March 31, 2011
Orangeville Citizen/Free Press and Economist
A3
Local award winner tells the real estate secret By LINDSEY PAPP Staff Reporter
Kevin Flaherty, a local sales representative with iPro Realty Ltd. Brokerage, has been awarded the 2010 Overall Top Sales award. Surprisingly, Mr. Flaherty says the reason for winning the award is more important than the award itself. According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 96% of buyers will first be introduced to your home online, where they will short-list it based on the quality of information and images provided. “Essentially what (buyers) are doing, is finding their next home online,” said Mr. Flaherty. “Your home is tried and convicted online; that is the secret that realtors don’t want you to know.” He believes that nine out of 10 people who search online use the short-list process. Buyers type in specifics like a price range, specific features of a home and scan through the search results, skipping over results with little or no pictures and poor representation of the home. “The thing the public generally misconceives about realtors is realtors are independent contractors. The service that they provide is not unique to the real estate brokerage they are with, it is unique to the individual realtor,” he said. “What a realtor does is up to them individually, which means you could interview 10 realtors from the same company and get 10 different
answers on what they are going to do to market your home.” He says the most common reaction from sellers to his system is surprise. “There was a case last year in Alton where somebody was trying to sell their home for over two years, and they couldn’t sell it. I sold it in seven days. Those stories go on and on,” he said. “They didn’t start doing their homework until it became critical for them, because of the belief that all realtors are the same.” They aren’t aware of the amount of work getting done in the back ground because of their information on what standard real estate services are. “If you look at the industry standard in real estate today, you don’t have to look very far to see exactly what I’m talking about. All you have to do is look through some pictures on any listing,” he said. “If people’s homes, our largest investment, are being short-listed online, the online representation is critical and essentially providing these services is what put me in the number one place.” Mr. Flaherty provides custom Web pages, a detailed narrated tour of the home and property, professional photography, floor plans and top quality feature sheets. “This custom webpage ties directly into the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system so with one click, customers can be on a homes custom webpage that contains all this high end information,”
said Mr. Flaherty. “The online representation of your house is absolutely critical. It’s not a nice feature, it’s not a cool benefit. It is the beginning and the end, it’s incredibly important.” Once the online representation is complete your homes personal website is then syndicated to many other places above and beyond the MLS site. “When we take a good representation and syndicate it to all these places online, the power of that marketing, and quality, definitely without a doubt becomes extremely powerful.” According to Mr. Flaherty the cost to produce this selling feature for each home is over $3000, these features are provided to sellers at no extra cost to themselves. “Generally speaking, my fees aren’t any higher than any other realtor’s fees,” he said. “There’s many services not done because of their expense, their time, the knowledge it creates and the knowledge you have to have to provide them.” This system has been evolving since the mid1990s. He says he was one of the first realtors in Canada to be as predominant online in the mid 90’s. “It didn’t do a lot for me then but since that time,” he said. “So we would slowly start increasing the quality, and we will continue to upgrade the system so that it stays cutting edge marketing.” Mr. Flaherty has been in the real estate business for 23 years and he commented that the industry itself hasn’t
evolved or changed since the ’90s. “When I started in real estate I was using a Polaroid camera,” he said. “You can’t find this package anywhere, I keep looking, I keep inviting buyers to find tour or aspects of service that are better quality and they can’t.” Mr. Flaherty stated that another benefit of the detailed video tour is the reduction of unnecessary traffic through your home. “If you saw a tour of this detail, do you think you would need to go see the home if you weren’t interested?” he said. “Bottom line, it’s a lot of hard work. At the end of the day people will get significantly more money for their house when using this kind of marketing.” He stated that providing this type of service with no extra cost to sellers is due to the increase in business it has brought him. “If I was trying to provide this service and wasn’t doing a lot of volume, it would be very difficult because it does take a large chunk out of the profit margin,” he said. This system has become so popular that in order to keep up with the business Mr. Flaherty has had to hire two sales representatives and a full-time administrator. “There was a house for sale in Orangeville for $380,000 for six months, and he called me and he was saying that it didn’t make sense for him that the realtor was telling him to reduce his price. I sold the house in three days – firm, not even conditional, for $430,000,” he said. “That’s how powerful proper marketing is.”
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TOP SALES AWARD: Kevin Flaherty (right) receives the iPro top sales award from Alves Rui, owner/broker of iPro Realty Ltd. Brokerage.
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