Category Archives: CORE

Book Review: Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Posted on July 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

The E-Myth books are highly recommended by a lot of other business authors, and by a number of business people I have met. I found The E-Myth Revisited to be very flabby – lots of good insights throughout, but woven around a series of stories and staccato imprecations that made the book a tougher read than it should be.

Gerber’s “e-myth” is about small businesses: the myth that people who start small businesses do so for an entrepreneurial impulse, whereas he proposes that most people start small businesses because they love what they do and want to do it for themselves. The problem, according to Gerber, is that people who love, say, baking, make great bakers but poor businesspeople. To be successful in business, you have to love running a business, not baking pies. I did like this point, which I’ve paraphrased: The purpose of going into business is not to do a job, but to free yourself up to create jobs for other people — if you’re the main person working in your small business, then you don’t have a business, you have a job, and your boss is a lunatic. I thought that was well stated.

Gerber’s main passion, though, is about establishing a “prototype” for a business, such as a franchise model, which organizes and establishes the systems under which the business will run. The point is that a franchise prototype or model sets up the systems that if operated correctly will help a business succeed, avoiding the “reinventing the wheel” phenomenon inherent in running small businesses.
The core argument is that businesses succeed when we set up thorough, tested systems to run them according to a blueprint designed for efficiency, automaticity, and order. Gerber makes a great point that you want to build a system-oriented business, not a people-oriented business, so that your system leverages the abilities of the people you have rather than requires you to hire more extraordinary people. It’s easier, cheaper, and more efficient to build one model and hire 100 ordinary people than build a bad model and hire 100 extraordinary ones. He also points out that a good business has to have a documented operations manual that sets out the blueprint.

Gerber also sets out fundamental advice for business:

Innovate by testing new strategies for increasing efficiency or sales.
Quantify everything. Track all your numbers, so you know what works and what doesn’t work.
Orchestrate a system which eliminates choice – i.e., it eliminates opportunities for decisions to be made that are inconsistent with the master blueprint.

This was the best part of the book, and the salient theme of the book: work on your business, not in your business, and set up a prototype (operations manual) that automatically runs your business to avoid becoming too reliant on yourself or personalities.

Takeaway

One of my main passions is customer service systems, the idea that a customer experience can be consistently maintained by creating systems that automate client service. I read this book years ago, and went back to re-read it for this review, and was surprised at how much Gerber’s argument about a “prototype” had seeped into my subconscious as I built my own personal philosophy about building a great business. I can’t necessarily recommend the whole book, but the Part II section on creating that prototype is a brilliant articulation of how to build a sustainable enterprise.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Book Review, CORE, Entrepreneurs, Services

Tagged Book Review, Entrepreneur, Franchises, Small Businesses

Why Most Real Estate Agents Fail

Posted on June 12, 2011 | 5 Comments

According to the National Association of Realtors 2009 Member Profile, the average real estate sales associate in 2009 made about $27,000. That’s the average, meaning that for every top producer putting $200,000 or $300,000 in his or her pocket, there are a dozen agents making basically minimum wage. Put it this way: a receptionist in an office can make about $30,000 to 35,000 a year, which is more than most of the agents in that office probably make.

This is just an astounding, tragic statistic, one that most people in the industry just blithely accept in a commissioned sales environment. Yes, it includes a lot of part-time agents, or agents who are new to the business, but that’s not really the reason that most agents make what is essentially a minimum wage.

So what’s the real reason? If I ask a group of agents why, they’ll say that most agents don’t do enough lead generation. Some will say, of course, that their brokers don’t do enough lead generation, like Shelley Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross complaining that he never gets “the good leads.” But no matter how you slice it, it always comes back to sales opportunities: agents would sell more houses if they had better leads.

That’s just nonsense. The problem with our industry isn’t the leads — we have plenty of leads. NAR says that 5 million homes are going to be sold this year. (Of course, NAR also has about a million members, so do the math).

Here’s the reason: most agents aren’t very good at their jobs. It’s as simple as that. If you’re a doctor, and you don’t have any clients, it’s not a matter of not having enough sick people. If you’re a lawyer, sitting around all day waiting for phone to ring, it’s not because people stopped having legal problems. It means you’re not very good at your job.

