What can real estate wholesalers learn from the hotel business?

Not many property wholesalers focus on flipping commercial real estate. Even fewer flip hotels. But no matter what type of real estate you are wholesaling, there are valuable takeaways that can be implemented to protect, improve, and boost your business. So what are they?

It’s About Expectations, Not Price

A recent study of hotels ratings and social media conversations about various hotel brands revealed that many of the more prestigious and higher end brands actually had the worst feedback. The conclusion was that this is because those paying more, expect more. Those expecting very little were more likely to be wowed by the property and experience. So how can you over deliver a little more?

Continued Bad Service Simply Won’t Fly

Real estate professionals can often find themselves falling into the same trap as old school banks, and the “he who has the gold, makes the rules” mindset. May be you do have great deals, and the inventory others want, but sooner or later consumers won’t put up with it. For example; it doesn’t matter how cheap hotel rooms are on Hotwire if travelers consistently have a bad experience. If they are travelling for a month, and a mistake is made in booking and their money is taken, but no room is provided, or on arrival the hotel says that they booked a single smoking room, when they are actually traveling with 5 kids, opinions go down south fast. Soon it becomes safer and more profitable for that customer to go pay more upfront in order to get more of what they want. If you don’t want to lose business to the MLS, Realtors, or other property wholesalers, don’t let service slip.

You Never Reach a Point When You Can Afford to Neglect Service

The above often happens when things are going well. But they won’t keep going well if bad customer service becomes a habit. One blunder that is made right is one thing. Three or five of the same mistakes, and little effort to repair the relationship is a new (low) standard. It doesn’t how big you are. In fact; the bigger you are often just means you have further to fall, you’ll fall harder, and there will be more people eagerly looking to give you a shove, and to step into your place. Most of us know Expedia and Hotwire, but does anyone remember Travelocity? Travelocity is actually still in business, but few remember the sight. What about the hundreds of wholesale mortgage lenders and even banks that folded and were bought out on the cheap in the last decade? Most of those that are left were basically taken over by the government. Do you really believe the government and tax payers will step in to bailout your wholesaling business?

Online Reviews Are Everything Today

There is so much distrust between consumers and businesses today. And a lot of it is sadly warranted. Today most consumers will check out reviews before doing business with anyone. They won’t settle for the testimonials and reviews you serve up on your website. They know that the feedback can be substantially different on other platforms. And it is so easy to do from a smartphone that consumers can check you out within seconds of meeting you. Are you going to do business with someone that has bad reviews? So find ways to propel and solicit authentic, positive reviews.

Positioning is Every Thing

Going back to expectations – the positioning you and your wholesale real estate deals hold make all the difference in how much volume you earn, and how much profit you can make. You are in control of the value that is put on your opportunities. Done right your positioning can attract more cash rich investors, high volume investors, and can generate more profit per deal.

Every Business Needs a Make Over Now and Again

Have you ever visited what you expected to be a reputable hotel chain only to find the rooms horrible outdated, and the amenities far from keeping up with the competition? How did that feel? How do you feel about that hotel brand now? The same goes for any type of brand. So is it time you gave your wholesaling website, presentation materials, and real estate marketing a makeover?

 

Authored by Best Transaction Funding BestTransactionFunding.com is the leading source of transactional funding and hard money loans for real estate wholesalers in the US, where 100% financing, and saying “Yes” is what we love doing all day long.

Savvy real estate wholesalers are building up big wealth in their digital assets. So how much is your wholesaling website worth?

Wholesaling websites can help not only fuel investors with lots of real estate leads and extra income, but can accumulate substantial wealth in and of themselves. In fact, according to a new report from website broker Digital Exits online businesses have been steadily selling for more than their offline competition.

If you are running a real estate wholesaling website anyway, why not pay attention to building extra value in it which can help attract investors and turn it into an extremely valuable asset which could be sold off in the future, at least if life emergencies take you away from the property industry? Or to make it easy for heirs to cash out?

According to the study which covered two years of online business sales data and 250 transactions the average sales price of an online business was over $514,000. Many have obviously sold for millions, with giants like Google even snapping up technology related startups for billions in cash.

Of course some real estate websites aren’t worth anything much at all. Some simply litter cyberspace with junk. So what makes a website valuable and how can you increase the value of yours?

Fortunately for real estate investors valuing an online business is much like real estate. You can either use the comparable sales method, or perhaps better; the income approach.

Digital Exit’s founder Jock Purtle reveals that not mobile apps or lead generation sites, but e-commerce and advertising models sold for the highest multiples of earnings. Those selling in the 2 million to 5 million range actually sold for the highest multiples, but Jock predicts a surge in under $200,000 website demand as investors get hungrier in 2014.

