We’re mad at it. We blame it for our troubles. We’re afraid it will eliminate us. But recession offers answers for real estate brokers to createsuccess, if we’re willing to listen and adapt. Otherwise we might just find out who’s buried in Grant’s tomb.
What’s the point, after the novelty wears off, that makes social networking a viable channel to create new business? Just what is the outcome to be achieved with social networking for real estate professionals? Read more…
There are two basic reasons why companies fail: unwillingness to embrace the obvious changes of their day, and a smug rejection of customer feedback. Those two factors can be found in every company that once commanded its market, then lost the leadership spot: Ford, Motorola and IBM. Each thought it “knew what was best” for the consumer. And each was taught quite quickly that the customer is always right. It’s a lesson being learned by other industry leaders today – such as Barnes and Noble, and some of the biggest real estate brokers in the country. We call it the “Failure Mindset.”
While the real estate industry struggles (and hustles) to catch up with consumers on social networking, a common concern has appeared amongst real estate agents. Faced with the prospect of being connected to their sphere of influence on a daily basis, “What should I say?” is the most common question asked by agents and brokers. Offering valuable content to prospects daily will mean more than repeatedly posting about overpriced listings. Here are a few suggestions to help.
If it’s one thing technology companies just can’t seem to learn, it’s that their users hate it when they are forced to learn – all over again – how to use their products. Whether it’s Microsoft’s incessant rearranging of menus and folders, or Facebook’s latest face lift, users are getting quite fed up with having to suddenly “look around” to figure out how to do today what they did yesterday without effort. It’s a lesson for all businesses that consumers prefer it when we stick to it.
As many of you know, we’re not fans of the Case-Shiller housing report. Aside from the relentless media spin about the tiniest blip up or down, the primary problem with the report is that its focus – home prices – is simply an incomplete picture of the housing market. To understand what’s happening in any commodity market – especially housing – much more context is needed. And don’t expect the local REALTOR’s analysis report to be any better: Few are worth the paper they are (still) printed on.
Thank goodness, then, for Hagerty’s Quarterly Housing Report.
Readers of this column long know of our contrarian opinion of most traditional real estate practices. None more frequently irks us than the idea that all problems in real estate can be solved by increasing the body count, er, recruiting. Even amidst the worst downturn in housing markets in two decades, brokers who hate recruiting still can’t stop doing it. Perhaps because as awful as it is, recruiting is still easier than focusing on productivity.
Ready to make big improvements in your business in 2010? Most of us make a list of things we currently aren’t doing – and probably still won’t in the New Year. So rather than work against ourselves – a formula for failure and disappointment – why not resolve to keep doing what you are already doing. Perhaps just a little differently!
At Matthew Ferrara & Company, we don’t believe in the “overcoming weaknesses” method of business planning. Rather, we think everyone should focus on their strengths and find ways to maximize the use of them every day. If your resolutions involve working on things you don’t like to do, don’t have a propensity for, and mostly do poorly, you’re heading for underachievement, frustration and disaster. On the other hand, if there are some things you’re already doing that leverages your natural talents, you enjoy doing already and would be more inclined to do more of or better, those should be the focus of your strategy for the next twelve months of business.
Focusing on your strengths lets each of us create business resolutions that best suit us – and therefore have the greatest chance of success. Rather than adopt someone else’s “must do” lists that we’ll never even try, we’ll be more successful if we take our “already doing” list and fine-tune it. Here are ten ways to do just that.
1. Know your strengths: The first thing you need to do is identify what you already have some talent for doing. Very few of us have talent for everything in business. So we need to figure out where our talents lie and organize our strategy around them. So sit down and make a list of what you are already doing that you do fairly well every time. Every other resolution you’ll make must focus on taking those talents and turning up the “volume” on their effectiveness.
2. Accept your strengths: If you list the things you have talents for, you’ll also bring to mind everything you’re not so good at doing. Make a side list of those things. Review the list and label each one “QP” or “NC” – Quick Possibility of mastering and improving or No Chance of being really good at soon. There are some things you might be able to improve – if they already relate to your existing strengths. Maybe you’re a strong prospector, but you are fairly week at generating new contacts. That is probably a QP with a little technology and technique. On the other hand, if you are really bad at paperwork and numbers, then list if NC and put it aside. You will deal with it – but not personally – later.
3. Outsource everything that’s a NC or clear waste of time. Look at your No Chance list from #2 above. Decide whether you can simply stop doing it (and nobody will notice) or if it’s a vital activity required for your success. If it’s vital, determine how you will outsource it. Remember, you’re already not doing it – or not doing it so well you should stop doing it harmfully – so someone else is going to have to do it for you. Find an office staff, another agent or third party business who can do it for you – at peak quality and performance – and resolve to stop wasting time trying to fix things you’re never ever going to actually do well.
4. Set goals, not to-do lists for your business. Rather than make a list of lots of things you’ll buy, try or do, focus your mind on the most important outcomes you wish to achieve in your business this year. Stress and chaos are created by task-oriented planning. You can easily create a list of things you can never get done in the time you have each day. If you want to succeed differently this year, stop worrying about tasks and keep your mind on the goals. Whether it’s financial, professional or personal, three clear and measurable goals which you review and keep in mind every day will more effectively guide you to what needs to get done than a “master list” of intimidating to-do’s and tasks.