That’s the sad truth, but it’s not the agent’s fault. It’s the industry’s, which has never focused training on core competencies, instead allowing licensing classes to devolve into long discourses on “fee simple absolutes,” coaching courses to be dominated by prospecting methology, and ongoing education to be dedicated to ethics, compliance, and the hot topic of the month (the eight hundred or so short sale certifications that are now out there).

And the problem certainly is not that we don’t do enough as an industry to teach agents how to generate leads — indeed, virtually the entire sales training apparatus in the industry is about lead generation, whether it be through prospecting or sphere development or marketing online or whatever.

No, the problem is competency. Agents who are good at their jobs sell a lot of houses, just like doctors who are good at their jobs develop thriving practices. Show me a group of top performing agents, and I’ll show you a group of people I’d probably be willing to list my home with. They’re probably agents who have basic sales skills, of course, but I bet that they also know how to take care of clients, how to do their jobs.

Think about how ludicrous it is that the industry spends so little time teaching competency, instead focusing on prospecting or ethics compliance. The industry spends all its time teaching agents how to prospect on the sales coaching side, then spends the rest of its time on the NAR side scaring everyone about ethics and compliance. No one teaches basic competency: learning skills that actually matter in the field, and learning how to deliver an amazing client experience.

One reason, of course, is that NAR itself is an organization largely staffed by people that don’t sell a lot of houses — all those nattering busybodies filling our local boards who themselves sell three houses a year and therefore have the time to devote to going to a lot of meetings to debate policies over coffee. Look at a local NAR board, and add up all the transactions closed in 2010 by all the members put together, and I’ll bet in most cases there are 50 agents in the local region who sell more homes than the entire group. Go ahead, prove me wrong, send me your local board members and their 2010 production. There might be exceptions, but I’m betting that I’m right about the rule.

Listen, my point is not to denigrate our profession. I love real estate agents, even the ones that for some unholy reason don’t work with my company. But we all know that this profession has to become better at servicing the needs of clients, and it starts with each individual real estate agent. It should be shocking — and bracing — to hear that most real estate agents don’t make as much as the receptionists. The question is what do you do next? Do you keep doing the same old things that don’t work for you, or do you start building new skills, following new systems, and taking a new approach to your business.

What do we do about it? If you’re an agent, take a client-oriented approach to your business. Stop working on lead generation, unless your lead generation activities are actually providing a service to your clients. Work on your own client service skills. Learn how to do a better job for your clients. If you build up those skills, the deals will come.

How do you get there?

If you need to do something RIGHT NOW to get you started in the right direction, take these three simple steps:

Take a look at each of your listings, and make sure that all the details are correct, the descriptions are correct, and the pictures are high quality and in high-resolution. If not, you have work to do.
Call every one of your buyers, whether they are active or not, and touch base with them. Find out if they need you.
Do a new CMA for every one of your sellers, unless the listing is less than a month old, and send it to them. Set a date to meet with them to review the results of your marketing plan, review the pricing environment, and decide whether you need new pictures and a new description.

And if you want to start building your knowledge and skills, keep tuned to this blog. We’ll be publishing a lot of information and advice about how to build your skill base and take a client-oriented approach to your business. If you want to catch up, read up on some of the back posts, which will tell you where I’m coming from.

The fact that you want to become better is the most important thing to keep in mind right now. If you want to succeed at this business, and are willing to do the things that will help you succeed, you will.

→ 5 Comments

Posted in CORE, Productivity, Uncategorized

Tagged Competency, NAR

Client-Oriented Real Estate in Action: The Guide to Grieving Your Property Taxes

Posted on May 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

The cornerstone of the CORE philosophy is that real estate agents should perform outstanding non-transactional services to their clients. We call these “courtesy services,” because they’re not necessarily services that relate to actual transactions — meaning that we’re not going to be directly compensated for them.

But at the same time, they have the potential to create massive amounts of business down the line, from the good will that is created when you selflessly spend time, energy, and money to help someone by providing a service they need.

The best example of CORE in action is our Home Buyer Tax Credit information site that we created last year, which ended up providing the best information about the tax credit available anywhere in the country. Over a three month period, we attracted over 75,000 unique users to the site, providing them with all the tax forms they need, and even answering hundreds of user questions on our blog.