Other factors which can affect value include ease of operations, overhead, track record, multiple income streams, list size, and uniqueness. This can help make a simply wholesaling website with multiple revenue streams, a tight outsourced team, which is attracting opt-ins and has relationships with lenders like Best Transaction Funding for liquidity and low or no debt very attractive to online business buyers, especially if they are able to develop good branding.

What’s the secret to increasing real estate website conversions today?

Thanks to the increasing spread of the internet, a dramatic rise in mobile device usage, the integration of social media into every moment of our lives and the proliferation of pay-per-click options generating large amounts of online traffic is perhaps the least of concerns for businesses and organizations today.

However, there can be a huge disparity between driving in masses of traffic and website conversions. With discounted property opportunities still available in volume, plenty of demand and the availability of transaction funding for financing fast flips the potential for massive deal flow is here in 2014, but conversions are where the money is made.

Without high conversion ratios real estate investment company owners suffer not only lackluster ROI and large lost opportunity costs, but masses of wasted labor and the time advantage which is so critical to the ability to survive and thrive today.

The big question is how to improve your real estate wholesaling website conversions.
It all starts here…

1. Attracting the Right Online Traffic

As touched on above; between Facebook, pay-per-click and high quality SEO content pulling in web traffic isn’t that difficult. However, if all you are pulling in are bots, spammers, teenagers in the Philippines, or even the competition looking to scrape your site for content it’s not only a huge waste or resources, but can be incredibly counterproductive too.

The same goes for virtually any other type of real estate marketing. Direct mail, cold calling, TV commercials and outdoor advertising can all yield masses of connections if marketers are promising to give away a million dollars. Yet, that doesn’t necessarily mean any increase in revenues.

So the first key to higher website conversions is draw highly targeted traffic.

One way to stop burning precious marketing dollars for many today is to purge their social networks of fake followers they may have added in efforts to ramp up quickly. Ongoing social campaigns can drive in better visitors and secure the best followers by using layered filters for laser targeting who posts are boosted to and ads are shown to.

Win by knowing exactly who your best prospect is. Where are they, what are their interests, how old are they, where do they work, who are their friends, who do they follow, what do they eat and listen to?

Inc. Magazine recently reported that as much as 30% of website traffic is made up of bots and malicious predators that scrape and steal information while sucking bandwidth. Symantec’s new ad campaign proclaims 40% of cyber-attacks are aimed are businesses with fewer than 500 employees. Unfortunately, those attempting DIY SEO and traffic generation often fail to monitor which visitors are legit by their navigation patterns and end up compounding losses by catering to the wrong crowd.

Still the best tool in the arsenal of most is great keyword usage. The killer mistake most amateur content marketers make it going straight for the most general keywords which have the most traffic. Common sense (and the metrics) shows that in many cases these keywords are also normally hit with the most competition. If your organization has a $10k a month budget, and just 10 competitors are working the same keywords with multi-million dollar budgets the outcome is pretty, painfully obvious.

Get the edge with:
a. Constant keyword research to identify trending phrases with low competition
b. Applying common sense understanding of who is using which related terms
c. Using ‘long tail’ keywords which are considered to be indicators of users closer to being ready to buy

2. Optimized Content

By now virtually every real estate marketer is familiar with the need for responsive website design which automatically re-sizes to fit an array of user devices and screen sizes. Optimized content is even more important.

Different visitors will be turned on (and off) by different things. By tailoring content to users by where they come from and what they are most interested in website conversion rates can be dramatically improved.

Strategically flowing content, which is simplified rather than complicated with too many features, plug-ins and distractions can go a long way to funneling web traffic to tacking the most desirable actions.

This can be enhanced even further by directing online visitors to optimized landing pages which are focused on driving specific actions by motivated sellers, home buyers and other investors to get the most out of every visit and penny invested.

3. Testing

The truth is that there is no ‘one size fits all’ right answer when it comes to website design for improving website conversions. What may look great or work great for one product or service may perform terribly for someone else. For example; a book or online course targeted to the less geeky user may do fine with a long scrolling old school sales page, whereas a new tech product designer for the recent college grad may do better with a very short video landing page.

The only way to know for sure and to ensure ROI is being maximized is to deploy split testing.
Recently there have been many DIY products released which help organizations split test for themselves. However, professional firms run tests for their clients that split test hundreds and thousands of different variations to pinpoint the optimal blend of components with scientific accuracy.

Understand that everything matters when it comes to optimizing for conversions from page layout to the media being used, phone numbers, verbal branding, length, navigation options, shapes of buttons, and even the fonts and colors used.

There may be some art involved here, but those that aren’t ready to gamble their wholesaling marketing budgets and the future of their enterprises away must split test and base their campaigns on the science of the metrics, and more importantly the right real estate and web marketing metrics.