Hazel Goldman is a Realtor with RE/MAX Advance Realty in Pinecrest.
Every week, we ask a Miami real estate professional for their thoughts on the top three stories from the week before.
This week, we talked with Hazel Goldman, a Realtor with RE/MAX Advance Realty in Pinecrest who, in addition to 25 years of experience and her Master Brokers Forum membership, has sold more than $1 billion in residential properties in such areas as Pinecrest, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove and Brickell Avenue.
Miami Agent (MA): What marketing efforts have you found to be the most successful for your real estate business?
Hazel Goldman (HG): The one thing that I did was, I took out space on a billboard, and it happened to be at one of the traffic lights that sees more traffic than any place else in Miami-Dade county. It’s a revolving billboard, so there are three advertisers on the billboard and a series of flaps go around from one advertiser to another; so, you come by the billboard, you may see my ad the first time, you may be it a second time, and if you’re stuck at the traffic light, you may see it three times.
But I did it for years, and I can’t measure how many customers came from it, but everyone saw it and everyone remembered it. Years later, people would say to me, “Ah! I saw you on the billboard,” knowing I hadn’t been on the billboard for three years.
Ninety-nine percent of marketing anyone does is self-promotion; you have to do a certain amount of it so that your customers think your effort is going into the sale of their property, but the truth is you never sell one house from an ad; if it happens, it happens very infrequently. When you’re selling to people, you’re selling you as a person who can make things happen.
MA: If a fledgling agent approached you looking for advice on how to be a top producer, what would you tell them?
HG: The first thing I would tell them is to have a plan on working with buyers, because you’re not going to get listings until you have a track record. So what you want to do is, dig in to that and plan for that. The second thing is, if you look at each customer as a meal ticket, you’ll fail. If you look at each customer as an opportunity to establish a relationship, where you can convey the knowledge you have and gain respect and notice of that knowledge, you’ll gain a customer for life. So in the time you have with a customer, whether it be a 30 second phone call, the email you respond to, the time with them in the car, you have to get across from them that they’ll be more successul with you than without you.
MA: Have you found that there are any types of properties/amenities that you buyers are particularly keen on?
HG: Living in South Florida, everything in my area comes with pools, patios, etc. Once you get out of the realm of number of bedrooms and baths, the next thing that many of my clients want (especially my condo buyers) is all about views. What are they going to look at? What’s going to be built behind them that obstructs their view?
The other thing that I find that more and more buyers want is that though you’ll have buyers who want the fix-up, they only want it at a very deeply discounted price. More and more, most buyers would rather put the whole purchase in the mortgage, get the mortgage rates and have a pristine, really well-maintained property. Also, more people seem to be looking for houses that are lighter and brighter than the heavy looking houses of before, and my customers tending more toward the modern, with big windows and clean spaces.
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