Category: Attitude

Discrimination in Housing: A Personal History

I was just reading about the Arizona Bill, currently headed to the Governor’s office for signature, that would enable businesses to refuse service to anyone on religious grounds.  The bill is designed to allow business owners in the State to refuse service to gay and lesbian citizens, but I assume, could be broader.  I mean:  I’m sure it could be construed as an affront to one’s religion to be forced to  serve a woman in a burka or a man in a turban, or even an African American.

No.  I don’t like the bill.  I don’t like it because it is anti-capitalist.  Our society is constructed around the notion that we are all consumers, all vendors.  We are about offering goods and services for sale to anyone who has the cash and wants to buy.  Any legislation that stands in the way of that goes against the grain of our National DNA.  Besides, how are the business owners who invoke this Bill as a rationale going to tell who’s who?  Are they going to force suspected undesirables to show their secret gay membership cards?  Are rainbows going to be banned?

I think it would be so funny if Michael Sams, the first openly gay football player headed to the NFL, were drafted by the Arizona Cardinals.  Would these uber-religious business owners refuse service to that millionaire?

namaddox_t640I keep thinking about Lester Maddox, who in 1964 – after passage of the Civil Rights Act – held a group of  3 African American Georgia Tech students at bay outside his restaurant near in downtown Atlanta.  The ax handle he brandished became a symbol of sorts, that he later marketed and (gulp) autographed.  Maddox went on to  be the 75th Governor of Georgia after serving as Jimmy Carter’s Lieutenant Governor.

If the Arizona Bill had been law in Georgia in 1964, I’m sure Lester Maddox could have found some religion that would justify his actions.  But we didn’t think like that back then.  We just thought he was an ignorant racist.  His election proved that he was not alone, not by a long shot.

I started selling real estate around Atlanta in the late 70s.  Race was a hot topic then as increasing numbers of middle-class African Americans sought the better schools and safer surrounds of the suburbs over the blighted inner-city.  Us Realtors were cautioned against something called ‘Block-Busting,’ where a Broker would sell one house in an all-White neighborhood to an African American family and then canvas the area creating fear of falling values and rising crime to take many more listings and make many more sales.

I worked an area East of the city, around Decatur and Stone Mountain (home to a large carving of Confederate Generals riding across the side of the mountain and off into glory), where many brave African American Atlantans  from downtown chose to move.  Often these were my clients.  I remember being impressed.  These were the most American of my clients, working hard and taking risks to ensure a better life for their families and their children.

I remember one man – a UPS employee – I helped to sell a house, buy a better one, then a few years later, buy an even nicer one.  He and his family were special to me because the buyer of that first house he sold?  It was me.  In a 180 degree twist on the Exodus of the day, I did a little reverse Block-Busting, and became the only White resident of an African American neighborhood.  And we all got along just fine.  As Americans we were all interested in the same thing:  Our Property Values.  We all wanted neatly kept lawns,  freshly painted trim and a lower crime rate.

I got a couple of nasty calls from the neighborhood where my friend bought, and a couple of For Sale signs went up – not with me, because I didn’t play that ugly card – but by-and-large, people just went about their business and continued to work to make their neighborhood the best place it could be.  It seems strange to even mention that today, but remember:  this was the Deep South in the Late 70s.  Race was huge.

So huge that in the little town of Avondale Estates, smack-dab in the middle of my area, the local Realtors got together with the city leaders and agreed to ban For Sale signs.  The plan had two objectives.  First, it forced anyone wanting to find a home in Avondale to contact one of the local Realtors (ca-ching!).  Second, it gave the local Realtors the opportunity to screen who they would give the information to.  So, if you sounded African-American on the phone, suddenly there were no homes for sale in Avondale!   For Sale sign bans were quickly the subject of a few court battles and were eliminated.

