Interviewed by Obeo

Sam Rader is the man behind Tulsa’s leading residential real estate brokerage. He first purchased his Tulsa, Okla., brokerage in 1979. By 1985, he had changed the name to RaderGroup REALTORS®, and as his brokerage continued its success and growth, he purchased the Coldwell Banker franchise in 1989. Today, RaderGroup has 11 offices; nine of them in the greater Tulsa area and two in southern Oklahoma. With an agent count of 450, RaderGroup closed $875 million in volume with just short of 6,000 transactions in 2006.

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We are very sales-agent oriented. We try to emphasize sales agent training and professionalism across the board. We invest in a lot of training and marketing for our agents to be successful. In lieu of growing the numbers of agents we have, we are more interested in growing each agent’s business by increasing their personal productivity. We provide career track education and coaching/mentoring programs that will assist our associates in going to the next level.

We have a two-tiered, online and offline approach to our internal lead generation system. Our offline approach drives leads through our highly recognizable buyer’s guide magazine. This is complemented by our traditional newspaper print advertising program. Our online approach engages and captures consumers who have been driven to our company site through the offline programs. We not only drive leads through our company Web site, but also on about 10 other national Web sites.

We have made a strong commitment to virtual tour technology with Obeo as our marketing partner. We take virtual tours on all of our company listings and upload those tours to not only our company site, but we also syndicate them to other sites including REALTOR.com. Since we believe in increasing our agent’s productivity; we don’t have agents snapping pictures all over town. Instead we have two full-time staff photographers who are constantly in the market shooting listings. It’s easy; an agent turns in a listing, and the photographer goes and takes photos of it. We furnish that as a service to agents. It’s a win-win.

Another way we drive leads is to offer a free home-staging consultation for sellers. Upon request, we’ll send someone out to do that. We also have a company wide client follow-up system that what we call our “In Touch” mailing. We print quite a few thousand newsletters every month and send them to COI lists, our best clients and referrals. We do that through our marketing department for our salespeople at a very minimal cost, including the design work. As you can see, our lead generation program is working before, during and after the transaction.

We have a lot of training with our associates. We train routinely on following up quickly with electronic leads of all types. Many agents have their own sites and follow up directly. We don’t use a program like Lead Router.

Here at RaderGroup, we also have a relocation department and a special e-team that handles electronic leads that come into the company. We offer virtual tour services to our agents and load them to REALTOR.com. We then give our agents the capability to upgrade those to Obeo if they wish. We subsidize that cost for them. Obeo has some very nice programs and services that they offer, so quite a few of the agents like those enhancements. Obeo will upgrade a virtual tour, and then take that virtual tour from us and submit it to REALTOR.com with the upgraded package.

In this market, buyers and sellers expect a lot of assistance — as in all markets — especially with closing once you get a contract. They expect our agents to handle the details and hold their hand through the closing process. That expectation keeps our associates in the middle of the transaction. Most buyers in Tulsa, I’d say 75 to 80 percent, move less than 10 to 15 miles from their current home. We have local buyers and local sellers that are very familiar with our local brand. The more they use our salespeople, the more we stay in the center. We’re not seeing a lot of transactions being taken away yet. We haven’t seen a lot of aggregators or interlopers.

E-mail Sam