Category Archives: World's Best Service Standards

Book Review: Stephen C. Lundin, FISH!: A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results (2000).

Posted on July 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

Stephen Lundin’s Fish!: A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results quickly became a revered text in modern management styles after its publication a decade ago, particularly well-known for its promotion of “fun” in the workplace to motivate employees.  There’s actually a lot more in the book, though, than just its “fun”-orientation, particularly in its zen-like endorsement of “choose your attitude” and “being present” in the moment.

The lessons imparted in Fish are very simple and provocatively empowering.  The authors assert that employees in the workplace have the power to change their own attitudes about their work, creating a positive environment that will not only be more productive but happier in their lives.

Clearly, these are not novel ideas, but what gives them power is that Fish! uses as an example of this management technique the Pike Place fish market in Seattle, which is known for its lively fishmongers tossing fish to and fro.  The idea is that if these workers, who have very difficult jobs that are not particularly lucrative, can maintain an amazingly motivated attitude about their work, then so can anyone.

The four elements of the Fish! philosophy break down as follows:

1.  Choose your attitude

This is probably the simplest and yet most powerful of the ideas generated in the book.  As the authors state: “there is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself.”  Workers choose the attitudes they bring to work: they’re either going to be miserable, or they’re going to be motivated.  If they choose to be motivated, and get in the habit of making that choice, they will be happier and more productive.  If you have to be at work, why not be great at it rather than ordinary?

2.  Play

The second, and more celebrated, element of the Fish! philosophy is to incorporate “play” into the workplace.  The idea is that you can be serious about your business and still have fun with the way you conduct business.  It shows that you’re not taking yourself so seriously, and that you understand the importance of good humor even in stressful situations.  The benefits of play are as follows: happy people treat each other well, fun leads to creativity, the time passes quickly, having a good time is healthy, and work becomes a reward and not just a way to rewards.

3.  Make their day

This is the core service concept of the Fish! philosophy: approach customer service with the goal that you’re going to make someone’s day.  Go out of your way to give someone a memorable experience working with you.

4.  Be present

The Fish! philosophy also incorporates an element of Zen-like attention to being present in the moment.  The authors point out that people in service professions tend to “zone out” in their work.  Because they’re so unhappy, just clock-watching and waiting for their shift to end, they don’t really pay attention to their clients or customers.  They’re not fully engaged in their work.  In the Fish! philosophy, you need to concentrate on being present in the moment, and being focused on the needs of your client.

Takeaways

This is a great book, and one that every successful real estate agent should read.  The simplest advice I’ve ever heard about maintaining a positive approach to business is this: “choose your attitude.” That’s it.  You have control over the attitude you bring to work every day.  If you choose to be positive, you’ll find that it becomes easier every day to become the kind of professional, and person, that you want to be.

Really, all four lessons from Fish! are worth remembering, including everything that Lundin has to say about great customer service.  This is a must read.

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Who are your clients? Ummm, your clients, dummy!

Posted on April 19, 2011 | 1 Comment

Whenever I am at an industry conference, I’ll hear a real estate broker make the observation that a broker’s real “client” is the “agent.”  That is, although individual real estate agents have buyers or sellers who are clients, a broker’s clients are actually the agents: the broker provides services to the agents, who then treat the clients, but the broker’s main role is maintaining that client relationship with the agents. The theory is that the broker does not actually have a relationship with the buyers and sellers, but only with the agent.

This is one of those observations that always seems clever when people say it, kind of a counter-intuitive perspective that is presented as a flash of insight.  Except, of course, that it’s become pretty much of  a cliche, given that I hear it at every conference.

More importantly, it’s wrong.  If you’re a real estate broker, your agents are not your clients. Your clients are your clients.  Your agents are your agents.  That’s why we call some of those people “clients” and some of them “agents.”  

And even more importantly, I think that it’s gone from counter-intuitive clever insight all the way through to cliche and now all the way to a pernicious system of real estate brokerage that elevates the agent above the client in the broker’s perspective.

Put it this way: a great real estate broker provides outstanding client service to buyers and sellers.  The main delivery system for those services is through the individual agents, so the broker does have a significant obligation to empower those agents with tools, technology, and training to provide that client service. And, of course, the broker has to provide a reasonable compensation system to incentivize agents to stay with the broker and do lots and lots of deals.  