I opened a real estate office in the distant suburbs:  Lilburn, in Gwinnett County.  It was a growth area with lots of new construction and today is considered close-in.  Back then, it was the sticks.  I remember the day, shortly after I opened, that I was Tested.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was said to occasionally send two sets of ‘buyers’ into the same real estate office, one White, one African American, to ensure that they received the same service.  My Test started with a walk in:  a well dressed White man who quickly told me about his income, his debts and his cash-on-hand and then asked to see 3 bedroom ranches in Lilburn.  I lined up three and off we went to tour.  He didn’t seem very interested in what I showed him and was vague about getting together over the weekend to look again.

A couple of days later, I got another walk-in.  This time it was not a so nicely dressed African American woman with a well-behaved child.  Her financial profile was very similar to the man I’d helped two days earlier and surprise, surprise:  she was also looking for 3 bedroom ranches in Lilburn!  That was easy for me: I’d already done the research for the other guy, so we hopped in the car and drove off to see the same three houses.

I never heard from either buyer again, but I didn’t expect to.  I knew I’d been tested and I knew I passed.  What they were looking for was evidence of ‘steering’:  showing two buyers with similar needs and capabilities different properties based on race.  In general, local Realtors did pretty well with this test, but some well-established members of our real estate community did not.  There were fines and a revoked license or two.

Today I live in Southern California and discrimination seems to have little impact on the real estate market or individual real estate decisions.  Our neighborhoods are diverse and it seems anybody can easily live anywhere.  Again, it’s that Capitalist thinking:  if your money is green, you can buy here, there, anywhere you want!  But I remember when I moved here in the late 80s,  I saw discrimination at times more glaring than what I’d seen in the South . . . only this time it wasn’t directed toward African Americans.  It was directed at Hispanics.  My impression was, if you looked Hispanic and were in Irvine or Mission Viejo . . . well, you’d better have a rake or mop in your hand and a ticket out after sunset.  That was my impression.  Things are very different today.

Discrimination is the decision we make about what is good, what is not so good, what is better and what is best.  Discrimination is a good thing when it comes to food, wine, issues of taste, fashion and culture.  When applied to people, though, discrimination is a terrible thing.  It requires that we look at people not as individuals but as members of a group or class, and to make individual decisions on them based on our impressions of their group or class.  I don’t think discrimination of the human type has any place in America.  Here we create stuff, sell and buy it, and anybody can have a piece of the pie.  Period.

I have one final memory of discrimination and housing I want to share.  It involves a fellow named Otis, who owned 5 acres out in the country a few miles from my Lilburn office.  One of my agents, Carol, had a buyer who was looking for a place to build a house and have horses.  Carol showed Otis’ property and the buyer loved it.  She wrote and offer and took it over to the Seller.  Before she could even begin presenting the details, Otis asked what must have been the most important question he had about the transaction:  ‘What color are they?’  Carol thought for a moment and then said, ‘I don’t know . . . I didn’t ask.’   And she gets a gold star for that one!

And, Governor Brewer?  I’ve got a gold star for you too if you refuse to sign that stupid bill!

 

Cautious? Or Crazy?

There was a piece in the industry trades this week about a new ‘trend’ among home buyers. Seems some folks are making their offers contingent on a ‘sleep-over.’ They want to spend a night in the home before they solidify their commitment.

Before you snicker, too loudly, think about it . . . from the home buyers’ perspective. You love the house, you love the neighborhood, at least you love it during the day . . but what happens after the sun goes down? Is the house next door owned by young Jesse Pinkman from ‘Breaking Bad,’ trashing the place with regular week long parties?  Is that rarely used rail line half a block away actually used every night around 2 am?  Is the proximity of the Hospital Urgent Care facility comforting and disturbing at the same time (what with the near constant siren noise)?  How else would you know about the ambiance of this particular house at night unless you just GO THERE?  Spending the night, while unusual, is certainly not weird or strange.

I’m remembering the condo I owned in Atlanta 25 years ago.  It was what I could afford.  Enough said.

