Matthew's blog entry titled "NAR's RPR should RIP ASAP"Watch this video
Facebook’s face lift confusion provides businesses a good lesson in how not to confuse your customers while building your brand.
Matthew Ferrara offers ten ways to start focusing on what you can – and will – do this year to reach your success.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fantasy Island – (US) – The Federal Reserve today unveiled yet another plan to distort the housing industry and stave off a rebound in the marketplace by using Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to encourage banks to offer mortgages as low as 4.5% – nearly a full point lower than what ‘unencouraged’ banks have currently priced the risk of mortgage lending in the free market. Undaunted by the volume of empirical data indicating that this very policy of offering below market rates to sub-prime credit borrowers originally caused the over-extension of consumer credit and sharp inflation in housing prices in the last decade, Treasury officials said today (with a straight face) that lowering the cost of lending would halt the slide in housing by enabling consumers to borrow larger sums of money.
One of the most exciting roles our company plays for real estate brokers and agents worldwide happens when we are called upon to do Strategic Planning with them. It’s fascinating to see how planning energizes people – even though many of them have been operating for years without a written plan (:>) Here are some of our tips for your planning for the Future!
