1000watt blog

Repositioning for the future

By Marc Davison | July 2nd, 2009 | 8 Comments Categories: Branding, Brokerage of the future, Brokers, Commentary, New business models

First published on Inman News 7.1.2009

Read Part 1 here

A brokerage model of the future is coming.
Some might suggest they’re already here.
One might be stealing your client right now.

In the blink of an eye Hawaii Life Real Estate Services launched and became the No. 1 real estate site in Kauai. Soon after, they went from a pretty for-sale-by-owner site and search portal to a full-fledged real estate brokerage. Their lava has now spread to the Big Island, destroying some of the old growth that lay in their path.

You may be wondering what you’ll do if they open in your town. Stop. Start wondering what can you do right now to make sure that if they do, they’ll fail.

Repositioning yourself for the future

Yours could be a brokerage of the future. Your small boutique with 25 amazing agents could easily displace the old brand that has been there forever and has, over the long haul, brought nothing new to the table. Or you could be that old brand — the sleeping giant — that decides to wake up and roar.

To achieve this, here are three simple steps up the ladder of repositioning yourself for the future.

1. Determine your customer’s frame of reference. For the most part, consumers have a clear understanding of the space a brand occupies. When Volkswagen, the “people’s car” company, attempted to slide into the luxury class with its $94,000 Phaeton W12 it failed because it ventured far outside the frame of reference the marketplace has with VW.

The same argument can be made for the myriad of social networking sites seeking to engage consumers in a format outside their frame of reference. Consumers typically do not socialize with real estate companies. Instead, their frame of reference is centered around searching and finding homes — not friending and RSS (really simple syndication) subscription.

Repositioning a brand first requires the brand to thoroughly nail the basics of what its consumers expect from them as opposed to abandoning those critical elements in wake of introducing gimmicky new ones.

As it pertains to real estate, as long as your IDX feeds, response times, service promises and Web sites remain second rate, and as long as you continue to not offer market data, local insight or tools to help users make better decisions, your efforts to reposition will fail.

Tweeting sure is fun, but your customers don’t need you to be their Twitter follower. They need you to be their adviser and they need your site to be as amazing as you say you are.

2. Connect consumers’ frame of reference to your vision. As a Porsche enthusiast, the Cayenne made perfect sense to me once Range Rover officially closed the drawbridge between how far consumers were willing to pay for SUVs. Had Porsche released a $100,000 Cayenne in 1995, odds are it would have backfired.

When brands reposition, they must create connectors that segue their relevant and known benefits from the present to the future. Zappos successfully built those connectors through their accelerated service proposition that allowed the brand to move beyond being an online shoe retailer.

Brands must build connectors — or bridges — that help carry their customers from where the brand is to where it intends on going. Those connectors include products, services and experiences that continually suggest the forward path the brand is on.

Apple nailed it by taking its already left-brained users into the music world through iTunes, then segueing them into hardware with the iPod, which created the frenzy for the iPhone. Quite arguably, as a result of this successful repositioning, if Apple wanted to release an iCar, it could.

Building this connector also requires the brand to have a deeper connection with its customers. Zillow, for example, continues to endure, invent and reposition themselves year after year by pushing the boundaries of what they are as a brand.

Part of your success formula is attributed to their brand stewards — over a dozen — who actively and consistently define Zillow’s relationship with their customer as well as translate the customers’ understanding back to the brand.

Are you building those connectors? Do you have a brand steward? Without both, your bridge to tomorrow sports a gaping void preventing the marketplace from following you forward.

3. Keep your promises. Create a brand promise to help locate the brilliance that resides inside your company and turn it on. It’s a promise that you must deliver on every day, for every client, or face brand death.

Real estate makes too many promises and claims it doesn’t keep. You can’t guarantee you will deliver dreams. You can’t assure me that all your agents are the best in the market. So stop trying.

The future brokerage will make one promise. With great precision it will hitch every available brand touch point to that promise. And ride it from dust till dawn, delivering on its every word.

For your brokerage of today to be the brokerage of tomorrow, you will have to remove every agent who can’t support that promise — and probably every managing broker who can’t assist in drilling your brand ideals down through the ranks.

