Day 2 - continued

Then we got to hear from another REIA leader who has turned around a declining group and got it growing again.  Tom Zeeb from the Capital Area REIA in Washington DC  He had a lot of ideas for us on how to attract new members and we plan to implement many of his ideas so we have new faces at our meetings for you to network with or share your service.  And the bigger the community, the more clout we have when issues come up  that are bad for investors, like billing the landlord for the water if the tenant does not pay.

And many of these ideas will translate over into your business.

1.  You have to have Video on your site, so figure out how to record Video and drop it into your site.  So do short 30 second to 2 minute videos and put them all over your site.

2.  Use your face, and as an investor I can't figure out what investors barely put their name on the site, let along their photo - realtors personalize their marketing well - so why don't we as investors, let the people know who they are working with.

3.  Take some time to reduce costs, - renegotiate contracts on your rent, your phone service, anything you pay money for on a regular basis, if you have not put services out to bid this year, do it, you might cut $100s off your expenses.

4.  His group has gone to a full time quarterly membership that auto bills the member's card once a quater.  They are paying a bit more through out the year, but in smaller increments - I need feedback from the members on this. 

5.  Their group also put together their own Lead Generating web site for motivated sellers than feeds into a call center that shares calls with the members who pay for the service in a round robin type of thing.  I think all the Home Vestors Franchises had this at one time in Kansas City and they pooled their money for all the bill board ads to get the calls to go to the main web site or an 800 number and the call service had a round robin feed to each of the home vestors owners - I need to know more about this because we need to do it - bill boards and massive web sites can be cost prohibitive, but with 10 investors pooling funds, it can be more effective.

6.  He talked about sub groups - their group has a womens only group ( we heard this yesterday) and they have a night owls group that meets once a week except for the week of the main meeting.  They meet from 10 to midnight and it is very well attended. - I want to do subgroups more at MAREI, but I need sub group leaders. 

7.  He also suggested we include on our name tags what our specialty is, so that we all know exactly what the person we are talking to at the meeting does.  We are going to try to implement this, so does anyone know where I can buy specialty stickers?