5. Organize your time. Most business professionals make the mistake of trying to organize their tasks, rather than their time. They erroneously think the goal is to find the magic combination of scheduling tricks to get the most things done in the least amount of time. That works if you’re a machine on an assembly line. However, most real estate sales is knowledge work, and your brain cannot work “on command” in an unbroken stream of activities. Deal with your time differently this year, by organizing it into periods of most useful outcomes. Determine what is most useful to your business – prospecting, training, presentation skills, negotiating – and then organize your time around getting those things done consistently. Look at the week and ask yourself how to best use the time you have to work towards your goals. Then schedule the right amounts of time to using your best talents to achieve those goals. Eliminate, delegate or forget about everything else.
6. Get effective before you get efficient. We sometimes mistake efficiency for effectiveness. This often leads us to mis-use our talents and time, and especially technology. For example, using technology to organize our databases and create labels for mass mailings may be highly “efficient” compared to the days when we tried to remember everyone’s name and send handwritten notes. However, it could be massively ineffective if the consumer’s preference for contact is email or social media. When you look at turning up the volume on your talents, don’t just take for granted that improvements come from simple efficiencies. You could outsource your prospecting calls to a call center, who could call 1,000 people a week for you; but that might not be nearly as effective as making friends with your past ten clients on Facebook, and writing a personal note on their Wall each week. Both are prospecting. One is efficient by volume. The other is effective by goal.
7. Fire things. Just like you clean out the drawers of your desk at the end of the year, simply throwing away paper and items you packed away rather than dealt with all last year, start your new year by firing everything that no longer works toward your goals. For managers, this might be non-productive salespeople, unattended office meetings, or handing out leads to agents who just throw them away. For agents, this might mean unreasonable sellers who refuse to market-price the home, buyers who won’t work under contract and other agents who refuse to pull their own weight in a deal. Your problem solving must be different this year. If avoid-and-forget didn’t work for you last year, fire-fast-now might be the different approach you need.
8. Stop copying others. Too many of us think that if we just copy someone else’s activities, we’ll reach the same success they have achieved. This is a bad strategy for two reasons: We only see the outward side of others’ success, without the back-story of challenges they handle, but some of which might sink us. We are simply not the same people; problems they can handle with their talents could overcome us if we have different strengths. Secondly, copying others activities means implicitly accepting their goals. Our goals should direct our own activities; There are many paths to success, and it’s important for each of us to follow their own. Some agents achieve high sales performance with lots of technology; others are masters of the telephone and handshake. Both can achieve measurable successful outcomes – based upon different strengths. But adopting the techo-approach for a techno-phobe could be the wrong strategy, and vice-versa.
9. Listen to customers. Lots of consultants, planners, leaders and technologists in the industry claim special access to the future. They have systems, tools, programs you can purchase to get there. Some work; some don’t. But what always works – every year, boom or bust – is talking to customers. They will tell you exactly what they want, how they want it and how they would like to pay for it. And since they pay the bills – not create them, like everyone else – they should be your most important source of information. Then you can go back to the others and ask how their products and services jibe with what consumers are saying, and incorporate the best of these into your optimal use of time and talents.
10. Get to work. While this sounds obvious, it is most certainly not. Most people go to the office but never go to work. They hang out, chat, catch up, eat lunch, run errands, do paperwork, upload a file, check their email, and lots of other activities. But they never actually get to work. If your job is to make sales, then going to work only happens when you make sales. At the very least, you’re only working when you’re doing activities that directly correspond to the next sale you will make. The sales will not make themselves. Others – your fellow agents, your broker, the government – will not make the sales for you. If you want to really do something differently in the next twelve months, then go to work and get to work for every minute you’re there.
So there’s a quick list of ten things to do differently in 2010. Note that none of them are silver bullets, get-rich-quick schemes. There’s not a single specific techno-gadget or snappy-comeback to use for or against consumers. The list requires each of us to assess, evaluate, plan, organize, delegate, focus and do that which is necessary to reach our goals in 2010. To create your next year of success, wishing for a thing is not enough to make it so. It’s time to do the right things – and differently – to make next year your best in the business.
Recently while teaching a social media strategies workshop, one of the brokers approached me during a break. In essence, while he admitted to being dragged into the social media world reluctantly, he was just about furious with my suggestion that agents play games online. It’s bad enough they are wasting time in these social networks, was his point. To suggest they should spend time farming, killing vampires and running a mob gang was simply stupid. How are REALTORS supposed to make sales while they are playing games online. Let just see, shall we?
Riddle me this: How is it that the industries that charge the least for their products and services seem to have more more advanced technology than those that charge the most? Some time ago, we wrote that REALTORS might want to take a look at how gas stations were using technology to market ancillary products to their customers. Now a year later, my local real estate brokerages still don’t offer any interactive technology to their visitors in the waiting area, but my local veterinarian and shoe store does.
