How to Crush it...3 SECRETS to Thriving as a Virtual Real Estate Agent on YouTube

Can you have a real estate agent business that's almost entirely virtual? 

In this blog, we talk about dominating your local search results in Google and YouTube for free, because let's face it, we spend a lot of money as real estate agents, and we need to keep more in our own pockets. Can I get an amen? 

Today, we're talking about whether or not it's possible to have an entirely virtual business. I absolutely think that you can. Let me share with you some secrets of how my team and I are doing business without often meeting clients face to face, and in this environment, that's pretty much the only option we got, right?

Secret #1 is virtual showings for buyers. 

Now, virtual tours for sellers have been a thing for quite some time, and we've all seen these Matterport tours. We've all seen virtual walkthroughs for sellers' listings. But what if you are representing the buyer, and let's say that your buyer lives in, oh, I don't know, Germany? They are not going to be coming here on a weekly basis to see properties. So, what do we do? 

Well, my team and I do virtual showings. We get the client to sign an exclusive agreement to work with us because you wouldn't get in the car and start driving people all over town if they were not committed to working with you exclusively, would you? 

Okay, I did that a lot when I was a brand-new agent. I lost so much time driving people around that were not qualified to buy or that had no intention of ever using me, and then they wrote an offer with another real estate agent. Learn from my mistake. Do not do that. If they will not sign an exclusive buyer brokerage agreement to work with you now, they're never going to sign it. I'd rather cut them loose now than waste six Saturdays of my time before I figure that out.

So, you tell them how you're going to help them with this virtual service. They sign an exclusive agreement to work with you. You start emailing them properties that match what they're looking for. They go through the email and say, 'No, no, no. This one looks promising. Yes, this one looks really good.' And they get back to you and say, 'I love this particular house.' You then make an appointment as a preview showing. You're going to go look at the property on behalf of your client. And I usually tell the listing agent that my client's not able to join me, they're out of town, I'm gonna go look at it and preview it for them, take some video, give it to them. 

If they like it enough, when they come to town for their house hunting trip, it will be on their short list because they're only going to come for a few days, and you can't show somebody 32 houses in two days. Either they'll kill you, or you'll kill them, or it'll be a double homicide, and we don't need any double homicides in real estate.

When you go to the property, you can take a video with your cell phone, or you can use a 360-degree camera, which I love because then the client gets to wear the VR goggles, and they feel like they're really immersed in the house itself. They feel like they're standing in the kitchen as they're looking around. It's pretty cool. 

So, I did a video once before on virtual showings. You should check that out next. So, you take this great video of the property, you upload it, and send them the link. It's totally private. Nobody else is going to see this video except for your client. Now they know what that house looks like. They're not being misled by photos on Zillow that make the room look three times larger than it actually is. And when they watch that video, they're either going to say, 'Yes, this is a definite possibility,' or 'Nope, let's cross it off the list.'

So, virtual showings are absolutely a way that you can get clients to want to work with you exclusively because you are offering a service that your competition is not. Would you agree that this sounds like a good idea? You sure think so.

Secret #2 is using electronic signature software. 

Now, I am still amazed at how many people are not doing this. When I got my real estate license, and I was working on a file, I would sit down at the conference room table and spread out all of my paperwork and go through all of these papers, trying to make sure that everything was initialed and signed and all the things. And it would literally take me hours every time I sat down to do this. So much time wasted. Thank goodness technology has come around, and we don't have to do that anymore. 

Now we use electronic signature programs like Dotloop, DocuSign, zipLogix, you name it. You fill out everything online, you email it to your client, they click, click, click, click, adopt the signature, and it sends it back to you when it's done. You don't ever have to print out a piece of paper if you don't want to. You can make it entirely online. And not only does it make your life easier, it makes it faster to collect signatures because you don't have to drive an hour each way to get your client to sign three pieces of paper and then drive home again. We're also saving a tree, so I'm sure that makes them very happy too. No trees had to sacrifice their lives in order for our files to be complete.

But now, secret #3 is about lead generation.

This is arguably the most important point because we have to be generating leads every single day in order to fill the pipeline and always have more people to work with and have deals in the pipeline so that we get paid, and we actually put a roof over our heads and put food on the table. Now, in our current environment, door-knocking and open houses are just not really an option. You could cold call for hours every day, but that's a hard pass for me. I could buy leads from the big portals, but I refuse to do that because that makes us a commodity. That makes us compete against each other on price. 

Whoever is going to do it for the least amount of money becomes the winner. Plus, the prospects start to assume that we are available on demand, and that they can text us at midnight, and they should expect a response within five minutes because when we get the lead, we have to respond that quickly in order to get them as the client. We are training them how to treat us, and I am not okay with that. I am not going to answer my phone 24/7. I am not going to answer my phone on a Saturday night when I'm on date night with my husband, or I'm taking the kids to the movie, or we're at the pool. 

There are times when I'm working, and there are times when I'm spending time with my family. And if I'm with my family, I'm not answering phone calls 24/7. And quite frankly, I don't want the client that thinks that that is okay and expected. They need to be respectful of my downtime the same way that I would be respectful of theirs. Can you tell that that's kind of a sore subject with me? I'll get down off the soapbox now.

So, what do we do instead? Well, if you've followed me for any length of time, you know that I love me some YouTube. YouTube is the way that I generate the vast majority of clients for my business, not only for myself but for my entire team as well. We make YouTube videos where we showcase our area, what it's like to live here, what you need to know if you're interested in buying or selling a house, fun things to do here, everything about Savannah that someone interested in living here would want to know. As a result, they find our channel, they start watching the videos, they get to know, like, and trust us, and I hear time after time after time when we get a brand new lead that the person invariably says, 'I stumbled across your YouTube channel. I feel like I know you already. You guys are the ones that we want to work with.'

So, not only do you get a better caliber of client because they already know you, they already see your value, they're not just looking for whoever is going to give them a rebate off of their commission, and they're usually not interviewing anybody else. They've already decided to work with you, and so when they pick up the phone and call you or send you that first email, it's a done deal. There's no conversion going on because they've already picked you.

Now, don't just take my word for it. This is a note from Anne. Anne is one of the students in my coaching program. Anne posted this in our Facebook group recently, and she said, 'What can I say? Stoked, blown away, amazed, thankful, all of it.' And Anne's British, in case you couldn't tell. 'I've been a realtor for 20 years, and today I got my first lead from YouTube channel, and it only has two videos.' 

So, if you put the content out online, you attract the client online. You do some virtual showings for them. It is very possible to have an entire business model set up that is virtual, and it is replicable and scalable. 

If you would like to learn how to do this for yourself, join me on my YouTube channel where I provide teachings on how you can get business from your own YouTube channel.