By Erica Christoffer

Quick skim

If cold calling, door knocking, and spending oodles of money on marketing don’t sound like your cup of tea, don’t sweat it, you can still flourish in the real estate business. Author Jennifer Allan will show you how in her book Sell with Soul (BlueGreen Books, 2008). No longer do you have to tarnish your principles to prospect. Challenging the industry’s status quo, Allan offers fun and easy tips on how to generate business and referrals with respect. Allan uses examples from her own career, while outlining the value of a hard and thorough work ethic to achieve success.

                    Buy the Book

From the Book: 5 Ways to Generate More Business Leads

1. Take your friends to lunch. Keep in touch with people in your social network by taking one person to lunch each week. Don’t make it an infomercial about your business. Instead use the time as an opportunity to catch up. After all, relationships are key. Next time someone at your friend’s office says they're looking for a REALTOR®, you’ll be the first to pop into mind.

2. Know your market. Look at houses, preview as much as you can, and put together practice market analysis reports. Be the expert your clients expect you to be, plus some. Knowledge and professionalism are impressive traits. Plus, your clients will trust you more when you know what you’re talking about. Allan’s mantra: “Competence gives you confidence.”

3. Spruce up the follow-up. Return calls and e-mails as quickly as possible — even if it’s to say you’ll call them back later. As a service provider, you should make yourself available and

accessible. It also makes clients feel respected and important. As Allan explains, she landed one of her first big sales because she answered the phone during dinner.

4. Take responsibility for your mistakes. In her early real estate days, Allan once forgot to present a client with the seller’s property disclosure. This cost her the removal of one very large dead tree, right out of her own pocketbook. The silver lining was her client became so impressed with her honesty and willingness to make the situation right, he continues to refer business to her today.

5. Consider blogging. Can you string a few sentences together? Good. Consider blogging about your experiences, your local market, or just everyday events. If you’re interesting and consistent, the readers will come — and so will the prospects.

Sneak Peak

“As a professional real estate agent, you will be well paid for your services, and your clients expect you to be competent at your job, not just competent at prospecting. Your paying clients don’t care if you have 10 listings or two, if you have five upcoming closings or none. They do care deeply that you understand the real estate market, that you’re a good negotiator and that you know how to look after them and their needs.”

About the Author

Allan got her start in the real estate business in 1996 and quickly found success with her thorough yet-laid-back nature. In Sell with Soul, which came out this year, she shows the benefits that knowledge, hard work and support can bring. A Denver native and prolific blogger, Allan encourages her peers to be true to themselves and true to their clients with her own style of lucrative business-generating ideas.

Posted on December 18 at 04:44 PM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)

The Weekly Book Scan caught up with real estate pro and author Bente Gallagher (a.k.a. Jennie Bentley) to talk about her new novel, Fatal Fixer-Upper (Berkley Prime Crime, 2008), a do-it-yourself mystery centered around a renovation project. The book follows New Yorker Avery Baker, who inherits her aunt's 1870s Victorian cottage in Waterfield, Maine. While she sets out to learn all about home renovation, she unravels family secrets with historical ties and clues to a missing professor in the area.

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Bentley used her experience as a renovator and real estate professional in Nashville, Tenn., to write the fiction book, which is her first published novel. In November, the book was No. 11 on the Barnes & Noble bestseller list for paperback novels.

Bentley is willing to respond to any of your questions, so after you read the Q&A, be free to post a comment or question for her below.

Where did you get the idea for the novel?

BENTLEY: I had first written an unpublished book Cut Throat Business about a real estate agent when I was a new agent myself. Whenever I walked into empty houses, my vivid imagination would start going wild. I would open the door to an empty house – and I realized that anything could be in there—you never know what you were walking into. So for that book, I made it about a real estate agent who stumbles over a dead body in an empty house.

My agent started sending it around to publishers and it made it to Penguin. They liked it but they didn't think a real estate topic would work for them. Their books are usually focused on crafts, hobbies, and activities.