The brokerage of the future will no longer license products from vendors of the past whose products and services don’t help your client walk your talk.

The brokerage model of the future will become deft at the art of removing and replacing everyone in its marketing department who cannot find 50 new ways to push its commitments out to the marketplace and steward their brand.

The brokerage of the future will be profitable. Nimble. And its general manager will don a five-pointed star on her lapel next to her Realtor pin, clearly expressing to the consumer that when it comes to the most important purchase in their lives, there’s a new sheriff in town looking out for their best interests.

That’s how the brokerage model of the future will roll.

- Davison

Twitter: 1000wattmarc

New brokerage model: from bust to boom

By Marc Davison | July 2nd, 2009 | 5 Comments Categories: Articles, Branding, Brokerage of the future, Brokers, Commentary, New business models, Real Estate Articles, Yelp

First published on Inman News - June 30, 2009

The corridors of real estate echo with the anxious cacophony of futuristic business model chatter.

Environmental branding, virtual space, marketing, social media and stemming the ooze of profitability caused by the open gash of lopsided splits are now on the gurney as the present model heads for open-heart surgery.

Stat.

Today’s brokerage is dying. Its value proposition, earnings and moribund branding all are in dire need of defibrillation. Clear!

Its future hangs in the balance. A ghostly spirit invisibly hovers over its stilling life form, hoping for resuscitation and a second chance to exact influence over the marketplace.

Given the prognosis, today’s brokerage must look to the future. It needs the future. It can’t remain on life support much longer. Especially as they appear to have no influence over the masses who should be stampeding the marketplace during the greatest time in our lives to buy real estate.

To be a brokerage of the future, the brokerage of the present must undergo a complete repositioning. Starting yesterday.

Everything you thought just went boom

Repositioning a brand is no simple matter. It requires more than a new skin on a Web site, a sexy slogan or a feel-good promise.

At the onset, repositioning requires the brand to recognize the reasons for its decay. In almost all cases, decay forms when the changing needs of the consumer are not met, thus eroding the brand’s established position.

Buick understands that all too well. Their current reposition is wrapped up by their “Everything you thought about Buick just went boom” campaign. In order to succeed they must deliver on this promise or they will fail just as United Airlines, Clear Channel and others have.

The reasons for failure are simple. Failed attempts at repositioning can be visualized through a simplistic understanding of what is required to succeed. In short, to successfully reposition your brand you must:

Isolate the very reasons why your brand is eroding.
Attend to only those things that are achievable rather than aspirational.
Too often, a brand’s unsuccessful efforts either target things people don’t care about or they create overly ambitious goals that outstrip the brands’ ability to deliver on its promises.

United Airlines sought the unattainable with its “Rising” campaign, attempting to position the brand as the “most passenger-centric airline” in the industry. They articulated their understanding of consumer issues and hyped their solutions that effectively raised expectations, which were then deflated by their inability to deliver against promises.

Conversely, Virgin America’s success centered on the achievable — the simple things — they knew would make a difference for their guests. This set the stage for the provision of first-class seats to everyone, more leg room, ambient lighting, a self-serve mini bar and fun stuff to do while in flight.

Simple. Attainable. Targeted. They delivered.

A pulse, a passing grade and a business card

Open the brokerage up. Inside, cancer looms. Unlike Virgin America, the brokerage views its customers as leads that it captures, drips, manages and forces to convert through dubious value propositions rather than first-class comfort and engagement.

Semantics? Spare me. These words so blatantly define what the brokerage stands for to the public. It is the very reason why they resist calling you until the final leg of the transaction and then delete you post-closing.

Many of the agents who brokers recruited brought nothing other than a pulse, a passing grade and a business card to the table. Their qualifications pale in comparison to what Yelp requires for a customer-service position.

From one hand the brokerage baits through a sympathetic understanding that real estate is the most important transaction they will ever make. From the other they switch those who they lead-generate off to the least experienced in the roster who renders the largest split.

