describe the words in that grouping, why you chose them and what they mean to you.

Now take one word from each of those groups of words, you should have a minimum of five or six and write a sentence or two about why you chose those words out of all of the other ones that were there and how that word affects you, your family, your business and the world around you.

Take these five to seven words and rank them according to their importance to you and your business. 

Crafting the vision statement

Whew, quite the process, right? 

The next step is crafting your vision statement, which is defined as:

“An inspirational statement of an idealistic emotional future of a company or group. Vision describes the basic human emotion that a founder intends to be experienced by the people the organization interacts with; it grounds the group so it can actualize some existential impact on the world.”

Your vision statement will be:

• Future focused on internal
• Typically shared with your leadership team and your employees
• Should align with your values

Ask yourself these four questions when crafting your vision statement:

1. Who is the product or service targeting?
2. What is the product or service?
3. Where does the product or service operate?
4. Why does your product or service exist?

Your vision statement should encapsulate what the world or consumers’ lives will look like after your company’s vision has been realized.

Crafting the mission statement

The mission statement is the formal summary of the aims and values of a company, organization or individual. Your mission statement is your reason for existing, what you do, and where you do it.

It is a guide for the owner of the company to refer back to regularly when it comes to

major decisions for the company.

It is also a reference for your employees to come back to understand not only why they work for you but also why the decisions they make can and will impact the business, good and bad.

There are six questions that a mission statement should answer:

1. What does your company do?

2. Who does it do those things for?

3. Where does your company serve?

4. What type of business is it?

5. How does it do that type of business?

6. Why does your company exist?

Ensure that your mission statement has these three components:

• Key market: Your Target Audience is crucial to ensure your eye is always on servicing that client/customer
• Contribution: What does the product or service do?
• Distinction: What makes your product or service unique, and why should people use it or buy it?

You should be thinking about your mission statement as the here and the now; it is external; it is to tell people what your business is about and why your company is in business.

Why will agents leave, and why will they join?

I left you a teaser at the beginning of this article; agents will leave your team or brokerage for the same three reasons they will join.

A realtor will leave you because of competition. If they feel like the broker, the manager, or the team leader is competing with them in any way, you will find that agent checked out and looking to move on. They will leave their current brokerage and join you because of the lack of competition.

An agent will leave you because of the lack of value that they are getting for the dollar spent. I mentioned earlier that the brand value proposition is important but can’t be the only thing. If you aren’t providing more or better than your nearest competitor, that agent is gone.

Lastly, an agent will leave due to the lack of culture at your company. They will also join because of the company culture, which should be one of cooperation and not one of competition.

If you harness the power of clarity in your mission, in articulating your vision to your future agent and attract based on values, you will begin to build an organization that you can and will be proud of. One that members (most importantly) will tell their colleagues about.

The value you bring to the marketplace will not only help you retain your Realtors but also help you recruit new agents based on the testimonials of the raving fan base you have created within your company.

Kelley Skar

I am a second generation REALTOR®, SUCCESS Certified real estate coach, a real estate trainer with a proven track record as well as an international speaker (which means I’ve spoken all over Canada and the US).
I knew early on in life that I was going to be an educator; I started with University thinking I was going to be a high school teacher. Life took me in another direction. However, my passion for learning and educating has never left. I am a student of history, business and of life. My passion lies in high-level discussions around business strategies and helping agents & brokers build a bigger, better, and highly profitable real estate business.
I have been married to my beautiful wife for over 16 years, and we have smart, athletic and articulate 14-year-old twins. We enjoy hiking through the Okanagan together, spending time at the beach and on the lake as well as traveling the continent and hopefully at some point, the globe. I love to play golf, work out in the gym, hang out with my friends, and am a huge Green Bay Packers football fan.

The post Get clear on your brokerage & team values: A step-by-step process appeared first on REM.

Our route home, which was in Alberta at the time, would bring us through West Kelowna and then over a bridge into Kelowna itself. 

Each time we would cross that bridge and look out at the lake, framed by the gorgeous mountainside, we would sigh and look at each other and wonder aloud what we were doing.

Well, in 2020, we finally figured out the answer to that question and committed to moving to Kelowna by the summer of 2021. We accomplished that goal and are almost at the end of our second year in beautiful British Columbia. 

Of course, a lot of research, discussion and planning went into making this move and not just about where we wanted to live and what schools we wanted our kids to attend.