Hindsight is always 20/20, they say. Unless, of course, you spend most of your time navel gazing. So it’s almost myopic to point out that some ideas’ time has come. And other ideas’ time has passed. On one hand, it’s time for every sale to include in-house ancillary sales. On the other hand, it’s time for NAR to give up the dream of one HAL-like central database. Didn’t they find the bellybutton lint the last time they tried it? Read more…
Download a copy of the latest survey of REALTORS by the Center for REALTOR Technology and you’re certain to be fascinated – startled, perhaps – at what’s happening on the Bat-belts of modern agents trying to make buying and selling homes a twenty-first century experience. While the report is no page-turner – in fact, it looks a bit like it was produced on a Commodore 64 with dot-matrix fonts – a few facts stand out, highlighting just how easy it should be for serious salespeople to scoop up market share in the months to come. And all they really need would be a Blackberry and a thousand bucks.
November 12 – San Diego, CA – As the National Association of REALTORS Annual Convention opens this week in San Diego, Matthew Ferrara & Company announced the launch of its latest learning service, real estate brainchain (http://www.rebrainchain.com). The new online video learning community features high-quality training lessons for real estate professionals on a broad variety of topics like sales, marketing, technology and management. As easy to use as YouTube, but with real estate specific content, brainchain launches with almost 100 ready-to-learn lessons featuring some of the industry’s top trainers.
“Brainchain changes the paradigm in online learning for REALTORS,” says Matthew Ferrara, CEO of Matthew Ferrara & Company, the parent of brainchain. “In the last two decades, we have repeatedly delivered innovations in real estate training, first by incorporating technology into the classroom, then by creating the industry’s largest delivery system of webinars. We’ll deliver more than 3500 webinars this year alone, but we still don’t think that’s enough availability and affordability for the industry. That’s why we’re introducing real estate brainchain.”
The new platform uses the latest video innovations to change how real estate professionals use the internet to grow their business. While many real estate agents have been using the web to learn for quite some time, “we’re focused on the educational paradigm,” says Derek Deveau, Director of Development for brainchain. “Many agents have attended live webinars online for years; the challenges we’re solving there are to make the content available all the time, and to make them far more exciting than just slide shows and computerized voices. By using a state of the art video studio, we can record and broadcast live, with a higher learning impact. People learn quickly and easily using television today. We’re doing the same thing on the web.” Likewise, Deveau adds, we’re eliminating the scheduling hassles that keep some agents from attending the classes they need at the times they need them.
Brainchain is much more than just online videos, says Ferrara. “As a professional education company, we don’t just create content. We study how people learn and what helps them retain that learning. In most cases, that involves two factors: Learning in discrete amounts of time, and learning when it’s important to solve a problem. With brainchain, most of our lessons are under 10 minutes, so you can pay attention, focus, absorb, and then go apply the learning right away in your business. And since it’s on-demand, our members will watch the lessons they want, when they want it, which creates the motivation to concentrate and acquire the skills. In two decades of training experience, we have seen that students learn more when it’s in small bites and on topics they are really interested in.” Brainchain also adds social networking elements to its platform, creating a true video learning community.
Laura Fisher, Director of Site Development says that brainchain is designed to get members teaching and talking to each other. “The site’s full of extra features. There’s a forum where members can discuss hot topics and share ideas with each other. The Think Tank provides access to the trainers who are in the videos, so students can contact them and ask questions. And every member can blog about how they are using their new skills and knowledge to advance their careers. By combining social network features with high-quality video learning, we’re really creating a skill-development environment that has something for everyone, and lots of new content every day.”
The real estate brainchain platform will launch at NAR with almost 100 learning lessons ranging from “how-to” lessons on technology, social networking and office productivity, to real estate sales lessons on prospecting, farming, staging, pricing, marketing and management. “Brainchain links together great minds, like Martha Webb, Matthew Ferrara, Rich Sands and others. Each has dozens of lessons that can be watched and combined to create new ways of thinking – new “brain chains” – for real estate agents of the future,” Deveau adds. “It’s going to make an amazing amount of knowledge available to the greatest number of people in a format that’s both easy and fun for anyone to use.”
For more information about real estate branching, visit http://www.rebrainchain.com or contact us today.
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According to everyone with a microphone, now’s the best time to buy a home in decades. The recession has pushed home prices and mortgage interest rates so low that affordability has never been better. We’ll even throw in a few free Bernanke Bucks to help you cover closing and commission costs, and rebate you the remaining dollars even if you didn’t pay them in taxes. Between all the rebates, freebies, price reductions and home inventory options, doesn’t it seem strange that the market isn’t roaring? Sure, there’s a bit of unemployment rising here and there, but 9 out of 10 Americans still have jobs. So why are consumer still struggling to take advantage of the sales of the century?
The real estate industry is ripe for a serious game changer. By that, I don’t mean some company that comes along fiddling with commissions or cutesy technology marketing. I’m talking something that causes customers to stand up and say, Wow! I’m definitely working with that company. We’ve talked about this before in our blog, but the timing is better than ever. In fact, I’m thinking of making an appointment with Richard Branson, in the hopes that he’ll take up my suggestion and do for real estate what he’s done for the airline industry. It’s time for him to open Virgin Real Estate.