Did we get paid for any of that? No. Did it take a lot of time. Oh yes, indeedy it did. But was it worth it? Well, even though we didn’t make much direct revenue from income on the site, I like to think that by providing such a great service, we helped at least the 800 agents that work at our company by inspiring them to do the same sorts of thing in their business, and by arming them with the best information available about such an important governmental incentive program.

Well, we’re doing the same thing today, launching a new initiative on our site to help clients and other people in the community grieve their taxes. We have put up a comprehensive guide called the Guide to Grieving Your Property Taxes, which is now available on our real estate site and gives the best information available on the internet about grieving taxes in New York State, including:

Are we getting paid for any of this? Not directly. It’s done as a courtesy to our clients. But unlike the tax credit site from last year, this is information that we will be able to use year after year, because the rules generally don’t change. So it’s an evergreen initiative.

But also, we will have some benefits from it, as follows:

First, because we’re hoping that all eligible sellers with Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty, which is about 2,500 people, will grieve their taxes. If they grieve the taxes and are successful, that makes their homes more sellable.

Second, we might be able to get necessary price improvements to make our listings more competitive. If sellers are going to grieve their taxes, they need to establish that their homes are worth LESS than the assessor believes. They won’t be able to argue for a grievance if they have their home on the market for MORE than the assessed value. So we might get some price improvements on it.

Third, this is the best possible reason for our 800 agents to call their spheres of support, the people that they cultivate for direct business and referrals. We spend a lot of time and energy in a mailing campaign to our agents’ spheres, but it’s all about trying to give them a reason to call. There’s no better reason to call than to urge a client to grieve her taxes, give her all the information she needs, and then help her by doing a CMA that can help substantiate the property value.

The point is that if you spend your time trying to provide great services to a client, you will eventually get value out of it. That’s the foundation of the CORE philosophy, and now we’ll see how it works in action.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in CORE, CORE in Action, S.O.L.D. Systems, Services

Tagged CORE in Action, Property Taxes, Services

Book Review: Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right — Achieving Operational Excellence in the Real Estate Industry

Posted on June 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto is a powerful book, one of the best and simplest articulations of how to achieve operational excellence that I have ever read. Gawande’s message is simple: the world has become increasingly complex, and we need to actively create systems and processes that will simplify the tasks that we have to complete in our everyday lives. His deceptively modest proposal: use a checklist.

Now, I know that seems almost stupid and simplistic at first glance. We’re all familiar with checklists, and generally associate them with rote tasks, not with complicated procedures. And we resist the idea that our professional performance could be improved by something so jejune as a checklist, almost as if a checklist would trivialize the important work we do.

As Gawande points out, though, that’s exactly the way a bunch of doctors felt the first time that a hospital administration tried to incorporate a checklist into one of the most common of medical functions — putting in a central line. He recounts how a critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital devised a checklist to try to avoid incidences of infenctions in the placing of a central line. Doctors all knew the basic steps for central lines: (1) wash hands with soap; (2) clean the patient’s skin for the placement; (3) put sterile drapes over the patient, (4) put on a mask, hat, sterile gown, and gloves; and (5) put a sterile line over the insertion site after placing the line. Gawande called these steps “no-brainers,” the type of things that doctors know they are supposed to. But the hospital found that in one third of cases, doctors were skipping at least one of the steps.

So the hospital initiated a simple checklist procedure to ensure that all the steps were taken. Since the doctors were resistant to the intrusion, nurses were enlisted to ensure compliance with the checklist. What were the results? According to Gawande, they “were so dramatic that [the administrators] weren’t sure whether to believe them.” The ten-day line infenction rate went from 11% to 0%. Over a fifteen month period, the administrators projected that the checklist had prevented 43 infections and 8 deaths, saving over $2 million in hospital costs.

This was not an isolated result. After the success at Johns Hopkins, Gawande recounts how hospitals in Michigan initiated a project to use a central-line checklist in intensive care units (ICUs) in hospitals throughout the state. Here are the results:

Within the first three months of the project, the central line infection rate in Michigan’s ICUs decreased by 66%. Most ICUs . . . cut their quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan’s infenction rates fell so low that its average ICU outperformed 90% of ICUs nationwide. In the …. first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175 million in costs and more than fifteen hundred lives. The successes have been sustained for several years now — all because of a stupid little checklist.

