Category: The Industry

Focus

There is an old Cajun saying that I dearly love:  ‘Be what you is; even if you’s old and ugly then be old and ugly, but be what you is.’  The bad grammar is intentional – that’s the way I heard it.

There are many messages in this little line, but this morning what I’m getting is:  know your strengths and structure your environment so that you can bring them into play as frequently as possible.

Traditional real estate has generally made a mess out of the salesperson’s job description.  Agents are expected to do it all — which means prospect, list, sell, process, coordinate, followup and on and on and on.  Truth is:  it’s a very rare individual who can do all of that well and all at once.  The sharpest quickly zero in on the jobs that result in more listings and more sales and build a team to take on the other functions.

Maybe you’re a great people person.  You’re personable, sharp and you know your business.  People like to be around you and it seems the more time you spend reaching out to people the more business you do.  Maybe technology baffles you.  You couldn’t put together a flyer if your life depended on it and you still haven’t learned how to get your email on your Blackberry.  Instead of looking over at the Wunderkinds of our industry with all of their devices and technical know-h0w and feeling like you just don’t measure up, find a way to focus on your strength.  In this very two dimensional example, the way is clearly to hire somebody to do the largely clerical job of managing your technology (and maybe more).  Really:  if you are the kind of people magnet I just described, it’s probably a waste of your time and a squandering your biggest asset to futz around trying to keep up with technology when you could pay somebody else to do it for you at $12 an hour.

I got a real lesson in this last week when John Powell and I dropped in on one of our top producing brokers, Patrick Wood, in Chino Hills, CA.  Pat’s been in the top five consistently and has closed 44 sides in the last 3 months.  He has among the largest market shares in his area and personally outperforms entire offices of traditional agents.  Getting a moment with Pat is not easy because his typical day is non-stop meetings, back-to-back , all day long.  He’s doing what he’s good at:  Pat is definitely a people person.  Sitting just outside his office door is his assistant, Valerie.  You know the instant you meet her that this person is supremely well organized.  Her work-space is neat and everything seems to have its place.  The morning we dropped by I commented on the stack of offers she had open before her.  ‘That’s 18 offers that came in on one of our REO listings, ‘ she said.  I bet she could easily tell you the essential details of the best 5 at the drop of a hat.

John and I had been with Pat for about 30 minutes when Valerie came to the door.  ‘Your 10:30 is here and don’t forget, you’ve got an 11 O’clock, too,’ she said.  The message was clear:  You need to wrap this up or you’re going to be running late all day . . . and frankly, nice as James and John are, neither of them is going to buy or sell real estate through you, so get a move on!

This kind of functional partnership is the stuff of greatness.  With the right help a good REALTOR can be huge.   On the other hand, it’s very hard to find a great REALTOR who has no help.

In the early 90s, I spent a couple of days with Ron Prechtl, one of the top agents to ever work in Granada Hills.  He was a people meeting machine and that’s mostly what he did:  meet people, let them know he was in the business and collect their contact information.  Every time he came into the office, he’d drop a handful of business cards and scraps of paper on which he’d recorded information on the people he’d met on his assistant’s desk.  ‘These go on the regular mailing list,’ he’d say and then, pulling a few out, ‘And these go on the hot list.’  His assistant had a pre arranged schedule of mailings for all of Ron’s various prospect lists and one of her most important tasks was to keep it going and keep it growing.

Ron was a pretty sharp guy; but I’ll bet if he had to organize and maintain a mailing list, produce, print and mail letters on a consistent basis and track the results . . . he’d have done less than half his normal production.

I’ll bet he never spent an hour and a half making a flyer . . . someone else did that while he was out meeting five more people.

In today’s real estate world, finding the time to do what you do best can be daunting.  If you’re in the business, you’re probably doing Short Sales.  The time and detail requirements for this type of business are so demanding that few are really good at it.  You could spend hours of your day cranking through this — again largely clerical — job or find someone to do it for you.  It doesn’t even have to be an individual on staff.  We recently heard a good presentation from the Loss Mitigation Network who will take on that job for you . . . for free.

Is our business changing?  Absolutely.  Are there more and more new tools, new technologies, new strategies flooding into the industry?  Without a doubt.  But people still deal with people and that’s where they usually make the decision to buy or sell:  with people.  Don’t let your learning curve keep you from doing the thing that has always made you successful:  meeting the people.  Even if you is old an ugly . . .

Un-Dumbing the Industry

I am very encouraged today.  A little elated, actually.  Yesterday, John Powell and I met with seven members of the Help-U-Sell family in San Diego and Riverside Counties.  Our conversation was free-wheeling but seemed to focus mostly on marketing and deal-doing strategies.  As we got into the realm of Short Sales I had to sit back, and I started to smile to myself.  These guys, the survivors, know their stuff!