After I settled in, a very predictable night time pattern emerged.  I’d hear my upstairs neighbors laughing a Johnny Carson close to midnight (the floors were not that soundproof).  Soon after, they’d go to bed  . . . and then the squeeking would begin.  Rhythmic bed squeeking.  You know:  eek eek eek eek eek eek eek eek. It would eek and eek and eek and then it would stop for a moment and then it would start up all over again.  Sometimes the eeking would continue for an hour or more.  I’d lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, almost as much in awe as a I was angry for the loss of sleep!

After several weeks of  sleep deprivation and hours wondering how in the heck I was going to deal with it, an opportunity presented itself.  I happened to be coming into the building at the same time as my neighbors.  When we got to the front door, I opened it for the lady and then turned to the guy and asked if I could speak with him for a moment.  As the wife started up the stairs we hung back.

‘I don’t know how to say this,’ I began.  And I didn’t; it was possible he’d take great offense, possible he’d threaten violence, who knew?  ‘But your bed has a squeek.’

‘A  sqyeek?’ he came back, head tiled, brow knit.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘You know:  eek eek eek eek eek eek eek.’

‘Oh, that!’  he answered.  ‘We hardly notice.’

‘Yeah, well, I can’t help but notice, and though I am in awe of your stamina, I need my sleep!’  I said chuckling.

‘Oh!’ he said,’I had no idea!  I’ll go work on it right now.’

And he did.  No more sleepless nights, no more  eek eek eek eek eek.  And the best part was that I’d met my neighbors!  We became friends and socialized a bit over the next couple of years.

Now, what if I had spent the night in that condo before buying it?  What would I have done differently?  Would I have gone ahead with the purchase?  I don’t know – but I’d like to think I would.  My time there – and the appreciation I experienced  – were worth a few weeks of discomfort and it was strangely rewarding to take care of the problem the old fashioned way:  by talking about it.

I don’t want to suggest that pre-purchase sleep-overs are a great idea.  It’s certainly a stretch and I’m sure there are some serious paperwork issues that would need to be taken care of before anything like this occurred.  But I do believe that home buyers should get to know their prospective new neighborhood at all hours of the day and night.  I think you can usually learn what you need to know by simply walking the neighborhood after dark, by visiting the super market during a peak time, by visiting the closest school when kids are getting out fo the day.

Beyond that, as a purchaser, you have an implied duty to be flexible, to get along, to work with your neighbors to make your neighborhood a better place to live for everyone.  And never be afraid to put a damning squeek in its place!

 

 

A Reminder for Help-U-Sell Brokers

Back to Basics:

Help-U-Sell is a marketing driven company.  Everything begins with marketing.  Marketing is how we gain market share, how we grow, how we increase profitability.  Contrast that with what the Ordinary Broker does;  he attempts to accomplish those things through recruiting.

We market to SELLERS.  Because our seller offer is so far superior to what Ordinary Brokers have, our biggest marketing challenge is to simply inform home owners that we are here and can save them money.

We love buyers – really, LOVE buyers – but we find them through our listings, not through our marketing.  Every new listing creates a dozen opportunities for buyers to connect with us and the more listings we have the more buyers we connect with.  (I know, ending a sentence with a preposition . . . but we are communicating here, not teaching grammar).

Which is not to say we don’t market our listings to buyers; of course we do.  But this is mostly a process of plugging our listings into established channels like the Internet, the MLS, our ongoing marketing and so on.  Our strategic marketing, our aggressive, proactive marketing is to SELLERS.

There are four messages we want to communicate to potential sellers in all of our marketing:

We are HERE

People use us

It works

They save money

We use three tools to communicate those four messages:

The Easy Way

(or the Smarter Way – though as a Help-U-Sell purist, I prefer the Easy Way)

Sold & Saveds

Testimonials

If you have marketing pieces out there (i.e. websites, Facebook pages, EDDMs, brag cards, newspaper ads (what’s a newspaper?), etc.) that do not use those three tools to communicate those four specific seller messages, you’re doing it wrong and missing the boat.

Help-U-Sell is a wonderful business model that produces outstanding results IF you do it right and do it with consistency.  It is so simple that it’s easy to second guess it and start making changes.  Most of the changes I see make the model look more like what Ordinary Brokers do . . . and that’s certainly madness.  I mean:  who in their right mind would want that? 