Because of my bio as a real estate agent and renovator, they asked me to write a mystery series about a home renovator.

The main character in Fatal Fixer-Upper is renovating a 19th Century Victorian cottage and is often at odds with her handyman on the design. She wants to add contemporary touches and he wants to preserve the heritage of the home. Is that based on what you often see in real-life renovation projects?

BENTLEY: It actually it is. My husband and I have renovated eight or nine houses over the last few years. We love the old finishes and how homes were built back then. We've always tried to be very sensitive to that, and keep the original as much as we can in homes. So often the house may look old on the outside but then when you walk into it, it's been gutted to the suds and everything is new. That's strange. If someone wants contemporary, they can go buy one.

You always have to have conflict in a book so having these two at odds about how they want to renovate I thought would be amusing.

You even included renovation tips at the end of the book as an extra.

BENTLEY: The publisher often has tips at the end of their books on how to do various things mentioned in the book. Readers like to try out what the characters are doing.

So I made a list of five different crafts from the book and the publisher selected a few. In the book, it has tips on how to create a mosaic tabletop or countertop, and using lace to create

vintage kitchen cabinets.

Do you use your publishing success as a marketing tool in your real estate business?

BENTLEY: I talk about it on our Web site [Bentley, whose real name is Bente Gallagher, works with her husband, Michael Patrick Gallagher, also a REALTOR®], and we'll do some cross promotion. In our newsletters to our sphere of influence, we have real estate news and we'll include book news too.

But other than that, I'm not really promoting the book and real estate together. It ties in a little and gives me a little legitimacy as a writer — being a real estate and renovator makes me sound like I know what I’m talking about so I mention it when I do interviews and when marketing the book.

How long did it take you to write?

BENTLEY: I received a three book contract for 18 months so I have six months to write each book. So this book took me about four months to write, but it takes about six months then to go through the process from rewrites to deciding the cover, back page, etc.

This first book in the series I wrote last year around this time and it came out this November. The second book in the series will be coming out in August, and I've already started on the third book.

What are the other two books in the series going to be about?

BENTLEY: Avery and Derek, the two main characters in the first book, will be working on renovating more properties together. They'll be renovating a haunted house, a mid-century ranch in Waterfield, Maine. They'll find a skeleton in the crawlspace and when they lift the floor up, they'll find bones and another mystery will evolve around this.

In the third book, Avery and Derek then will renovate their friend Kate's old carriage house into a romantic retreat. They won't buy a new house to renovate in the third book because they need to sell the house from the second book first. They aren't overly rich people and they wouldn't be able to sell it that quickly. You have to inject some reality into it.

Each book will focus on a new house and one particular room for the crafts in each book. So in the first book, the kitchen was the main focus, and in the second it will be the bathroom, and the third book will focus on a romantic bedroom. There will be four or five tips at the end of the book again for renovating these rooms. For example, in the second book, I have projects for turning furniture into a chest of drawers for a sink base.

Did you always set out to become a novelist?

BENTLEY: It was always a dream, but I didn't think I'd be able to do it. I didn't take it seriously as a career choice. Writers are special people – they're my heroes.

Three years ago I met a woman who just moved here to Nashville and her book was about to come out. She was so normal – and I thought maybe if she could do it, I could too. She took me under her wing and showed me how to get a book published, and how to get it placed with an agent and then a publisher. Until I met her, I never thought it was something I could actually do.

Posted on December 9 at 12:35 PM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (2)

Get 12 tactics to succeed in any market. Listen to one tip a week in a series of free podcasts from best-selling authors Gary Keller and Dave Jenks based on their new book, Shift: How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times.

Keller is the founder of Keller Williams Realty International, and Jenks serves as vice president of Research and Development at Keller Williams.

You can download the Shift podcasts through your iTunes account by going to the iTunes store and searching for "Gary Keller" under the podcast tab in the business category.

Posted on December 1 at 10:47 AM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)