Short Sales are complicated things.  There are dozens of lenders, each with their own requirements, varying industry and government regulations to consider as well as the vagaries of investors on the secondary market.  To work them and work them in a way that makes them worthwhile, there is a huge volume of information a real estate professional must know and manage.  The level of detail, understanding and street-wise know how I heard when these folks talked about what they’re doing was astounding.

It took me WAY BACK (I mean, way WAY BACK) to 1982, when interest rates edged close to 17% and the only way you survived was by knowing financing, contracts, and sales strategies inside and out.  We called it ‘creative financing,’ but it was really just knowing your business so well you could make things happen even under impossible circumstances.  It was a great time to be a REALTOR, a time of pride, because you knew if the person sitting across the table from you had a REALTOR pin on their lapel and an HP 12-C calculator cranked up, he or she was probably just as smart as you and the two of you were going to put that deal together.

The boom years were a fun ride, like the latest offering at Six Flags.  But, like that Six Flags ride, the pace was fast and the lines of people pressing to get in on the good thing were long.  Few practitioners took the time to learn their business. Most just gripped the safety bar and screamed.   We (as an industry) got dumber and dumber.  It was almost cartoon comical . . .

Picture the agent and buyer standing outside the house that’s just been toured.  The buyer says, ‘So, if I put 20% down, what would my payment be on a 30 year fixed?’  The agent hems and haws, scratches his head and finally answers, ‘I don’t know . . . let me call my lender.’ That was 2005.

In the churning and collapse of our markets, the weaker ones, the ones who didn’t learn how to put a and b together to make c, fell by the wayside.  They didn’t have the depth of knowledge they needed to make it through this mess.  That’s why the ranks of REALTORS across the country are way down.  The survivors are a wonderful bunch of very sharp people.  Many are hanging on by their wits and their toenails waiting for the wheel to turn but from what I see, their grip is tenacious and they will make it around that bend.

Suddenly, the REALTOR is a hero again.

This Generation and That One

I was talking to Ken Kopcho, a great Help-U-Sell broker, today about an email I’d sent him.  He hadn’t seen it yet.  ‘You know, I’m a mano a mano kinda guy,’ he said,  ‘I respond well to face to face meetings and conversation.’   I think he was ribbing me about sending an email rather than calling.  And he’s right:  I do resort to electronic communication probably more than I should.  Truth is, I can get 3 or 4 quick business-like text or email messages out in the time I can have one phone conversation.

‘There are people in this world,’ he continued,’who could be sitting at the desk directly across from me who would send me a text if they needed to tell me something!’  This ribbing was turning into a smack-down!

‘Come on, Ken,’ I finally answered, ‘It’s just different kinds of communication for different kinds of people and we should to be able to work with everyone.’

That’s when Ken got excited and started telling me about the sale he just made.  His buyers are a military family:  he’s  in Korea and she’s at home in Texas.  He’ll be stationed at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Ken’s Santa Maria marketplace, so they have been looking at houses online.  They first found Ken on his office website after Googling ‘homes for sale’ in Santa Maria.  Then they found his listings again on Zillow and it was through Zillow that they made contact with him.  He was right back to them and they said (almost on cue), ‘Why, you’re the only broker who’s gotten back to us!’

Though they have been in touch over various listings, Ken has never met this family . . . and here’s the kicker: they are now under contract on a house they have never actually seen (except online).

There are lots of little lessons in this brief saga.  First, if we’re going to be successful, we’re going to have to be sensitive to the communication styles of the people with whom we work.  The shortest distance between your message and the person you want to get it is through their preferred mode of communication (not yours).  Though Ken is a more traditional guy, he was able to communicate so well  with this family electronically that he made a sale.

The story also puts me in mind of the great real estate generation gap.  The average REALTOR is 52 years old.  The average home buyer is 32 years old.  Those twenty years are measured mostly in terms of technology.  Our buyers are often more tech savvy than we are.  They are also impatient with anyone who isn’t up to speed with the new way of doing business.  Here’s where we (more mature) real estate professionals have to really hunker down and learn the new way.  I mean:  you may be the best horse and buggy salesperson in the world, but if most of the world wants a Model T Ford, and you don’t understand those new fangled things at all . . . you better get busy learning.

I talked with another broker a few weeks back who I think illustrates this dilemma.  Like me, he’s . . . um . . . mature.  He’s been in the business for 30 years.  His strength has always been the personal touch.  He gets to know his customers and does the searching for them, showing them only the homes that closely match their criteria.  His marketplace has become trendy and the upwardly mobile early 30s crowd is moving in.  His buyer lead conversion rate has been in decline for awhile and is now frustratingly low.  Truth is:  his style is probably turning off many of the buyers in his marketplace.  He needs a quick masters degree in working with the tech savvy buyer:  how to use Zillow, Trulia, Facebook, Listingbook, Sikku, and websiteSSS to empower consumers in the home search process.