Get back to basics!  Start marketing . . . to SELLERS.

 

The Secret to Help-U-Sell Success

The secret to how Help-U-Sell works isn’t a secret at all.  We’ve never tried to hide it.  Though it is very simple, it is so different from the way ordinary real estate works that our competitors dismiss it and assume we’re not telling the whole truth; so we continue to hide in plain sight.  Here’s the easiest description of how Help-U-Sell works I can create – it’s just four steps:

  1. Help-U-Sell begins with a superior offer to home sellers.   We go into the market offering a service very similar to what ordinary brokers offer, but we charge a logical set fee (rather than a percentage commission), which can save the seller thousands.
  2. The superior offer enables the Help-U-Sell broker to take more than his or her share of listings in the target market.
  3. More listings means more signs and better marketing, and  ultimately, the large listing inventory generates a strong flow of Buyer (and Seller) inquiries into the office.
  4. We capture those inquiries and turn them over to Buyer Agents who are carefully groomed and trained (via Science to Sales) to convert them into sales.  As listings increase, as the flow of leads increases, as we add Buyer Agents to handle the flow, production snowballs.

That’s it.

The mechanics are easy.  What’s more difficult – especially when dealing with people who have grown up in the ordinary real estate universe – are the attitudes required to make it all work.  There are four critical areas that underpin successful implementation of the Help-U-Sell system.  These are essential areas of focus on which the whole program depends.  If these elements are faulty, Help-U-Sell will not perform to its potential.  They are:

  1. Broker Control.  The Broker is the business, and the business is the Broker’s.  The Broker is in the business of selling real estate.  This contrasts with ordinary brokers who, by and large, are in the recruiting business. The ordinary Broker recruits to expand his business; every agent added increases the Broker’s reach (well . . . in theory, anyway).  Help-U-Sell Brokers rely on their marketing and office systems to expand their business.  Agents come in to help the Broker handle the large amount of business the office is generating.
  2. Systematic Marketing.  Because the broker is in control, he or she creates and manages a marketing plan for the Help-U-Sell office and for all the office listings.  The marketing plan is constantly fine tuned and eventually becomes a relatively stable, almost fixed expense.  When we take a listing, we don’t create a whole unique marketing plan for that one listing — that’s what ordinary real estate agents do and the result is thousands of agents running around willy-nilly with almost no marketing coordination.  We take the new listing and simply plug it into our existing office marketing program which produces results for all of our listings.
  3. The Buyer Inquiry.  This is the single most important moment in a Help-U-Sell office.  It is the place where we take the power of our superior offer and our marketing and convert it into leads, prospects, clients and sales.  That’s why we work so hard to make sure our people are handling the inquiry – whether from phone or Internet – effectively.  Really:  if you want to improve your production and your bottom line, I know of no better way than to improve the way inquiries are handled in your office.
  4. Buyer Agent Job Description.  Help-U-Sell Buyer agents focus on one single but very important aspect of the business:  they convert Buyer leads generated by the office into closed transactions.  They don’t prospect for listings, don’t call FSBOS, don’t go on listing appointments or orchestrate marketing.  It’s an easily managed job description that enables the agent to do many more transactions than he or she could at an ordinary office.

As I read this I am struck by how much of it deals with Buyers and Buyer Agents and Brokers hiring Buyer Agents.  The Listing and the Seller side of the transaction are mentioned only a couple of times.  But we are Help-U-Sell. Doesn’t that indicate that this description is a little twisted?  Not at all.  At Help-U-Sell, the listing side of the business is pretty simple.  It’s easier to take listings when you have a superior offer and our systematic approach to marketing gets listings sold.  It’s the buyer side that requires the greatest shift in attitude by the largest group of people.

I am reminded of my first ever meeting with our founder,  Don Taylor.  He smiled as only Don Taylor can smile and said, ‘People forget, but Help-U-Sell was always about the buyer.’

Let’s try to remember that.

