Much time and money is wasted focusing on weaknesses we are likely never to overcome. A company’s competitive strength is always derived from their strengths, not their failings. Stop trying to do that which you perform poorly, and spend more of – all of – your time doing that at which you excel. Why struggle with listing presentations when you’re a much better paperwork person? Likewise, bean-counters should never be asked to hold an open house. The hardest part will be realizing you need partners – a team – because very few of us are really excellent at everything.
Martial arts masters use their opponent’s strengths against them. Today’s business innovators can do the same. Rather than imitate or go along with the market leaders, discover what makes them vulnerable. Then target your competitive activities directly at these weaknesses. For example, the company with the most listings also has the most expenses. Imagine if your company had little or none? What could you accomplish that they cannot?
The computer is powerful. Email is wonderful. Social networks exciting. But remember the pen is often mightier than all. Not all activities need to be computerized. Brainstorm with a pen and paper. Send a thank you message on a note card. Draw a picture on a flip chart. Great ideas and business often happen on the back of a napkin. You can turn them into a computer file later.
Much time is wasted nowadays trying to do too many things at once. Try the “off” settings for your interruptions, and focus on critical activities for extended periods of time. Don’t try to work with your phone on, email beeping, office door open. Create some space and silence; then focus on your work. You’ll get more done – better, sooner – and feel less chaotic.
Don’t be sad that consumers aren’t attending your Sunday open houses; they aren’t even attending Sunday Church these days. So it’s time to expand their options – and your business – by offering open houses other days and times. Try lunch time during the week; Early bird open houses at 7am. Stop-by rather than fight traffic at 5. Busy buyers need more options than just the traditional Sunday stop-in. With six other days of the week, experiment with choices.
The customer is always right; but they aren’t always right for you. If you know what you’re trying to accomplish in your career, you’ll know when certain customers aren’t a “match” for your goals. This makes avoiding bad choices – like taking an overpriced listing or spending time with un-serious buyers – much easier. It’s perfectly acceptable to say “No, thank you,” when presented with a bad business offer. Try it.
According to NAR and Radar Logic, home prices rose month-to-month from April to May in 10 cities in America, like Boston, Charlotte, Seattle and Denver. Words like “recovery” are used in the press release, because, at least from the Voice of REALTORS, the word “inflation” is off limits. Since the press release is just a snippet, it’s likely to be passed around without much analysis. Too bad, because it’s likely to mislead a lot of consumers. Let’s just do a little math: According to the data, home prices rose around 3-5%. According to another report from NAR, the median sales price natiowide in the first quarter was around $196,600. If we take the median increase of 4% of the median price, you’ll get $7864, which is awfully close to the $8,000 tax credit for first time home buyers. Which means, if we’re really honest, the home price increse isn’t due to positive market forces, like recovery, but negative forces, called inflation. And a very specific type of inflation: market distorting, government subsidy-dollar inflation. That’s not any sign of a housing recovery. That’s simply called smart sellers. They know that buyers have access to free Greenbacks, so they bumped up their [...]
Nowadays it’s common to see overpriced listings. But rather than fall into the same trap as others, why not try something altogether different. Stop pricing your listings at all. Instead, let the consumer determine the right price every time. Placing property in the market in “price zones” opens the property to far more buyers who might otherwise have disqualified the property because of an arbitrary “search” criteria on a website. Simply offer properties “in the mid $300s” or “starting around $200k” and open the potential pool of buyers as wide as possible. Try it.
What’s better: a complicated marketing campaign combining timelines, tasks, calls, emails and to-dos – or a simple repeating calendar reminder to contact important clients and prospects? Real estate is one of the easiest jobs we often make more complicated than it has to be. Stop over-planning and start doing what you can right away. Make a call. Send an email. Do it regularly, but don’t worry about doing it complexly.
