Agent Invitation is a web service that transforms how residential real estate agents and buyers and sellers find each other. After a (very) brief introduction earlier this year we enjoyed generous feedback from agents and consumers. We listened, and have redesigned the service to better meet the needs of both.
We are in “pre-launch”. That means we are new and looking for agents to join the site, so for a limited time we will waive agent membership fees to the end of 2010. When we have a sufficient number of agent members we will launch the service to consumers and charge new agent members a $29 flat monthly fee.
http://agentinvitation.com/agents
The back story:
My name is Don Stewart and I left a career in the technology industry to sell real estate in 2005. I took the courses, bought the coaching, interviewed the successful agents and this is what I learned:
If you are not prepared to risk significant money to look like you have a big successful practice already, it will take a long time to make a good living no matter how hard you work or how smart you are.
It is hard to get buyers and sellers to know who you are and to trust that you can do the job. It’s hard to break out of the pack.
I was a sole breadwinner and could not reinvest all of my commissions in advertising and promotion to grow my business.
The problem really broke down to a few simple things.
I needed to be able to:
- tell buyers and sellers what I am really good at
- demonstrate that I deserve their trust
- attract new clients quickly at a cost that I could manage
The big problem is you are only one voice in the crowd – it costs money for people to see you often enough to break through. You can rely on “word of mouth” and “personal referrals”, which are great, but slow.
It occurred to me that while we spend lots of time and money trying to impress prospective clients, we really don’t give them much information to help them make a good choice.
We rely on slogans and repeat views of our name and face to build our “recognition”. In most cases it doesn’t help the consumer at all, and might not help us very much either. It seems like the long line of people we pay for advertising and promotion are the real winners.
There are enough really successful agents to keep the rest of us thinking that if we just keep advertising and promoting like they do we’ll get there. Many big agents provide great service, but that doesn’t mean that they are the best choice in every instance – if that was true the rest of us should find another line of work! What we really need is a new way to attract clients that need what we have.
So I thought – why not get a number of agents together to give consumers a place to go online to find the information they need to choose a great agent for their needs? A pretty simple idea.
Every agent has a segment of the market where they are strong – a neighborhood, type of home, client profile, whatever. If you do great work your clients will speak well of you and tell others…online. If a buyer or seller knows they can go to one place to get the straight goods and find a great agent anywhere in the US and Canada they will support us – we can “attract” new clients!
This new web service is called Agent Invitation. It is built for like minded agents to gather in one place to tell consumers what they are good at, and offer client satisfaction star ratings and testimonials directly from clients so buyers and sellers can see who is good at their job, who they can trust, and who might be a great agent for them. Agents can post useful information about the communities they know best so consumers can research neighborhoods and find out which agent is really the local expert. They can contact any agent at any time or pay a small fee to ask a few agents to propose their services and fees.
Agent Invitation is in “pre-launch”. That means that we are new and looking for agents to join the site, so for a limited time we will waive agent membership fees to the end of 2010. When we have sufficient agents available we will launch the service to consumers and charge new agent members a $29 flat monthly fee.
If a client hires you and you complete a transaction we expect to be paid 0% of your commission. That’s right, no referral fees – we are not in your pocket, don’t sell leads and we don’t charge “success” fees. We charge a fair, flat monthly fee to be a member and that’s it.
Your part is to make sure that your information is complete and looks good on the site, that you contribute useful information about the areas you know best, and do a good job for your clients. Then, we believe, the rest will take care of itself.
So that’s the big idea. You are welcome to got to http://agentinvitation.com to have a look for yourself. You will land on a client home page where you can see what we are telling them, and can click to go to the Agents home page (Agents Click Here) to review our information and sign up for free.
This is a service built for you – so comments, suggestions are welcome and appreciated.