My wife and I are both entrepreneurs and run our own businesses, so we had to figure out how we would run a business in a new market. 

At first, I leaned into referrals and connected with a local agent to take on referral business; I saw some success there. But soon, the market shifted, and that business began to dry up, so I needed to alter my business plan and return to what I knew best.

Finding leads through YouTube content

I was an early adopter of video in the Calgary real estate market, starting my YouTube channel in 2010. I decided to focus on good actionable information that any buyer or seller would be searching for.

I would take a video, write a blog post, and put it up on my website. It took two solid years of content creation until my business took off in 2012. 

When it did finally take off, I was generating 30 to 50 leads per month, seeing tens of thousands of visits to my website monthly, and not having to pay a dime for ads. It was two years of gruelling work where I was not 100 per cent sure it would pay off; lucky for me, it did.

Fast forward to 2022, the market shifted, and I’m a new fish in a small pond where I don’t know anyone. I have no database. I have no SOI. I have very few past clients. So I went back to what I knew, YouTube.

But this time, I had to do things differently; I didn’t have two years to wait for Google to index my site and start pushing leads my way. I had to hack the system and figure out what was working to generate leads.

Study the strategies of those doing what you want to do

I started my YouTube search and came across a couple of realtors in the U.S. who were doing what I wanted to do. I studied their channels to determine their strategy, and from there, I developed my own path forward to get back into YouTube marketing and start generating leads through the channel and not exclusively through my website.

After months of studying these channels, here’s what I found:

1. The focus is on buyer acquisition by highlighting the community and giving knowledge about the area.

2. Typically, they used four to six styles of videos, and they stuck to that strategy.

3. Always stick to the topic of the channel; if you’re talking about your community, don’t start posting videos about technology.

4. Consistency is key to building an audience and generating leads; think two to three videos per week (this may have changed by now as Google/YouTube have shifted their focus to the quality of content and not quantity).

5. Good lighting, good audio and a standardized intro are musts.

6. Know your hook and how to grab attention through the video as well as video titles.

7. Descriptions are like blog posts; use them to your advantage.

In May of 2022, I set up my channel; I took the time to develop the strategy and then began posting content there in July. The content I was posting was somewhat sporadic. I was sticking to the plan in terms of the style of content, but I was inconsistent.

In October, I started getting really consistent with video uploads, and that is when the shift happened. 

I have been tracking my analytics since August, and with consistency and sticking to brand messaging, I was able to increase viewership and subscribers. 

Here’s what else I found:

• As I continued to post, my average monthly views and watch hours continued to increase
• This has a direct correlation with the number of subscribers generated
• The more content I post, the higher the impressions and views
• Thumbnails matter
• Video titles matter more
• Consistency combined with searchable content equates to results

I know realtors like to hear about the theory, but they also want to know if it works, and I don’t blame you. There are a lot of gurus out there talking theory without ever knowing whether what they are instructing on will ever work.

I am here to tell you that YouTube marketing can be a game changer for you and your business.

Start with a plan and strategy

Is my YouTube Marketing working?

In short, the answer is yes, it is working, and it is worth the effort. I don’t have the biggest channel in my market in terms of subscribers, but since the start of the year, I have generated about three leads per month. 

I have had Zoom calls with all of those leads, and we have shown five of those clients properties and have one under contract as of the end of March. This came from a five-minute video that took less than two hours to shoot and upload. It is going to yield a five-figure commission.

If you want to leverage any new medium, the key is to get started with a plan and a strategy. Determine what your messaging is going to be and who is your ideal target market or avatar. Make a list of content ideas and start to put together a list of topics you want to cover, then start shooting. 

If you need help figuring out where to start, watch others doing what you want to do. Study the competition and hack their system to develop yours. Plan, strategize and execute; it will pay dividends later on.

Kelley Skar

I am a second generation REALTOR®, SUCCESS Certified real estate coach, a real estate trainer with a proven track record as well as an international speaker (which means I’ve spoken all over Canada and the US).
I knew early on in life that I was going to be an educator; I started with University thinking I was going to be a high school teacher. Life took me in another direction. However, my passion for learning and educating has never left. I am a student of history, business and of life. My passion lies in high-level discussions around business strategies and helping agents & brokers build a bigger, better, and highly profitable real estate business.
I have been married to my beautiful wife for over 16 years, and we have smart, athletic and articulate 14-year-old twins. We enjoy hiking through the Okanagan together, spending time at the beach and on the lake as well as traveling the continent and hopefully at some point, the globe. I love to play golf, work out in the gym, hang out with my friends, and am a huge Green Bay Packers football fan.