But you cannot always serve two masters.  Too many brokers, I think, including me, sometimes elevate the agent at the expense of the client. Here’s an easy example: do you provide dedicated parking at your offices to your agents, or your buyers and sellers?  At our offices, where possible, we have dedicated parking spots in front of the entrance for clients. Why? Because we want to make it easy for clients to be able to park at the offices.  That’s a good client service.  But I know lots of brokers who leave those spots open for agents to park in, because the “agent is the client.”

Of course, this is sort of a cross-industry standard, because you can go to most businesses in the country and find dedicated parking for staff or important employees, but not for clients.  And if you go to any mall in the country at 9AM, you’ll find the first ten rows of parking taken up by employees of stores in the mall, who will squat on those choice parking spots all day long.  

But it’s not just simple things like parking spots.  For example, many brokers, including ours, provides for “call coordinating” of sign calls and online inquiries, which go first to the listing agent.  This can be considered a good client service for the seller, who is probably best served if an inquiry is delivered to a listing agent who has a tremendous incentive to try to sell that listing.  It also can be considered good customer (not yet client) service to the potential buyer making the inquiry, since the inquiry is directed to an agent who really knows the property.

But in a lot of cases, this is actually bad customer service for the potential buyer, made in the spirit of the listing agent being the client of the broker.  Although sometimes online inquiries are made about a particular property, at other times the inquiry is spurred by that property, but the customer would be better served by talking to an agent who is sitting in front of a computer and can dedicate as much time as necessary to fielding that call.  Instead, the inquiry goes to a listing agent, who is likely out in the field, with clients, or otherwise distracted and occupied.  It’s a good service to the listing agent, good for the seller, not necessarily good for the person making the call.

This is not to criticize call coordinating, but simply to give an example that treating the agent as a client is not always in the best interests of the buyer or seller who are the actual clients of the company. This one’s a close call, but only if you actually think that people who call into your company deserve the best treatment possible. If you actually think that your agents are your clients, then it’s an easy call.

Finally, while I understand the impulse to treat agents, particularly productive agents that drive the bottom line, as the clients of the broker, I don’t see why service to agents should come at the expense of the client.  The idea that you have to choose between treating your agents/employees as clients, or your buyers/sellers as clients, is a false choice that sends us down the wrong path.  I don’t think you can have a great client service company without providing great tools, training, and technology for your employees (or in real estate, your agents).  

Inded, other industries do just fine in adopting client-centric approaches that actually empower employees and treat employees fairly without adopting a “employees are the client” standard that we hear bandied about in real estate. For example, Zappos is one of the gold standard companies in providing great client service, but Zappos also has a legendarily empowering employee culture. In fact, the great client experience wouldn’t exist without that employee culture.

A great real estate company should be able to recognize that the buyers and sellers are the clients, and provide amazing services to those clients through an empowered, trained, and motivated workforce.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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November 30th is a HARD Deadline — Be Prepared

Posted on October 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

It has occurred to us that we should send out a general alert to all of you to start preparing for November 30th.

What’s November 30th? It’s the last day that first-time home buyers can close to take advantage of the federal tax credit. It’s going to be a massive closing day. It’s also, unfortunately, the Monday after Thanksgiving, which means that it’s going to ruin a lot of holidays.

I expect that the month of November is going to be a huge closing month, but it’s going to be stressful.
This is a good chance for us to kick it up a notch, to bring some WOW and deliver that kind of great service people should expect from us.

We need to be absolutely positively sure that every one of our first-time home buyers can close by November 30th. People who don’t start preparing now are going to end up in situations where their buyers literally cannot get an attorney who can close them on time. Or their buyers are going to look up on November 20th and have to pull together last-minute documentation during the holidays.

We have told our colleagues at Hudson Abstract and Rand Mortgage to be prepared for the deluge, and to be on top of every deal that might be a first-time home-buyer purchase to make sure that we are ready to close.

You should do the same thing. Look at your pipeline. If you have buyers you think (or you know) are going to claim the credit, contact them now and alert them to the situation. Talk to your attorneys and mortgage people and title people to make sure they’re aware that you have a HARD deadline.

If you want to send them something that explains the situation, send them our blog post about the issue on the Market Intelligence blog.

Be on top of it. Be the World’s Best Real Estate Agent.

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Giving our clients good pricing advice

Posted on October 27, 2009 | 1 Comment

A year ago, I was in car accident. I was on Kinderkamack road in Emerson, and stopped because a line of geese were crossing the road (new rule: drive over the geese), and a woman who apparently wasn’t paying such careful attention smashed into the back of my car.  She pretty much destroyed the rear end of my car, virtually totaling it.  It took about three months to get the car fixed, and I had some residual neck pain for a few months.