These are among the powerful illustrations of the effect of checklists on operational performance included in The Checklist Manifesto. In addition to the medical field, Gawande shows how pilots use checklists to ensure safe operation of aircraft (including an engaging description of how checklists impacted the famous “Sully Sullenberger” flight that landed in the Hudson River in 2009). And he demonstrates how hedge fund investors use versions of the checklists to protect against making poor investments, including one vivid illustration of an investor turning down an opportunity when a checklist item turned up that the company’s owners had been divesting their personal holdings.

So how does this impact the real estate industry? I think that our industry could learn a lot from The Checklist Manifesto about operational excellence. The role of the real estate agent is significantly task driven, but those tasks can sometimes be overwhelming. Just getting a listing on the market can require dozens of discrete operations: taking pictures, uploading pictures, writing descriptions, checking paperwork, ordering signs, inputting property data, double-checking taxes, etc. We need to do these things every single time, but rarely do we see a company articulate a simple checklist to ensure that every listing gets that quality service. The same holds for the far more complicated but necessary task of maintaining ongoing listings, when agents tend to get lost in the frenzy of daily activity and neglect the day-to-day communication and updating responsibilities they have to existing clients, leading to poor client experiences.

For the last year, my company has been working on identifying the “best practices” in the industry — the practices that ensure a quality client experience for both buyers and sellers, with the idea of coordinating those practices into a series of checklists and a comprehensive ”Project Plans” that cover particular aspects of the real estate transaction. The goals is to provide with a set of plans that can guide them through the transaction. The point is not to limit them — people can always do more than is on the plan. Neither is the point to demean their professionalism– it’s not that we think they’re NOT doing some of these things, but we believe that in a given case they might not be doing ALL of these things because of the overwhelming complexity of the entire task.

Most importantly, we think that these kinds of checklists make a job easier, by simplifying our lives. Just like computers, we have only a certain amount of “RAM” in our heads. Computers gain efficiency if they can move information from “RAM” to hard drive memory. Similarly, most of us become more efficient if we don’t have to store tasks in our memory, but can reduce them to a hard copy that we can refer to anytime we need them. An agent with a 30-item checklist for getting a listing on the market is going to be more efficient than an agent who has to remember all 30 tasks and whether she’s already done them. (And it’s definitely more efficient for the agent sitting at the desk next door, who keeps getting a tap on the shoulder asking, “hey, what am I supposed to do next?”)

Finally, real estate professionals should recognize that if checklists can improve execution and performance in life-and-death situations involving surgery and airline flight, and in million or billion-dollar financial investing decisions, then they certainly can be used in the much less urgent field of real estate. A real estate agent who feels that checklists are “beneath” her should be at least a little chagrined that pilots and doctors are using them to great effect.

Essentially, I think that The Checklist Manifesto should be required reading for real estate professionals; indeed, I would recommend the book for anyone who cares about achieving operational excellence in his or her field. If you need proof, I’ve already purchased 50 copies of the book at my company’s expense for distribution to our management team, and have saved others as gifts for colleagues in the industry. It’s a great book. You should read it.

If you’re interested in some other information about the book, here are some links:

Atul Gawande’s home page for The Checklist Manifesto

144 Reviews (average 4.5 stars out of 5) on Amazon.

Steven Levitt, the author of Freakonomics

Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink and Outlier.

New York Times review

Washington Post review.

Interview in Time Magazine.

Gawande interviewed on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

The Safe Surgery Checklist illustrated in a terrific clip from NBC’s ER.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Book Review, CORE, S.O.L.D. Systems, Services, Technology, World's Best Service Standards

Tagged Book Review, Checklists, Project Plans, Service, Technology

What’s the Best Way to Build Marketshare? Make Your Clients Happy.

Posted on June 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

I was asked to speak on a panel this week at the RIS Social Media Summit in New York, with several other brokers about how to generate marketshare in a competitive market. It was a great panel, moderated by the peerless Allan Dalton of RIS Media and Top 5 In Real Estate, and I tried to make the argument that the best way to generate greater marketshare is to do something simple: provide a better experience for your clients.

My point was to try to get away from the three traditional methods of building marketshare, all of which were adequately covered by other panelists: (1) build a bigger army by recruiting or acquisition; (2) build a better army through agent development and training; and (3) generate more clients directly through company initiatives and programs.

