Interview with Parrish Foster

How one appraiser dug in and tripled his low order volume

Company: Campfire Appraisals
Website: http://www.campfireappraisals.com
Specializes in: FHA loans, rural metal buildings, and homes
Goal: "In 3 years, when someone thinks, 'OKC Appraisal,' I want them to think of our business."

Q: How’s business going?
As has been the case with many others, the going has been slow lately. In June we only had 12 orders. So, we decided to really dig in and do some intentional marketing. And now, one month later, it’s already paying off — in July so far, we’ve already had 32 orders! We’ve been so busy that we’ve had to turn down orders to catch up with everything.

Q: How are you finding the business?
Most of the time, people are finding us on the web. They go searching for an appraiser online for various reasons and we pop up. We’ve gotten two new clients recently because they said their previous appraisers were rude and stressed, so they went searching for a new one. They said that when they found our site, they were impressed with the content and felt like they would enjoy working with us. One of these clients has already sent us 15 orders in the last couple of months! As a side note about friendliness and customer experiences, we make always make sure to send out Thank You’s. One of our new clients told us that they’ll use him for all orders simply because I thanked them.We’ve also been enjoying more business coming as a result of the new FHA guidelines making it easier to get that work.As far as advertising goes, we normally don’t do anything that can’t be paid for in one order to help decrease our risk on marketing efforts. Here are some marketing tactics we’ve tried that have been bringing in orders:

We just recently sent out 200 XSellerate postcards and have already gotten an order. The target niche was homeowners, and our message was about eliminating PMI. We sent this postcard to a list of homes that we’ve appraised in the last 4 years, since we figured that many of them were at a place where they would like to (and could) eliminate their PMI payment.
Just last month, we started advertising on yellowpages.com. We went ahead and purchased an ad ($400/mo.) so we would come up first for the Oklahoma City area. We received our first order from the ad by the second day it was online. We’ve received 3 from that in the last month since we posted it. Yellow Pages also included some free Google “pay per click” ads in our advertising package. We’ve gotten several more orders from that too.
We plan to be included in the next phonebook printing when it comes out. Why? When I think about where to advertise, I ask myself, “How would I look for someone like this?” I compare looking for an appraiser to looking for a plumber. No one looks for a plumber until they need one. And where do they look when they need a plumber? Many times, they’ll drag the phone book out or look at an online directory. So that’s why we chose to have a presence in the local yellow pages — we think this is a good move to reach our homeowner niche especially.
Another marketing approach we tried was to sign up with appraiserguide.com. We just did that recently, and it’s already more than paid for itself. Before we advertised with them, we checked them out by calling their advertisers (that were not in our market) to see how it was going for them. That helped us make our decision.

Q: Someone recently forwarded me an appraiser ad from our local Craig’s List, and it turned out to be yours! Can you tell us more about that?
Well, since we were targeting homeowners, we went back to our question of how they would likely look for an appraiser. We thought of Craig’s List because it’s becoming a place where people sit and browse, and it’s free. So we tried it. We listed it in two sections:

In the real estate section under “services” from which we’ve already gotten four responses and an order
In the barter section which has already gotten two orders (both turned out to be cash orders instead of barter).Keep in mind that Craig’s List is free, and it only took me about 20 minutes to do, so it seems like a great deal to me. We’ll probably do it every few weeks or so to keep it fresh and see what we get.

Q: What tools do you use and how have they helped you?

Our XSite is such an important tool for us — that’s how many people find us. And being able to change the site myself whenever I want lets me update so much more often and keep the content fresh and relevant. That means I can target our prospects better, and it’s good for search engine optimization too. Some of the other sites we checked out didn’t let us do this as easily or as often.
The MLS import into WinTOTAL is an amazing tool once you get it set up. It saves a minimum of 15 minutes every report.
Disto and DaVinci: being able to sketch and not have to read anyone’s writing is great — especially when it’s raining since ink smears.
GPS device: I couldn’t do rural appraisals without it. We use the “Hunting & Fishing Garmin” because it shows us section lines. Many of our properties are rural routes and such, so you can’t find it by the street address.
Another of my favorite products is the Vault that I use to store and back up my appraisal reports. I don’t understand how anyone could not use something that can potentially save your entire business. When your house burns down or whatever, you’re out of business and out of compliance with USPAP if you don’t have a secure offsite backup. I don’t want to take that risk.

Q: Tell me a little more about your website.
Our website is www.campfireappraisals.com. We use a la mode’s XSite and didn’t have to do any HTML or anything special to it to get a great looking and highly functional site.

It’s our goal that when people visit our website, they see us as more than appraisers… we want people to know that we’re involved members of the community. That’s one of the main reasons we have local content on our site.

I make sure to change out images often, and update the homepage text every week. We chose a night photo of the Oklahoma City skyline instead of the typical day-time one you see so we would be differentiated from other appraisers’ websites in the area.

Our site is now set up to allow people to order appraisals online. We’re finding that more homeowners tend to order online, but we do have some mortgage companies that order online now, and we’re really encouraging more to jump on board since it’s more efficient for everyone and offers great communication and tracking tools for the client.

Q: What are the most popular pages on your website?
I’m not sure what the most popular page is specifically, but I’ve been noticing more and more hits going to our local content like movie links, weather, and local events. The beauty of these local content links is that I don’t have to do anything… I contacted local sites that I wanted to link to asking them if they were OK with it, and now have a good source of fresh information coming to my site every day. Of course, I checked these sites out pretty well for quality and content before I decided to link to them. I figure that if it’s not interesting to me, then it shouldn’t be on my website.

Q: What would you like to share with other appraisers?
I just want to share that there are orders to be gotten out there. And there are always going to be orders out there because people are always going to need homes.
To Elites: You have all the tools to do this stuff, so use them to market yourself and get more business.

Need more business? Click here to learn about our automated marketing program, XSellerate.

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