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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 protest too much.

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Points of Perception

Peter Drucker noted that when the general perception of a situation switches from “the glass is half full” to the “glass is half-empty,” major innovative opportunities were possible. The change in perception usually starts with the consumer, not the industry. It rarely reflects a real change in the facts, more than what the facts have come to mean to the consumers. For example, today represents the best time in fifty years to purchase a home. The stars are perfectly aligned to purchase low, borrow low and maintain low monthly costs. Most consumers would be long-term winners with a real estate purchase today. Yet the perception of real estate in general has become “half empty” in the minds of both buyers and sellers. Consumers no longer associate real estate with happy thoughts, even if they recognize it as a sound financial investment. That perception change is profound. And it’s keeping them on the sidelines. What can the real estate industry do, then, when even if we lead the consumer to half-empty glasses of water, we cannot make them drink?
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Who Moved My Maze?

Fans of Spencer Johnson’s book will recognize the theme in today’s column: Something has definitely moved in today’s real estate industry. For decades, the industry built by Baby Boomers for Baby Boomers has essentially run the same race through the maze, finding the cheese almost every time. Periodically, the cheese was moved or a wrong turn was taken, but never very far and never a dead end. Usually, within months, the industry figured out how to navigate new turns and once fattened themselves again on the rediscovered cheese. Yet could a recession have pose a different problem to this “re-routing strategy” for managing change?

What happens to an industry when it isn’t just the cheese that has been moved but the entire maze?

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The Real Meaning of Days on Market

Real estate is a tricky business. At some point, you’d expect things to “mean” what they say. Yet we’re an industry that can’t even decide what exactly constitutes a “bedroom.”  In some markets, it’s a broom closet; others extend the definition to unfinished attics. Of course, small dens and breakfast nooks in big-city condos qualify as bedrooms as long as a curtain divides them from the next room. Funny stuff, but it gets more serious when you try to apply these definitions to market data. If we can’t decide what certain market data means, how can we plan a business strategy around it? When current listing prices are sketchy, foreclosures skew sold data and “for sale by owner” inventory makes it impossible to determine meaningful absorption rates, wouldn’t it be nice if we could just pin down the meaning of something simple - like “Days on Market”?

Ironically, even that market metric is sorely misunderstood.

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The Other Side: How to Attract Future REALTORS

Recently we pointed out that the next generation of REALTORS will come from non-traditional sources. As brokers focus more on productivity than body-count, and the recession will ultimately teach them this business lesson. A more rational, performance-based method of building real estate companies will emerge. Traditional “Ponzi” schemes of filling the bottom with as many people with a license-and-heartbeat will fade away. It will become less frequent, not more, than inexperienced sales people will be thrown into the office mix. This positive lesson, while long awaited, will help brokers reconfigure their strategies for the future. But what about salespeople? How will they know whether it’s right for them to join a particular company? Let’s look at the other side of the recruiting question for a change.

In the future, real estate salespeople will still be independent contractors; As long as brokers and agents can milk the tax loophole, they will. Whether or not that has any impact on performance, however, is a non-argument. The best agents in the business are the best, not because of their tax status, but because they surround themselves with the right productivity environment. Entrepreneurial salespeople know that the key to their success is to make the right choice of brokerage. They want to join companies that balance teamwork structures with ample independent creativity to unleash their knowledge as workers.

Future agents will join companies who produce; not necessarily those with the most stuff. Read more

The Other Broken Real Estate Market

Everyone knows about the 90/10 rule: 90% of the business is done by about 10% of REALTORS. Translated to a consumer experience, this means that most buyers and sellers have about a 1-in-10 chance of getting the “best performing” agent to sell their home or represent them in a purchase. Even a generous assessment of the business - quartiled for the top 25% of agents who generate more than $200,000 in commissions annually - leave the underperforming-bottom 75% of the business to muck up the works. And while banks, lenders, Fannie, Freddie, Frank and Dodd all share some blame for causing the current crisis, could it be that the “other” broken real estate market is the soft-underbelly of the brokerage industry itself?

Do we really need to answer that?

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Where the Next REALTORS will be Found

A recent quote from Walter Percy Chrysler has been stuck in my head lately: Most people never get ahead in life because when opportunity knocks, they are out back looking for four leaf clovers. These days, it seems like Chrysler’s perspective is particularly appropriate to the real estate industry crisis. In addition to merely waiting around for Uncle Sam, Freddie, Fannie and even China to revive the housing industry, most brokers are busy scurrying around looking for lucky charms to help them survive the downturn. In fact, it’s even worse than usual - beyond burying statues and rearranging furniture - when we see brokers doing the absolute worst possible thing they should be doing right now: Recruiting the agents from failing firms. Did anyone every wonder to ask just why that firm was failing in the first place?

