Real Estate’s Best Days are Ahead

“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” So quipped Mark Twain after hearing his demise had been published in the New York Times. The same might be said today about the real estate industry. A lot of hullabaloo has been making its way through the web these days - the end of brands, numbered days for independent agents, consumers ready to do it on their own. Trouble is, it’s mostly punditry that supports these assertions. Certainly, real estate brokerage is under a lot of pressure to produce profits, cut costs and improve customer satisfaction these days. Even more likely is the potential for the industry to further downsize, eliminate waste and fracture between awaygrossly inefficient organizational structures and innovative models. But dead?Methinks some people doth... Read more »

Surprise! REALTORS Missed the Housing Bottom

What one phrase has done more damage to the housing industry - consumer and practitioner alike - in the last two years? “I’m waiting for the bottom.” Buyers have been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for prices to hit their lows. Those REALTORS who didn’t just quit (200,000-plus of them did) similarly stuck their heads in the sand, waiting for everything to just blow over. “When the market changes,” was the favorite phrase of meetings, workshops, articles and convention speakers. A few out there - the Harneys, the Stavers, even yours truly - continued to plead for sanity. Nobody has ever called the bottom of anything on time: from Tulips to Tech, market bottoms have consistently eluded all of the experts. So it should come as no surprise that the REALTORS... Read more »

Grow to Win

What do Hyatt, FedEx, Microsoft, and Burger King all have in common? They all started during recessions. And today they each are winning companies in their industries. Every one of them understood that recessions cause both economic uncertainty and reveal new opportunities. Their success is a result of capitalizing on the companies who went into “automatic” mode during good times, forgetting that change, and recessions, always come. One look at these companies today proves that recessions and innovation go hand-in-hand. They either invented or re-invented how their industry performs during a time when rivals tried instead to weather the storm. They took risks that helped them grow through the downturn, and win a dominant position in their industries. Read more »  Read More →

Let’s Not Ruin Social Networking

A month ago, I received the strangest email ever: An agent in LinkedIn blasted an email to her connections announcing her next open house. Sadly, it was little more than a cut-and-paste of the abbreviation-dumb newspaper ad she probably also ran. No photos, nor punctuation. Not even a hyperlink. More recently, a steady-stream of Facebook invitations have been arriving,  with impersonal introductions like, “If you know someone who needs a REALTOR in AnyTown, USA, send me your referrals!” Oh, sorry; I thought you wanted to be my friend. But the social networking abuse reached a tipping point yesterday: It seems some virtual tour vendor has made it “quick and easy” to mass-post your tours across multiple networks at once. Oh, goody: REALTORS are about to have no more friends.... Read more »

The Rest of the Listing Presentation

These days, too many brokers are winding down the clock to bankruptcy, with lots of help from their sellers. Too much misplaced blame has been on buyers of late. Other than foreclosures, we have not looked hard enough at sellers’ contribution to the inventory problem. And sellers are a problem. Too many brokers have trapped themselves with “list to live” strategies that have achieved anything but. No genius is necessary to see how holding a commodity for ten, twelve or twenty-four months, then selling after multiple price reductions, isn’t a business plan. It’s a going-out-of-business plan. No matter how large the commission, it’s barely enough to get out of debtor’s jail free. With record amounts of listing inventory still clogging the marketplace,... Read more »

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  • Real Estate’s Best Days are Ahead
    Posted on: July 1, 2009
  • Surprise! REALTORS Missed the Housing Bottom
    Posted on: June 23, 2009
  • Price to Sell in Any Market
    Posted on: June 18, 2009
  • Grow to Win
    Posted on: June 18, 2009
  • 37 Ways to Market a Listing
    Posted on: June 18, 2009

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  • Let’s Not Ruin Social Networking
      (5 out of 5)
  • A Difference of Six Words
      (5 out of 5)
  • The Future has Already Started
      (5 out of 5)
  • Numbers and Sense: Social Networking in Real Estate
      (4.9 out of 5)
  • Real Estate Renaissance: Focus on Opportunities
      (4.9 out of 5)