Brokerages skimp and save where investing matters most, such as your Web site and agent training, and spend irresponsibly on things that matter least, like space, content and advertising.

Brokerages scoff at social media. Or are baffled by it. Some force themselves with trivial meanderings, despite the success your counterparts experience, embrace and benefit from outside the industry.

Pipe dreams

Your attempt to attain future brokerage status will drown in the bong water if all you do is slap up a new site on Wordpress, bang out a few blogs, recruit a few more top producers at 93/7 or lease a bistro like retail space sandwiched between Hugo Boss and Mac Cosmetics on Luxury Ave.

None of these things mean anything if below the surface, your brokerage is filled with the last 50 years of real estate sediment now clogging your arteries and causing your cardiac arrest.

What steps can you take to reposition your brand and become that brokerage model of the future?

- Daivson
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Part 2

There is no Web 2.0 bubble - and real estate technology ain’t what it used to be

By Brian Boero | June 25th, 2009 | 9 Comments Categories: real estate technology

Back in 2000, the online real estate category flamed out with the rest of the “dot-com” universe. It was five cold years before innovation flowered once more.

That will never happen again.

Yes, there are plenty of failed Web 2.0 companies, thousands of silly apps. Many more are on the way. But there is no “Web 2.0 bubble” — just a constant fizz of development, trial, error and, once in a while, breakthrough success.

This is enabled, and will be sustained, by dramatically lowered barriers confronting technology innovators. One can get a product to market cheaper and more quickly than before. Distribution is cheaper. Hosting is cheaper. The web is a more open and fluid environment.

A corollary of this reality is that the dividing line between “real estate technology” and the rest of the technology world is fading fast. Back in 1999 there were hundreds of real estate technology companies and applications - everything from website platforms to transaction management suites - tailored to something often characterized as “The unique needs of brokers and agents.”

Today, those inside the industry are often better served by bypassing real estate specific vendors and applications to pick form the burgeoning flower bed of platforms, APIs and apps from outside the category.

Here are a few examples, plucked from just the past week of technology news:

  • Google announced a new “What’s here?” feature in Google Maps. It gives the user - a home buyer, for example - a peripheral view around a point on a map. It’s available through the Google Maps API.
  • Outside.in launched “Outside.in for publishers,” which allows website owners (e.g., a real estate brokerage, agent, or listings site) to integrate neighborhood level news, blog posts and tweets with their own content. This is a compelling addition to a listings detail page for a couple reasons: It’s fresh (indeed, in some cases, real time) and provides the user with a sense for the ambient noise of a place, the stuff charts and graphs can’t render.
  • YouTube upgraded it channel designs and layout. Until now, creating a YouTube channel made sense for a lot of reasons - but a creating a cohesive brand experience was not one of them. Even large brand efforts like the (prematurely) celebrated Coldwell Banker channel have been limited by a kludgy interface. That’s no longer the case.
  • BookFresh launched today. It’s an appointment-gathering application built primarily for small businesses: Plumbers, massage therapists, accountants … and Realtors. It’s slick, robust and represents a compelling alternative to real estate showing applications.

Of course, all these things are free or darn close to free.

Enjoy!

Layar launches, RETS feed mashed up with my cerebral cortex

By Brian Boero | June 23rd, 2009 | 5 Comments Categories: Apps, Mobile, Real estate search, iPhone

Well almost…

Layar, an “Augmented reality browser,” was presented this past weekend at the Mobile 2.0 Europe conference in Spain.

The application allows users to view an enhanced version of reality through the lens of their mobile phone’s camera. It is currently available in the Netherlands, on Android phones.

Layers, or “Layars” of information integrated with the application are displayed on top of whatever appears in the camera’s viewfinder. In real time. With full dimensionality provided by a built in magnetometer, GPS, and a display that even shows what’s behind you.

Right now, most data/map mashups rely on search parameters input by users and display places using year-old aerial or street-level photography.

Layar collapses those distances completely. No searching, only finding. No snapshots of the past, only now.

At the moment, real estate search is abstracted from reality - even in an advanced form like the Zillow iPhone app. With something like Layar in the palm of your hand, searching becomes more immediate. You or I could look at a neighborhood through the lens of our mobile phone and see data that tells the story of every home we point at.