History has shown us that good companies gain market share during downturns. Usually, that means they sell more of their goods or expand into new territories. Of course, the real estate industry has never used traditional business concepts to measure success, so for them, having more agents than the competition is supposedly a sign of success. Never mind that majorities of their current agents haven’t sold a single property in the last twelve months; the non sequitur logic of brokers is to go out an get more of those very under-performers, from companies who are going bankrupt because of the very under-performance.

Yes, it’s nuts.

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The Power of Anticipation

For the past few years, one trend in the real estate industry has increasingly worried me. Without hesitation, most REALTORS in our workshops can tell us all about their local market: the number of homes available, listed and sold this month, the average days on market, even the top agents by inventory or revenue. They know the market share by dollar, number of agents and most yard signs. They can rattle off housing statistics like they were a search engine, organized by price, bedrooms and baths. For all appearances, REALTORS seem to know a whole lot about the marketplace.

Unless you ask them about consumers.

This point occurs in every class, every marketplace, with REALTORS old and new. It’s proven itself to be a major knowledge gap in a sales industry that has steadily lost consumer loyalty every year. When you ask REALTORS what they know about the consumer, the come up blank. Guesses, estimates and defenses against facts - because when the research is presented, it’s never accurate to “their market.” But overall, it’s fairly clear that REALTORS know more about the physical houses than the actual people they work with every day.

And it’s proving to be a serious problem for real estate sales. Read more

Resolve To Follow Your Business Plan

Every year at this time, most of us are making “resolutions” of how to improve ourselves for the upcoming year. We resolve to go on a diet, save more money, take time off with the kids, and so on. Business people usually take it one step further, resolving to do all the things they “put off” in the last year because they ran out of money, or opportunity knocked, or they just forgot. We all do this - while conveniently forgetting the most common thing about New Year’s Resolutions is that we usually forget about them by the end of January!

So this year, why don’t we resolve NOT to make any resolutions, and try something much better, instead…

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Use the Stock Market Crash to Sell Home Homes

Here’s a question you’re unlikely to hear asked in real estate companies these days: Is the stock market drop a GOOD or BAD thing for the housing industry’s current slump? At a time when nobody seems to have the answers - not the Fed, not Congress, not the Detroit auto makers - to turn around the economy, could it be that the market itself has found a way to revive the housing industry and jump start the economy.

And all it takes is a good, old fashioned market crash?

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Do you have the Success you Deserve?

Graduates of our Integrity Selling course learn a very important principle in the world of sales: You always get paid what you think you are worth. It’s how the great sales people in real estate always earn the top dollars - because they believe they are worth them and won’t settle for a second-rate pay for the first-rate service they provide to their clients. The principle of “getting what you believe you are worth” is usually applied to commissions, but lately, with our clients, we’ve been taking this to a whole new level:

Are you achieving the success you believe you deserve?

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Avoiding the Industry Disaster

Just how close is the real estate industry to duplicating the disaster achieved by the airline industry? Contrary to popular belief, neither industry has been challenged by serious technology developments that have created “alternatives” to their essential model. People still fly on planes. Most consumers work with agents. Yet anyone who has had to deal with either industry lately knows that REALTORS are coming dangerously close to recreating the airline industry’s sub-lawyer-sub-car-salesman reputation.

For REALTORS, it shouldn’t take much to avoid that fate. But we must act now.

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Six Cool Ideas to Boost Agent Productivity

Why do some agents make more sales than others? What makes some agents capable of creating sales when others struggle for a single lead? Contrary to popular belief, it’s not a cool web tool or a more expensive marketing plan. Almost always it comes down to a single, consistent factor, no matter what company or place in the country:

A great manager.

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More Meaningless Marketing

When I read this headline this morning, I immediately thought of that Britney Spears song, “Oops! I did it again!” Once again, another real estate company is reporting some “numbers” designed to get people - consumers, agents, Martians - to gasp. Seems like their website has generated some few millions of “leads” to their agents. You know, buyers who go on their website and ask for more information. It’s another orchestrated PR campaign to get the public to say, “Wow! That’s a lot! It must mean they are really good!”

Too bad, then, that it’s just another example of totally meaningless marketing. What’s worse: Generation X and Y know it.

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Five Reasons REALTORS Are Losing Market Share

Amongst the growing list of reasons some REALTOR firms are losing market share today, there’s no lack of ‘blaming the consumer’ causes. Brokers and agents who repeatedly target the “market” or the “economy” as the culprits are just substituting politically-correct keywords for “the consumer” as the problem. Buyers won’t come off the sidelines. Sellers are unreasonable and won’t price their homes to market conditions. Lenders won’t offer credit easily. The usual suspects of the downturn are either consumers or third parties working together in a full-blown conspiracy to destroy the real estate industry.

Perhaps we could find a few simpler reasons?

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