Planning for 2014 and Planning in General

We’re just a couple of weeks away from Thanksgiving, which means it’s time to start thinking about what you want to accomplish next year.  It’s a great time to be making a plan because, by all indicators, 2014 should be a good year, a year to grow, to expand.  A few things you might consider in your 2014 plan are:

Adding support staff.  But remember the Golden Rule of Help-U-Sell:  you never add staff until you are so busy you are missing opportunities.  Support staff should enable you to either do more business or take more time for other things.  If, four months after the new hire, you aren’t  doing either or both of those things, the hire was probably in error.

Expanding your geography.  Help-U-Sell is a geographically targeted business, remember?  Your vision is to own the real estate business in your target market and to take ownership one neighborhood at a time.  ASSUMING you have been following a targeted marketing strategy and have begun to  dominate in a neighborhood or two, maybe this is the year you move on to broaden the target, add a few more neighborhoods.

Taking a step up and back.  Perhaps 2014 is the year you not only add a buyers agent or two, but you also add a listing assistant:  someone who can meet with a potential seller, do a listing consultation and take a listing on your behalf.  Before you recoil in horror (nobody can do it as well as me!), let me remind you that Help-U-Sell is built on systems that work, not personality.  Your listing consultation is . . . well, just the facts, and a competent, well trained assistant can do the job as effectively as you, the Broker.  Taking a step back from the listing side of the business should enable you to take a step up to working ON your business, to planning your next expansion, to becoming bigger.

Supercharging your marketing.  How many tentacles do you have reaching out into the lead generation ocean that is the Internet?  Is this the year you step up to premiere status at Trulia and/or Zillow? You should, you know.  Is this the year you start doing Facebook and Google pay-per-click to drive traffic to your optimized website? Of course, if that is your goal, you will need effective lead capture landing pages, too.  Is this the year you electrify your web presence by creating a powerful, search engine friendly blog for your business? I know:  I’m biased, but I think this may be one of the best strategies you could employ to do more in 2014.

There are four ideas that may spur your thinking.  Before we leave the topic of planning for 2014, though, I want you to also rethink the planning process.  For generations we have heard, studied and practiced the 1-3-5 year planning ritual.  The detailed long term plan has always been held up as the be-all and end-all of planning . . . and I think that is a mistake.

Our real estate market shifts regularly and rapidly.  Opportunities fly in (and out), sometimes out of nowhere,  You have to be ready to grab hold of the next big thing while it is fresh and too often, a rigid plan and a stay-the-course attitude can make this difficult.  Here’s my prescription for planning, for 2014 an in general:

1.  Get clear on your BIG objective.  Why do you own this business? What are you trying to accomplish? How will you know when you are there? And what is your exit strategy?  These are big picture things, hardly detailed.

2.  What are the likely milestones you will encounter on this journey?  Typically Help-U-Sell brokers start out all alone, doing everything themselves.  The first milestone is the hiring of an assistant.  Then comes hiring of buyers agents.  Down the road, an expanded target market or a second office may make the list.  What are the 6 – 8 major milestones between you and your BIG ojective, in anticipated chronological order.

3. Now, focus on the first milestone.  What do you need to do today, this week, this month to move you closer to it?

That’s it.  

You now have a plan.  And it is a plan that doesn’t tie you up, that allows for new unanticipated opportunities, for side-trips and even small failures, without taking you off course.

I remember the camping/car trip I took from my home in Atlanta to Washington State’s Olympic National Park in 1973.  My friend and I knew our first big stop would be Estes Park, Colorado and the Rockies.  Each night we planned the next day’s segment.  It might be 250 miles or 1,000, might include side trips, stops and so on.  And we were free to change course during the day, too, so long as we ended up a little closer to Estes Park.  After Estes Park, the next milestone was Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and we proceeded in the same manner, each day taking us closer to the next milestone, each milestone taking us closer to our BIG objective:  Olympic National Park.

I believe that kind of thinking, that kind of planning, is the way to build a lean, rapidly moving, dynamic real estate company.

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