Being a litigious sort, since I’m an attorney, my thoughts naturally turned to whether I had a claim against her for liability.  Three months of not having a car, an increase in my insurance rates (even though the accident was clearly not my fault), and some personal injury.  I would have thought it was worth something.  So I called a few attorney friends, including my cousin John Rand, a crack personal injury attorney in White Plains.

In about a 20-minute conversation, he explained to me that I didn’t have a case.  Something about New York’s and New Jersey’s no-fault policy for these types of auto accidents.  So I dropped the issue.

I thought about that recently when I was talking to some agents about how they help a client price a home.  When a seller comes to an agent for advice about selling a home, one of the biggest concerns is the price — the seller obviously wants to get the highest price possible.  Often, the agent is in the position that my cousin John was in, delivering some bad news about the viability of those hopes.  Just like John had to tell me that I didn’t have a legal claim despite my injuries, an agent has to explain to a seller the realities of the housing market.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy telling a client what she doesn’t want to hear.  And I think that in a lot of cases, agents aren’t able to do the job they’re supposed to do in helping their client understand the realities of the situation.  John would not have done me any favors if he had told me I had a viable case, and then induced me to spend time and money pursuing it.  Similarly, an agent doesn’t do her client any favors when she allows that seller to price the home at an unsustainable level.  The home isn’t going to sell, and the client isn’t going to have a good experience.

Why do we do that? Maybe it’s because we naturally shy away from being pegged with that stereotype that all real estate agents want to do is underprice their listings to get a quick sale.  Maybe we’re defensive about presenting a price. Or maybe it’s just because sellers don’t trust their broker to give them solid advice and counsel the way that I trusted my attorney to give me his advice.

Whatever it is, we do our sellers a disservice when we allow them to overprice their homes.  We’re not helping them, or, for that matter, ourselves.

So what do we do?  I’m working on a pricing presentation that tries to educate and explain the fundamentals of pricing to a seller, in the interests of actually doing our job.  If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

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Posted in Listing Consultations, World's Best Service Standards

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Staying on top of things

Posted on October 24, 2009 | Leave a comment

If you’re going to be the “World’s Best Real Estate Agent,” you have to stay on top of things.  For those of you working with first-time home-buyers, be advised that the New York State government just shut down the state’s first-time home-buyer tax credit.  As we predicted in the Market Intelligence blog a few weeks ago, the program was severely underfunded. 

Make sure your clients know, if they were planning on taking advantage of the credit.  My guess is that not a lot of you were working with people who were relying on it, since it simply wasn’t around long enough.

The larger point is this: the cornerstone of our business is knowledge about the real estate market. It’s incumbent on all of you to subscribe to information sources that update you about what’s happening, and provide avenues to push that information out to your sphere.

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

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Clean Windows Service — Getting Property Taxes Right

Posted on October 10, 2009 | Leave a comment

In a “World’s Best” class we had last week, agents in the class firmly made the point that a fundamental aspect of a great service experience is getting the taxes right. From a listing perspective, you have to go to the town or village to get the right taxes, not just trusting the seller to tell you what he’s currently paying. And that also means understanding that a property might have village, town, school, county, etc. taxes to pay – we’ve had problems in situations where the taxes quoted only included the village but not the town, or vice versa.

And from a buyer’s perspective, it means checking out the taxes yourself when your buyers get close to making an offer, rather than trusting the seller’s estimation. Why? Because taxes have a dramatic impact on affordability, a point I made on on the Market Intelligence blog today.

So if we’re going to have at least one central tenet of “clean windows” service, it has to be: get the taxes right.

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Posted in Services, World's Best Service Standards

What Would the World’s Best Real Estate Agent Do?

Posted on October 7, 2009 | 2 Comments

We just had a great session today with about 300 agents covering how the World’s Best Real Estate Agent would develop her business.  The question I’m posing to the class is “What Would the World’s Best Real Estate Agent Do?” with regard to all aspects of her business. How would she manage her clients? How would she deal with other agents? What tools would she use? And how would she build her business?

I’ve set up the Discussion space above for agents to submit their thoughts. Make suggestions, share ideas, write about your success stories, or give us an idea of what we could do to create a better service experience for agents and clients.

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Posted in Uncategorized, World's Best Service Standards