When I started in real estate in 1986, I wanted to work exclusively with buyers because I thought that was the best place for me to start, and in many ways it was.  But, the old timers that were in my office kept saying to me “You have to list to last”.  What they meant was that in order to have a lasting career in real estate I would have to start listing properties for sale as well as work with buyers.  They reasoned that if I had a large enough inventory of saleable listings that buyers and sellers would would come to me.  I would be able to advertise myself and my inventory of listings so that I could attract more buyers for those properties as well as sellers who liked what I was doing to get those homes sold.  What wasn’t emphasized enough was the word “saleable”.  My first few listings were over priced monsters that no other listing agent wanted and I soon learned that I would have to learn how to price properties if I didn’t want to go broke advertising a bunch of overpriced listings!

My next revelation in the world of taking listings was that it wasn’t enough for me to know what the proper price should be, but I also had to learn how to present that information to the sellers in such a way that they could really understand why their home should be priced one way and not another. 

What that finally meant for me was that I had to carefully sift through mountains of MLS data and then somehow assemble it into charts and graphs that I could use in my listing presentations in front of the sellers.  This took hours, and I often missed some critical piece of information that would cause the sellers to question whether or not I was the right agent for the job.  The on the job training was brutal!

Fortunately for you, much of that problem has been removed by the use of some cool tools.  The one that I want to talk about today is AgentMetrics® from Terradatum.

Terradatum is in the business of providing tools to Brokers, Agents and MLSs that help you make sense of the raw MLS data.  They do this through a series of software programs that crunch the data and then present it in chart and graph format that can be emailed to clients or printed out and placed in your presentation documents.  AgentMetrics® has three modules that are exactly what you need to show the seller your market share, your knowledge of what the market is doing and how a property should be priced for maximum impact when it hits the market.

Here are a couple of screen shots:
You can select up to ten competitors to graph and you can show a variety of data related to days on market, market share percentage, number of offices and all of that can be tied to listings, buy sides and a combination of both.

You can save the charts to PDF or you can email them right from within the program.  This is a great way to show case the market share that your office has and can help you establish market authority.

This chart shows what the market is doing over a period of time and is a great way to help you establish seller expectations that are in alignment with current market realities.

It also shows whether the market is trending up or down and can be used to help a seller time their entry into the market, something that is crucial right now if sellers want to get their home sold and closed before the holidays!

This is the Pricing chart and is one of my favorites!  The chart gives a very visual display of where houses that are comparable to theirs are priced and helps them gauge how they can price their home to be competitive. 

You can also get a sense of how strong a particular pricing range is as well as how many homes are currently for sale in that range, both good things to know in establishing a list price.

So, to recap, AgentMetrics® provides real estate agents with a powerful, yet easy-to-use tool to create effective marketing materials, from a market share, to market dynamics and trends, and an innovative statistical price analysis perspective. AgentMetrics® is an intuitive, highly visual interface that makes these concepts easy to grasp and comprehend by agents. With AgentMetrics®, agents compete and process their business more efficiently, winning more listings, and increasing their revenue stream over time. The AgentMetrics® tool set includes: Pricing Analysis; Market Dynamics & Trends; and Market Share Graphs & Charts.

Terradatum offers a couple of different ways to get the program depending on wether or not your broker has entered into an agreement with them.  If your broker has, you can get the desktop version which comes branded with your company logo and information so you don’t have to deal with that.  And they have an online version that contains the Market Dynamics and Pricing Modules only.  This one is priced by the month with discounts for prepaying for a year.

At any rate, this is something that absolutely needs to be in your toolbox.  The money you spend for a year’s subscription to AgentMetrics® can easily be made up the first time you use it to properly price your next listing so that it sells in a reasonable amount of time.  And if you don’t have any listings, the old timers advice of “You have to list to last” is just as important today as it was then!