And it’s not as if my company hasn’t been doing those things. We’ve had some of the biggest acquisitions in our history in the last year, and a few of the most productive recruiting results (we just recruited one of the top agents in Orange County this week). Moreover, we’ve run a few really innovative programs to attract clients, including the Home Buyer Tax Credit site we put up in January. As a result, our marketshare has gone up, probably by about 20% across the region.

Nevertheless, though, I think that the strongest way to build marketshare is simply by doing a better job for your clients, which requires a focus on actually improving the client experience and agent competence. I’ve been beating this drum for over a year, in my own company and on this blog, but I’m amazed to the extent that the training industry in real estate simply ignores the fundamental issue of client experience. Training is all about lead generation, and not what you do when you actually attract a client.

That seems backward to me. If you do a great job with that client, that client is going to work with you again in the future. That might not do much in the next few years, since most clients wait 6-7 years between transactions, but in the meantime that client is going to refer you business. And write about you online. And be a great reference. All those things will do more to generate new business (and marketshare) than a fancy personal ad campaign or a prospecting plan.

I firmly believe that the best companies in the next ten years are going to emerge because they simply do a better job for their clients. But I don’t see anyone scampering to take that hill right now.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Conventions and Conferences, CORE, Services

Tagged Client Experiences, Conferences, RIS Media

Five Things to Stop Doing in 2010

Posted on January 19, 2010 | Leave a comment

This past week, I gave a presentation at the Inman Connect Conference in New York with the great Steve Harney on “10 Things” real estate agents should do in 2010. My feeling was that agents are already doing too much, so I decided to talk about five things that agents should STOP doing.

Given that the conference is largely about technology, and that one of my main points was that agents should stop embracing technology, I thought it went rather well….

There’s also a short clip of Camilla Sullivan of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate interviewing me about the Five Things to Stop Doing in 2010 here.

1. Stop Annoying People, Start Helping Them.
Stop annoying people on social media like Facebook and Twitter. In the last year, real estate agents (and other salespeople) got into social media in a big way, on the theory that this new frontier of networked communications would help them break through the barriers that clients have put on phones, email, or direct mail marketing. But all that agents have managed to do is provoke their contacts to create those same barriers in social networks, the same barriers that people put up to emails of listings they’re not interested in, or phone calls. They are deleting (or even worse blocking) your emails, and they’re using call screening to avoid your calls, because they don’t see the value in what you’re offering — random listings that they don’t care about. No one cares about your new listing that you posted on Facebook, any more than they cared about it when you emailed it around. All you’re doing is annoying people, who are now blocking you or using new tools to screen you out. If you want to be effective in social media, listen to people and respond to them, and provide them with information they actually need. Don’t barrage them with marketing nonsense they could care less about.

So what should you do instead?
• Get the real estate agents out of your Facebook account. If you need to, set up two Facebook accounts, or master the new techniques they’ve created to provide different “faces” to the world.
• Read what your clients are saying, and respond to it. People like it when you post comments on their postings.
• Post minimally, and only when you have something people would want to read.

2. Stop thinking about sales, and start thinking about service.
How many people here would list their home with more than 50% of the agents in your market? That’s amazing. We’re in a business where even the sales professionals don’t have a high regard for the people in the industry. It’s amazing to me that sales training is still so focused on sales techniques that were developed 50 years ago or longer. Sales training should be all about service training. We all need to do a better job for our clients, because in the future clients are going to choose us based on the service experience of our past clients, not based on our marketing pitch or our ability to talk fast and use personal power to influence them. If you do a great job for your clients, you’ll be rewarded. If you do a lousy job for your clients, all the sales tricks in the world aren’t going to save you.

How do you get there? Establish a set of bedrock best practices for how you will run your business, everything from a checklist for what you need to do when you get a listing to a set of protocols for how to communicate with clients. And apply that to not just your transactional clients, but your sphere. Everyone needs a great real estate agent, even when they’re not buying and selling.

So what should you do instead?

• Set expectations for your clients, and then meet those expectations.
• Find out what your clients want, figure out how to give it to them, then execute.
• Look for opportunities to “Bring the Wow” to your clients – opportunities to blow them away with one particular bit of service attention.

