Need some advice on hiring

**DustinCA** · Oct 13th, 2011, 03:22 PM

Hi all,

I am getting started with my online real estate listing website. My idea was to put some ads online to hire, i guess salesmen, as a 1099 employee and have them work on commission. I am thinking about hiring a few people in every e city across the country to find owners that would like to list their homes on my new site. Now im running into a few questions as im doing this:

1) should i use just sales men or try to find individuals with real estate knowledge, say maybe a bird-dogger?

2)what is a fair commission on say a $70 one time listing fee for the salesmen?

3) I know that there has been a lot of issues with the whole do not disturb law, so I dont know how to get around all that stuff.

is this an outdated approach? should i focus more on say email marketing?

thank you for any input at all

**JackEdwards** · Oct 13th, 2011, 03:41 PM

$70 Bucks one time.. Commission only sales people. Epic Fail..

Sorry.. Rethink this...

Idea is ok.. Your way to sell it... Not so much.

**77startup** · Oct 13th, 2011, 03:51 PM

I'm under the impression that you need a "war chest" to hire sales people and pay them at least the minimum hourly wage?

**SHHDlove** · Oct 13th, 2011, 03:54 PM

Friend of mine is working for a company that is using commission only sales people. It wasn't going very well and they had to lay most of them off. Didn't help one bit.

You're going to need a website that sells itself, or at least sells without hiring a fleet of commission only sales people. There has to be trade shows in the area you can sign-up with, or websites you can advertise on...

**DustinCA** · Oct 13th, 2011, 04:04 PM

Originally Posted by JackEdwards

$70 Bucks one time.. Commission only sales people. Epic Fail..

Sorry.. Rethink this...

Idea is ok.. Your way to sell it... Not so much.

whats an epic fail? a $70 listing fee for a real estate listing, or hiring somebody on commission?

SHHDlove-the main thing im looking to try to get out of this is to have some listings when the website goes public. I was thinking of giving away free listings to everybody for the first 2 months, and get the word out via twitter fb and C/L ads. then on top of that hire some people for some phone calls after that, just so that there are some listings when the site is in the beggining stages

**JackEdwards** · Oct 13th, 2011, 04:11 PM

Originally Posted by DustinCA

whats an epic fail? a $70 listing fee for a real estate listing, or hiring somebody on commission?

$70 sale and hiring commission only sales people.. Will never work. Not enough money.

Also, here is a little fact, it is harder to give away stuff for free than it is to charge people.. Charge people.

**DustinCA** · Oct 13th, 2011, 04:33 PM

I completely agree with the whole free thing. I know if something is a certain price people tend to believe thats the value of it.

So when the website starts up and gets some traffic do you think people are going to sign up even if there are few listings in the beginning?

**JackEdwards** · Oct 13th, 2011, 04:43 PM

Originally Posted by DustinCA

So when the website starts up and gets some traffic do you think people are going to sign up even if there are few listings in the beginning?

no.. that is the biggest problem with new websites. It's the how do I get re listings and viewers fast enough to create value for the listers.

Defiantly an up hill battle..

**theBiz** · Oct 14th, 2011, 08:11 AM

Dustin, you need listings.........? Outsource it and get someone to copy the ads onto your website from another one..... or get a scraper that will automatically scan other sites then upload it into an file to then upload into your site.

Oodle did this to craigslist and look at them now.

I could have thousands of full ads with contact info on a site like that in days for under $100... you better get to work there are sharks out there.

Also i think the lowest with salesman you really can go is a maximum of $1,000 sale.

My buddy had a site selling services of up to $1,000. Salesman got small pay plus 20%. Out of about 35 guys 3 salesman were doing $1,000 per day making my friend some great money but the rest were doing $200-$500 a day on average. It was hard to keep people too because a ridiculous salesman was only making $200 per day commission, even that was hard to keep those guys, the rest of the 35 were recycled in and out. Sales manager sure had his work cut out for him.

The top sellers were getting warm leads but even those leads were deceiving advertisements so the salesman sure had their work cut out for them. B2C sales are tough.