We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jim Smith. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jim below.
Jim, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. So, we’d appreciate if you could open up about your growth story and the nitty, gritty details that went into scaling up.
Few real estate brokers can say that real estate was their first career. With a median age of Realtors in the mid-50s, most of us started in another industry. For me it was journalism. I didn’t start my real estate career until I was 54 years old. Realizing that it takes time to be known and trusted in this business and that I had a lot to learn, I decided to devote my time and resources to writing a column about real estate that I paid to appear as an “advertorial” in my local newspaper.
There’s an old expression that “you teach what you need to learn.” That’s very true, and journalism is a teaching profession. I had to study and master a topic before I could write about it. I started out monthly, choosing an aspect of real estate that I needed to know more about and that I thought would interest the general public. I’d research the topic, ask other agents, use the internet, and ultimately submit a draft to my managing broker for fact-checking and approval. This way I never embarrassed myself with what I wrote. I still send drafts of some columns to agents who know more about my chosen topic before I upload the ad to the newspaper.
Soon I was able to write a column every two weeks, and then weekly. When the Denver Post introduced a regionalized section called YourHub which allowed advertisers to buy just a portion of their circulation instead of full-run, I jumped on it, adding other editions covering a wider area over time. Today my “Real Estate Today” column is in every edition serving the entire metro area, and it is a continuing and growing source of leads from long-time readers who call or email me when they decide to buy or sell.
I also was paying to publish my column in the three weekly newspapers serving my primary market west of Denver. They gave me a great discount off their rate card (as did the Denver Post) because they knew I was creating readership for them with my content, so a year ago I asked the publisher what they would charge to run that full-page ad on page 3 of all 24 weekly newspapers in the metro area. She readily offered me a deal better than I could have asked for.
A sad truth is that 90% of Americans (and maybe of other countries) have trouble writing anything other than an email. Once I know what I’ll write about and have a firm grasp of the facts, I can turn out a good newspaper column in a couple hours. Then I will tweak, tweak, tweak as much as time permits, until I have a demonstrably good article. Real estate coaches say that it’s important to “touch” prospects regularly to stay “top of mind” with them, and to do so with “something of value.” I touch hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers (a great demographic, by the way) 52 times per year with information they find useful — a different topic every time. So that’s how I grew my business both for me and my broker associates without doing any prospecting whatsoever. I also have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m giving back to my community by being a good real estate columnist.
You can view my archive of columns going back over a decade at www.JimSmithColumns.com. I upload each week’s column to my substack account — http://RealEstateToday.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Journalism was my first career, beginning with a 1968 summer internship at The Washington Post. I started in real estate in 2002 as a broker associate at Coldwell Banker in Lakewood CO, In 2004, I was recruited by RE/MAX Alliance. Then, in 2007, I seized the opportunity to buy my own standalone building on Golden’s busiest street and launched Golden Real Estate, Inc. Soon I attracted broker associates and we quickly become a major player in the Jefferson County real estate market. In 2021 I moved the company into a storefront in downtown Golden and later sold the building I had purchased. The key thing that sets us apart from other brokerages is our weekly full-page column/ad on page 3 of the Denver Post’s YourHub section and on page 3 (or 5) of 24 metro area weekly newspapers. There’s no better way to become a top producing Realtor within a given market.
What’s been the best source of new clients for you?
Clearly and demonstrably, our weekly full-page advertorial in the Denver Post and 24 weekly newspapers is the major source of new clients. Every week or so I get a call from someone saying, “I’ve been reading your column for years, and now I’m ready to sell my home.” I estimate that 90% or more of my business (and that of my broker associates) comes from that newspaper column. There are literally hundreds and possibly thousands of readers who are thinking to themselves, “when I need a Realtor, I’m going to call him.” (The combined circulation is over 300,000.)
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
Frequently, when I go on a listing appointment, the buyer will have a manila folder on the table containing clippings of my “Real Estate Today” newspaper column. Once, after listening to a prospect’s needs and wants, I said, “I wrote a column on that topic a few years ago.” The homeowner opened the manila folder, and that old column was on the top of the pile of clippings. I got the listing. Experiences like that make me feel great, of course, and reinforce that I can never stop writing that column, and that when I sell my brokerage, I will have to transition the new owner into being the byline on that column so they inherit that goodwill and that following.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://RealEstateToday.substack.com
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/GoldenRealEstate1
- Linkedin: http://linkedin.com/in/jimsmith145
- Youtube: http://youtube.com/jimsmith145
- Other: http://goldenrealestate.com http://jimsmithcolumns.com http://talkingturkey.substack.com