3. Stop talking, start listening
Whether you’re online on Facebook, or sitting in someone’s living room, you need to stop talking. Natural salespeople like to talk, because they’re good at it. But we all need to listen more. The biggest complaint I hear from sellers is about agents who come in with a canned presentation and talk for 45 minutes without stopping for a breath. The first thing you should say to every client you meet is, “tell me about yourself, and what you would like me to do for you.” Just like you enjoy talking, so do they, and there is nothing more flattering or engaging than a person who asks you about yourself. Stop thinking about your client meetings as “presentations” and start thinking of them as “consultations” in which you’re going to ask questions, and they’re going to tell you what it is they want. The more they talk, the more they confide in you, the more you’ll naturally build credibility with them. You can’t manufacture “rapport” – it comes naturally by showing a genuine interest in people and what their concerns are.

So what should you do instead?
• Approach any meeting with a client with questions, not statements. Stop presenting, start consulting.
• Anyone you meet, in any situation, find out what their needs are, and then figure out what you can do to help them.
• Post less, comment more.

4. Stop doing things that provide the false security of productivity without actual productivity
In real estate, we measure productivity by whether the activity has the tendency to generate opportunities for you to obtain a new client or better service an existing client. Business development activities are productive. Going to see the inventory is productive. Taking a class is productive. Reading a book that teaches you something about the business is productive. But blogging about your experiences as a real estate agents is not productive. It might be fun, and you might enjoy it, and you might be able to justify it because it gives you pleasure, which is fine, but don’t fool yourself that it’s productive. And stop telling yourself that you’re blogging about the joys and miseries of real estate because you might get referrals. If you work in Manhattan, or retirement communities in Arizona or Florida, you might generate referrals. But the chances of you writing about your real estate career in Des Moines, Iowa or Monroe, New York is going to generate a referral – the idea that someone reading your blog in Utah someplace is going to happen to have a client moving to Des Moines Iowa is just too remote to justify the time expenditure. Don’t do things that give you false senses of security – look how much I did today – without actual productivity. Agents talking to each other is not anymore productive when it’s online than when it’s in the coffee klatch.

I constantly hear from agents in my company who have this great idea of how to develop their business. They all have one thing in common: they eliminate the need for the agent to actually pick up the phone and call someone. Why? Because calling someone is uncomfortable, and hard, and people don’t want to do it. That’s fine. Accept the fact then that you don’t want to do anything hard to build your business. But don’t fool yourself that you can be successful in the real estate business without courting rejection. And don’t finish up your day feeling like you accomplished something when you didn’t do anything to generate a real opportunity to obtain a new client or service an existing client.

So what should you do instead?

• Identify the activities you engage in that actually generate new business for yourself, or help you service existing business.
• Lock in times in your schedule to engage in those activities. I don’t care if it’s an hour, or three hours, or whatever, but lock it into your schedule just as if it were an appointment with a client.

5. Stop embracing new technologies unless they help you do something you’re already doing.
New technologies are exciting and seductive, but they can also be massive time- and energy-suckers. Here’s the rule: if a new technology allows you to do something you were already doing, but to do it faster, cheaper, or easier, then it’s a great technology and you should learn how to use it in your business. Examples are voicemail, emails, facsimile, scanning, digital photography, GPS. All those things allowed us to do things we were already doing, but to do them better. So what’s a bad technology: one that seduces you into doing something that you never did before. You have to ask yourself – why is it that I never did this before. If you used to send out reports on the market that you’d write yourself, then blogging technology is probably great for you, because it allows you to do something you were already doing, but to do it better. But if you’re not a natural writer, if writing is hard, and if you’re not particularly good at it, then why all of a sudden are you blogging? Why are you using a new technology to do something that you never did before? The fact that the technology exists isn’t a good enough reason.

For example: Facebook. Facebook is a great way to connect with your network. But we’re already seeing people mis-use it , and my experience the bloom is already off the rose. You join, you link up with people you haven’t seen in years, you exchange some emails, but then you quickly realize why you lost touch with them, and now you don’t communicate anymore. A lot of fun, but if you’re making some massive time commitment to Facebook, you’re probably being seduced by a technology you shouldn’t be.