Of all the resources, time is the most scarce. Money, technology, even knowledge are more abundant. How we spend our time each day determines how close we come to reaching our goals. Scheduling important activities first, managing interruptions and dedicating consistent periods of time to critical tasks such as prospecting or customer research, can make the difference between real estate professionals who are lucky enough to become successful, and those who purposefully get there every time. Think about it.
Readers of our column know that we called the beginning of the end of search engines some time ago, when we noted that Facebook and MySpace had already started to generate more ad views and targeted traffic than Yahoo and Google. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t seem to have read our post, and went ahead with Bing. Microsoft calls it a “decision engine” and it certainly works differently than the traditional search sites. Yet technology improvements aside, none of the search engine players have considered the basic question: Do people really “search” for things on the internet any more?
What separates good agents from great ones? Almost always it’s a matter of goal clarity. Great agents have a written business plan – as straightforward as one sheet of paper – that identifies their specific goals. This helps them connect their daily activities to their desired outcomes, and make key decisions about anything – marketing, technology, whether or not to take a listing – by asking: How does this help me achieve my goals? Anything that detracts from reaching their goals is eliminated. Everything that has to be done to accomplish goals and reap rewards is moved to the front of their daily schedule. Without goals, most agents simply do lots of activities, and waste time, energy and money. Think about it.
Ten Questions with Real Estate Expert Matthew Ferrara By Dianna Kawell Reposted with permission from WCR’s site.Real estate is becoming an increasingly technology-driven industry. Every day, a typical REALTOR® depends heavily on her laptop, GPS and digital camera to get the job done. For what was long believed to be a face-to-face business, 88 percent of REALTORS® now report using e-mail as the preferred method of communicating with their clients.However, REALTOR® Web sites may be the one neglected piece of the technology puzzle. Perhaps, it is because agents see little tangible results from their personal Web sites. In the latest Member Profile from the National Association of REALTORS®, members reported on average just four inquiries generated by their Web sites over 12 months—accounting for just 3 percent of their overall business for that year.In the past year, with members reporting a 14-percent drop in gross income from real estate, these already neglected Web sites have seemingly moved completely to the back burner. NAR is reporting a 20-percent drop in the dollar investment that REALTORS® are making in their Web sites from 2007 to 2008, with the number of REALTORS® who invested zero dollars in their Web sites increasing from 18 [...]
Two seemingly different mediums collided in my brain last night. First, I was reading a front-page story about a home that was struck by lightning and burned down the night before. I didn’t recognize the street name: Was it nearby or across town. My first inclination was to look for a map. Of course, there was none in the newspaper. My second inclination was to right-click something and Google-up a map. My fingers actually flexed for the mouse. Frustrated, I threw down the newspaper. Switching on the television, I fired up my new favorite show “Real Estate Intervention” on HGTV from the digital recorder. The show features real estate agents showing sellers comparable homes in their marketplace, to provide market perspective on how their home is competitively situated – especially on price. I like this show particularly, because I had a similar idea suggestion for REALTORS recently, and also because it shows how anyone who fails to ask, “What does my customer want?” is doomed to failure. After the end of the show, I looked back down at the newspaper on the table and then back to the freeze-framed screen and declared out loud: “Newspapers and sellers just don’t get [...]
In one of the cruel ironies of the housing market today, the total number of units sold this year isn’t that far from historically normal volume. According to the National Association of REALTORS, the seasonally adjusted annual rate for sales in May is around 4.77 million – generally trending the pre-bubble long-term volume for a typical year. Some segments continue to decline – such as housing starts – but it makes sense to stop adding more units to the million-plus excess inventory units available already. Clearing the excess inventory remains an important goal for the market. Only when supply and demand level off will prices stabilize. Yet real estate companies find themselves doing the same (or more) work for less results. Even selling historically normal units prevent a revenue decline; and nobody’s picking up “extra” units these days. With median home prices down 30% to around $173,000, volume strategies alone cannot sustain most brokerages. Thankfully, the consumer has provided real estate professionals with a ready-made solution. It’s up to brokers and agents to start selling it. Just like they used to.