The post Building a business in a new market: How to use YouTube to generate leads appeared first on REM.

If you don’t have a business plan, ask yourself why.

And don’t answer with, “I don’t know.”

Maybe start your sentence with “I don’t know” and end it with “how to write a business plan.”

Now we have a place to work from. In order for us to perform an audit, we have to have a plan to audit in the first place.

Write a business plan

So if you don’t have a plan, follow these simple steps to identify your lead pillars and get started:

1. Where did your business come from the previous year?
2. How many deals did you do?
3. How much money did you make?
4. How much money did you spend?

Project into the next year and identify:

1. Where do you want to get the business from?
2. How many deals do you want to do?
3. How much money do you want to make?
4. How much do you have to spend?

Break down the system you used to generate the business and identify what worked and what didn’t. Get rid of what didn’t work and focus all your time, money, energy and resources on doubling down on what did work.

Performing quarterly audits

Now that you have a plan to work from, you will need to perform quarterly audits to keep yourself on track to match or eclipse your goals.

An audit, by definition, is an “inspection of an individual’s or organization’s accounts” and also “A systematic review or assessment of something.”

In order to continue with the business plan we laid out for ourselves months earlier, we need to assess a few things before we proceed into the next quarter. 

Number one, are you actually fulfilling the plan? Have you done everything you said you would do for lead generation inside that pillar? If you have, that is great news; now you have something to assess. 

If you haven’t done what you said you were going to do, it’s time to get real and get accountable. You need to ask yourself why. Again, do not answer with “I don’t know.” If you start with that, you need to end with something that points to why you didn’t start in the first place. “I didn’t do that client event because I don’t know where to start.”

Second, you need to look at the system you have in place and identify if it’s working or not. The best metrics to look at are lead flow through the system and number of transactions completed relative to the goal.

I would say if you are building up your prospects and potential client lists but don’t have any sales, keep going. It’s only a matter of time before you break through, so long as you are following up. 

If you have no prospects and no deals, it’s time to be honest with the system you put in place and either scrap it or put it on the back burner.

Third, once you’ve been able to identify what has worked and what hasn’t, you need to focus your efforts on what is working and shelve (for now) what hasn’t. If you have five lead pillars and only three are working, shelve the other two and double your efforts on the successful three.

Analyze your budget

Lastly, how does the budget look? Are you under budget or over budget on your expenditures? If you are over, identify why and look for ways to get things under control for the next quarter. On the flip side, if you are under, understand how that happened and see if there are areas where you can deploy the same type of structure to increase your margins.

Real estate professionals need to start looking at this as a business. The person that owns and operates the Tim Hortons franchise down the block has to know their margins right down to the last penny. They know the cost of the cup, the cost of the coffee packets, employment, rent, mortgage, taxes, etcetera. 

Monthly or quarterly audits will help you continually improve efficiency, costs, service levels and ultimately, your bottom line putting more money into your pocket at the end of the year. 

It’s time for real estate professionals to start treating this business like a business.

Kelley Skar

I am a second generation REALTOR®, SUCCESS Certified real estate coach, a real estate trainer with a proven track record as well as an international speaker (which means I’ve spoken all over Canada and the US).
I knew early on in life that I was going to be an educator; I started with University thinking I was going to be a high school teacher. Life took me in another direction. However, my passion for learning and educating has never left. I am a student of history, business and of life. My passion lies in high-level discussions around business strategies and helping agents & brokers build a bigger, better, and highly profitable real estate business.
I have been married to my beautiful wife for over 16 years, and we have smart, athletic and articulate 14-year-old twins. We enjoy hiking through the Okanagan together, spending time at the beach and on the lake as well as traveling the continent and hopefully at some point, the globe. I love to play golf, work out in the gym, hang out with my friends, and am a huge Green Bay Packers football fan.

The post Are you treating your real estate business like a business? Why having a plan is crucial appeared first on REM.

Towards the end of 2009 I thought I had this business figured out. We had just come through one of the worst recessions in Alberta history and I had tripled my business from 2008, the year that I finally went full time into commission sales.

I had no budget and no database but worked open houses like they were going out of style. I door knocked and did all the old-school things my broker had taught me and it was working, but I could see a change on the horizon.