I know that’s harder for some brokers than others, not because they are stupid, but because it’s not enjoyable for them.  They’d rather be meeting the people, showing property and solving problems mano a mano.  This is a perfect situation for a sharp young buyers agent to come in and handle that segment of the market.

Take it from one . . . . um . . . . mature real estate broker:  if electronic communication and marketing is not your thing, it’s probably a problem in your business.  One way or another, you’re going to have to deal with it, either by going back to school or hiring someone who already knows it.

Gurus

Ours is an industry that loves experts.  We also love motivational speakers (even if they’re not experts).  We love to combine the expert and the motivational speaker and put them in front of a room full of brokers and agents to do their thing, strut their stuff, and present, present, present.  Having been in the biz since the eviction of Adam and Eve from the Garden, I’ve seen and met quite a few.  Here are some of my favorites:

Tom Hopkins.  Almost single handedly turned my new career around.  I failed miserably as a salesperson for six months.  Then I borrowed a set of his real estate tapes (it was 1976 and he hadn’t yet expanded to other industries) and listened to them until his words became mine.  As soon as the dialogs became automatic I started to fire on all cylinders, so to speak and the rest is history.  I had the honor of having breakfast with him one morning in the early ’80s as I prepared to introduce him to a big group.  It was like meeting a rock star.

Danielle Kennedy.  I saw her speak many times, but what I really remember is her book:  ‘How to List and Sell Real Estate’.  It’s been awhile since I scanned through it, but for years I swore it was the best book ever written about how to have a successful real estate career.  Like Tom, Danni was above all practical.  She gave you things to DO, today, that would make a difference.

Floyd Wickman.  Floyd was fantastic.  A great mix of solid strategy and humor.  I think his answer to any question a prospective seller might ask on the phone – ‘I don’t know, I gotta see the house first’ — should be carved into his headstone when he gets called to that great listing appointment in the sky.  My favorite Floyd moment came in the early ’90s when I was head of training at Century 21.  We had taken a philosophical right turn from the rest of the industry by jumping feet first into Consultative Selling.  We were abandoning the slick scripts and the heavy techniques that were popular at the time in favor of just knowing your stuff and doing a good job for people.  We had an unspoken moratorium for awhile on speakers as we tried to establish the new culture, and many were pretty hostile to our new direction (‘What?? You’re going to give out the address on the phone??? Are you crazy?!?).  Floyd was the first to step up and say he thought we were on the right track and he’d support what we were doing.  I met him at Caesars in Vegas and cemented the relationship over a few too many glasses of bourbon.  Mrs. Woodjakowski, indeed!

Charlie ‘Tremendous’ Jones.  Most real estate people don’t know Charlie because he was big mostly in Insurance circles.  I saw him several times though and once was manhandled by him on stage.  He was a big guy, probably 6’5″ tall and a little heavy.  He was on stage ranting on about people who didn’t make it because they lacked COMMITTMENT!! (he’d growl that word).  Next thing I knew, he was down in the audience, grabbed me by the arm and led me to the stage where he essentially put me in a headlock and dragged me around from one side to the other, addressing the top of my head with:  ‘Do you know what separates the greats from the not so greats?  COMMITTMENT!!  Do you know what makes the do-ers DO and the don’t-ers DON”T?  COMMITTMENT!!’  and on and on.  My friends in the audience told me afterward I looked like a rag doll being mauled by a pit bull.

Steven Covey.  I saw him once and loved how he related to the audience.  There were probably 2,000 people in the room and he took the stage with just an idea about what he wanted to communicate and what he’d like to accomplish. It was clear he was not speaking from a rehearsed script.  But he had an assistant backstage at a computer who had all of his slides and knew exactly where they were.  Covey would talk a bit and he seemed to make personal contact with everyone in the room (including me and I was at the back of the balcony) and then he’d say ‘Put up that pie chart slide’ and a moment later there it’d be. He bounced around like that for an hour and a half, letting the audience dictate the direction.  I swear:  it was the most beautifully organized, spontaneous, un-canned and involving talk I’ve ever seen.

Rick O’ Neil.  How could I not include our own former leader?  Rick was remarkable.  He didn’t do much visible prep work before he’d talk to a group — I think all the prep was going on in his head — but he always had the perfect message in the perfect order to move his audience.  I never saw anybody take a room full of people and literally change their collective minds and get a commitment from them  the way he could.  And he did it over and over.  I remember him showing up early the first day of one of our Help-U-Sell Universities.  I asked him if he’d like to say a few words.  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘I can, if you want.’  So I introduced him and what came out of his mouth was an elegant, eloquent and moving speech about honor, courage and commitment.  It got a standing O and should have been recorded for all posterity.

There are so many others and some I’m going to kick myself for not remembering (like Wayne Dyer) but that’s my short list for this Thursday.  Who are your gurus?

Accessibility Toolbar