PHILADELPHIA — Over the last two months, Darlene E. Jamison, team leader of the RE/MAX-affiliated Jamison Team, has been sending more texts and making more calls. She and her husband, Kevin, are "planting the seeds" by asking past clients to keep them in mind for future moves and trying to find new clients as the housing market shifts.
"It was so busy throughout the summer that you did not have to go through that," said Jamison, who works throughout the Philadelphia area. "They were coming left and right, buyers and sellers."
Home buying and selling typically slows this time of year as holidays approach. But a year ago, mortgage interest rates around 3% kept buyer demand higher than normal. Seasonality has not only returned to the market, but home sales are also slower than normal.
Earlier this year and last year, real estate agents didn't have to look far to find buyers who wanted to capitalize on the low interest rates and sellers who wanted to take advantage of the competition among buyers that helped home prices soar. Now, with fewer buyers and sellers in the market, agents are relying on both time-tested and new ways of reaching people.
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Using social media to find clients has become standard for real estate agents, Jamison said, but it's limiting. Mailings work, she said, and calling also is always a good bet, "especially if you haven't spoken with someone in a while, because you never know who they know who's looking."
Agents are making a lot of calls and meeting up with past clients. They're hosting holiday parties and food drives. And some are sending out cards that look like they carry handwritten messages but were penned by a robot to save time.
The 'have-to' market
"I can tell you the phone isn't ringing like it was," said Philadelphia-area agent Maria Quattrone, founder and chief executive officer of Maria Quattrone & Associates and owner of RE/MAX @ HOME.
"This is the 'have-to' market," she said. People who have to buy or sell for one reason or another are still active. Maybe a family is expecting twins and needs more space. Maybe a matriarch died and left a home that needs to sell. Maybe accepting a dream job means moving.
"We have to talk to more people to find the 'have-to' people," said Quattrone, whose team of about 20 makes calls every day.
"And less people are answering the phones," she said. "Less people want to do anything."
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Real estate agents know that the market fluctuates. For years, so many buyers were looking for homes that agents didn't have to be skilled at finding clients, Quattrone said. Over her two decades in the industry, she said, she knows what it's like to "really have to work" for business.
"You have to work harder, and you have to work different," she said.
Trying something new
This year, Marc Silver, a Philadelphia-based real estate agent and adviser with Compass Real Estate, started sending a new type of card to past and potential clients. The messages appear to be handwritten. But although Silver crafted the words, a robot in Arizona wrote them down.
At a facility outside Phoenix, 175 robots owned by the company Handwrytten can each write up to 1,000 notes a day using approximations of human handwriting. The robots make paragraphs' edges jagged, bend lines of text, and make repeated letters in the note look slightly different. For an extra fee, clients can have robots write in their specific handwriting.
The idea is to capture people's attention and stand out in a pile of junk mail. People are more likely to look at mail that appears handwritten. Handwrytten says recipients tend not to think twice about the actual writing.
Handwrytten's clients include "everything from piano tuners and solar panel installers to Realtors and large retailers," said David Wachs, chief executive officer. Real estate professionals are one of the company's largest customer bases, with about 33,000 clients nationwide, he said. A couple hundred work in the Philadelphia area.
A handful of companies around the country offer similar services.
A new feature by Handwrytten allows agents to circle an area on a map and capture all the addresses in the area. Agents can filter by home value or how long someone has lived in their home.
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Mark Baker, who became a real estate agent in February and works for Keller Williams Newtown, learned in a company coaching program about the importance of following up with leads and writing notes.
"My handwriting's terrible to be honest. I can barely read it when I write it," he said. "I was looking for a way to automate it. ... I don't have a lot of time to write handwritten notes. So Handwrytten does it for me."
Baker's first client mentioned his Handwrytten note as one reason the seller reached out to him. The notes are more expensive than postcards — he pays about $4 each — so Baker uses them strategically.
New systems come with a learning curve. The first time Silver's office used Handwrytten, it struggled with the upload of a spreadsheet and accidentally sent the same card three times to the same list of addresses, "which sort of ruined the whole handwritten idea," Silver said.
But he believes in the product as one way to stay on clients' radar for future sales and possibly find new clients. He can customize messages on cards for celebrations such as birthdays, Mother's Day, and Father's Day. He pays attention to birth and college announcements and other life events and looks for opportunities to reach out.
"You can't just sit around and have things just land in your lap," Silver said. If agents focus on the right activities, he said, "there's a land of abundance to help people and serve people at a high level."
Educating to attract business
Quattrone periodically holds workshops for first-time home buyers, who learn how to navigate a home purchase, and Quattrone gets her name out to potential clients.
She also records educational and promotional videos for consumers, investors, and fellow agents that she posts on social media. She streams live on Facebook and has a podcast.
"People want to know who you are," she said. "They want to know what you do."
Silver e-mails equity analysis reports to homeowners to mark anniversaries of their purchase. The reports include a market snapshot, trends he sees, and homes in the area that have sold or failed to sell. He invites recipients to schedule time to talk with him.
Engaging with communities
Silver was a music teacher for 16 years and checks in periodically with his network of parents and students. He sets up coffee appointments to reconnect with past clients and meet new people.
He recently held a party for about 45 past and potential clients with food and pumpkin painting and carving. A photographer took family portraits for holiday cards.
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Dropping off a small holiday gift with a personal note for recent clients is a common technique, Silver said. He'll give something useful, like an oven mitt or turkey baster. A note will say he's grateful for their business and ask them to spread the word about his services.
Over a recent weekend, Baker at Keller Williams distributed about 150 brown paper bags to houses, seeking donations for his office's Thanksgiving food drive. If households filled the bags, someone from the office would pick them up.
In addition to helping the community, "getting the name out really is what it does," he said.