In fact, the change was already there, I just didn’t know it at the time. There were pioneers in the industry effectively using video to build their brand – Ian Watt comes to mind. In 2009 and 2010 people were still using Twitter to get their name and their brand out to the masses.

These times were pre-business pages on Facebook, pre-Facebook advertising, pre-sponsored posts on Instagram. Heck, there was no Instagram at that time. Looking back to 2010 it is easy to see that year was the tipping point for social media being looked at as a business opportunity.

Realtors and marketers were still looking at social media as a networking tool – a place to be social – but what some were looking at was a way to build brand awareness. This is where we come back to my story.

The title of this article was meant to draw you in, but the picture I am going to paint for you will show you that what I have been able to build was not easy.

At the end of 2009 I wanted to make a change to the way I was operating my business and the way I was marketing myself. I knew there had to be another way to get my name and my “brand” out to more than five or six groups of people that came through my open houses on the weekend.

I devised a plan that would use video and YouTube (this is pre-Facebook video remember) to push great content to help the consumer understand the market, and to give my opinion on what was happening in the real estate world as it related to changes made by government, governing bodies or the financing sector.

YouTube would be my library and Facebook, Twitter and my blog would be the channels I would use to push that message out. I would shoot and edit five videos every. This made for some very long nights of editing, writing and putting together the plan to push the videos out. There were nights when my wife would come and get me to come to bed at 1, 2 or 3 in the morning.

It took two years to see the payoff. The long tail. The long game. The grind. Call it what you want, the strategy I deployed in my business was not going to pay off overnight and I knew it. I was willing to put in the work because I believed in my vision even when others didn’t.

At the beginning of 2012 after two years of these late nights, my wife and I had a heart to heart. It was time, she thought, to go back to a full-time job and work on real estate part-time. She was sick of the roller coaster our financial lives had become. She wasn’t the only one, but I had to push through. I had to continue to build on the foundation I had started.

I made a deal with her that I would close nine transactions before the end of the first quarter of 2012 and if I didn’t, I would look for that full-time position.

I am still selling real estate so you know how that story ends.

Are you willing to put in the work?

There are many different channels for you to work within to build brand awareness. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, podcasting and blogging are the five I would start with.

Here is what I suggest you do to get started. Formulate a plan. Come at this plan from the idea of creating your own media company. That company is going to spread your message out to the masses and in turn will start to develop your brand.

Decide on the channels you want to use in your quest and remember that each audience speaks a different language. Use YouTube as the encyclopedia and Facebook as the newspaper or talk show.

Once those videos are shot and edited and uploaded, they need to reside on your website via your blog. If you are podcasting, you will need an iTunes account and a way to syndicate and post that podcast, again, to your website.

Use snippets of the video you have shot to continually promote your brand across all those channels. Use pictures, video and quotes to help bring awareness to those videos and podcasts on Instagram.

Most important of all, you must be consistent. You must decide this is something you are going to go after long term and not just in the short term. This is a chance for you to build your business organically without spending a lot of money. You will be spending your time building something that will pay off in the long term.

How do I know? Because I am living it. The opportunities that have come to me as a result of creating my brand and continually pursuing that brand awareness online has led me to speak at multiple conferences around North America. It has helped me to garner referrals from other agents from across the country (95 per cent of my transactions this year are from my sphere and referrals). It has helped me land a gig writing articles for your favorite Real Estate Magazine.

If you are willing to put in the work, you will see the return on your investment. Have a plan and a message you want to convey and be consistent. These are more important than the channels you choose to push your message out.

Kelley Skar

I am a second generation REALTOR®, SUCCESS Certified real estate coach, a real estate trainer with a proven track record as well as an international speaker (which means I’ve spoken all over Canada and the US).
I knew early on in life that I was going to be an educator; I started with University thinking I was going to be a high school teacher. Life took me in another direction. However, my passion for learning and educating has never left. I am a student of history, business and of life. My passion lies in high-level discussions around business strategies and helping agents & brokers build a bigger, better, and highly profitable real estate business.
I have been married to my beautiful wife for over 16 years, and we have smart, athletic and articulate 14-year-old twins. We enjoy hiking through the Okanagan together, spending time at the beach and on the lake as well as traveling the continent and hopefully at some point, the globe. I love to play golf, work out in the gym, hang out with my friends, and am a huge Green Bay Packers football fan.

The post Building a brand has never been easier appeared first on REM.