I know people hate it when trainers talk about getting back to basics, so I’m not going to say that. But we need to do a better job with the technologies we already have. We all know that most brokers do a TERRIBLE job marketing their listings just on the fundamentals: bad pictures, old pictures, not enough pictures, incomplete descriptions, abbreviations from the classified ad days, incomplete information. Put it this way, if you’re not writing good, solid, appealing descriptions of every one of your listings, you have no business spending time on Facebook.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Bringing the WOW, CORE, Services, Technology, World's Best Service Standards

Tagged Inman, Technology, WOW

Client-Oriented Real Estate in Action: HomeBuyerTaxCredit.com

Posted on January 19, 2010 | 2 Comments

The purpose of this blog is to promote the concept of Client-Oriented Real Estate, or C.O.R.E., the idea that real estate agents should be focused primarily on identifying and servicing the needs of their clients. Not only do we think this is a better way to run your business, we think it’s a more productive way to build your business in an era where great service is much more likely to help you develop more clients through social networking and online review sites.

As we develop this concept and apply it to agent productivity, we’re finding all sorts of ways to apply it in the work we do running a large brokerage. A broker, like an agent, should be client-oriented, both from the perspective of the buyers and sellers as clients but also from the perspective of agents as clients.

So last November, when the Home Buyer Tax Credit was revised to increase the income limitations and expand it to long-time homeowners, we were on top of it. It seemed to us that a “world’s best real estate broker” should be able to break down complicated programs like the tax credit for the whole client base: agents and buyer/sellers. So we really dug into it to make sure we could help our clients (agents and buyers/sellers) understand the credit and take advantage of it.

The first thing we realized was that the tax credit was not going to be retroactive, and in fact would only apply to closings the day AFTER it was passed. This was on November 5th, the day the new legislation was announced and passed Congress. The President was signing it the next day, and the legislation itself said that it would only be effective to closings AFTER the signing date. This meant that buyers who might be eligible for the tax credit under the new guidelines but were closing on November 6th, the day the legislation was signed, would not be able to claim the credit — even though if they held off their closing for just one more day, they could be entitled to either $6,500 or $8,000.

So we put out a broadcast email to all our agent-clients, and a blog post alerting all our buyer clients about the issue, and advising them that they should talk to their attorneys about whether they could put off the closing for a few days if they were impacted by the tax credit. And we had a few people who actually did just that, which is “Bringing the WOW!” in a big way. Tough to “Bring the Wow” more than helping a client get a $8,000 tax break….

Once that was done, we kept it up. We came up with what we still believe was the best home buyer tax credit resources available anywhere on the internet. We had an overview, FAQ, list of individual scenarios, a breakdown of the history of the legislation, and even a comprehensive Eligibility Test that clients could take to see if they qualified for the tax credit.

But that wasn’t enough. It occurred to us that the large national franchises and other sites were not doing much to explain this difficult program. We discovered that the domain name “homebuyertaxcredit.com” was available for sale, and we bought it (never mind the cost). We then took the materials we’d developed for our brokerage, and then re-wrote and expanded them for a national audience.

From that, in early January, we launched the HomeBuyerTaxCredit.com resource site, which has by far the most comprehensive treatment of the home buyer tax credit anywhere in the country. Much, much more than the national franchises websites, which have scanty information and actual misinformation in some cases (I won’t name names, but it seems that all the brokers misunderstand what the long-time homeowner tax credit rules are).

Why did we do this? Remember the C.O.R.E. process: (1) identify the need, (2) figure out a way to service the need, and (3) execute, and establish the relationship. We identified that clients had a need for the information, and figured out how to get it to them. Then we executed by building a great site that is going to reach thousands of home buyers.

And, of course, we’re hoping to deepen the relationship. Throughout the site, the client has opportunities to ask for a referral for a real estate agent, an accountant, or a lender. Those referrals will help us serve our OTHER client base, the agents who work for us, either with direct leads from the site, or outbound referrals that will help us get inbound referrals down the road. We have no idea how much revenue the site will generate, but we’re hopeful. And even if we eventually lose money on the site (it cost about $100,000 to build), it was still worth it to execute well on a great idea. Sometimes, you just have to take your chances.

First, to provide a great resource site for people across the country who want to understand the home buyer tax credit. We identified a need, figured out a way to service that need, and then executed by putting out a tremendous site.