This is the stuff of great stoner conversation. But it is also, mark my words, exactly where real estate search is headed.

The team behind Layar says they will be in the U.S. and on the iPhone by this fall.

If you think this is far-fetched, ask yourself if, 5 years ago:

  • Your “cell phone” could nearly replace your personal computer
  • You could “walk down the street” using something like Google Street View
  • You’d run GPS-enhanced real estate searches from the palm of your hand

It is only a matter of time before the phenomenon many technologists call the “ambient web” becomes something we take for granted.

I wonder, will the MLSs in my market allow me to co-mingle listings in my mind? Will Google scrape my imagination?

Check out a Layar video demo below:

Hunch: The intelligence of a million clicks

By Brian Boero | June 18th, 2009 | 6 Comments Categories: Buyers, Marketing, Web 2.0

hunch-logoHunch, a website that claims it “Helps you make decisions and gets smarter the more you use it” emerged from private beta this week.

The site - which collected 7 million answers from 40,000 people during its beta phase - runs you through a series of questions that produce a “hunch” about what you should do. The more questions you answer, the better it understands you. The millions of correlations established from data points provided by other users also condition results.

Topics range from the practical (”Which running shoe should I buy?“) to the absurd (”How should I kill this zombie?“)

Users can create new topics, provided they adhere to a style guide and get enough positive votes from users who vet new entries, and can embed topics on their own site or blog. An API allows developers to create deeper integrations.

I wrote about Hunch after signing up to test the site a few months ago, noting its still-ambiguous relation to online real estate.

That connection is no longer ambiguous.

hunch

As you can see, there are already a bunch of real estate questions. There are also a ton of questions like “Where should I live in Los Angeles?” and a whole category dedicated to home and garden questions. There will be many more soon.

The online real estate possibilities here are obvious and vaguely threatening if you’re a broker not inclined to give freely of information or advice.

Looked at from this perspective, Hunch forebodes a future where the one indissoluble element of Realtor value - the decision-aiding knowledge accumulated through experience - is reconstituted, monstrously, from the inferred intent of a million clicks.

Okay, that’s a little bleak… but you take my point: Resistance is stupid. And good Realtors will never be taken out by technology.

So let’s look at it this way: Consumers don’t want to talk to a real estate professional until they feel they have to. Real estate professionals spend way too much time working unqualified leads. Something like Hunch then could work both ways.

You may think this is silly. But consider this: How silly is an engaging decision tool compared to, say, that “Buyer Tips” article that’s been sitting on your site for ten years? Or the mindless feeding frenzy of many online real estate forums?

I’d like to see an online real estate company or brokerage implement the Hunch API, contribute some topics, and build a marketing campaign around it.

It would sure beat “We deliver dreams.”

Selling sanctuary, sparkle and a path to better branding

By Marc Davison | June 16th, 2009 | 5 Comments Categories: Branding, Brokers, Ideas

Something caught my attention the other night while watching a rerun of Scrubs.

Here’s the set up.

J.D. watches the Janitor pack up a duffel bag of cleaning supplies.

J.D.’s narration: Sometimes when you’re down, you end up taking it out on the wrong person.

J.D.: Going on vacation?

Janitor: I get it — ’cause I’m a janitor, so, when I pack for a vacation, I just pack cleaning supplies. That’s funny!

J.D.: I thought so.

Janitor: Actually, I’m going to speak at my son’s career day.

J.D.: About… being a janitor?

Janitor: What do you think, there aren’t kids out there that want to grow up to make the world sparkle?

Selling sanctuary, love and sparkle.

Most brands sell products or services. GM sells cars. Borders sells books. Real estate brokerages sell homes. Great brands, however, satisfy desire by peeling off the hard leaves of the marketing artichoke and getting down to the emotional heart of the matter.

Zappos. They don’t sell shoes. They deliver that extra dose of love we all need from time to time.

W Hotels. People don’t go there to sleep. They go there to feel glamorous.

Downy doesn’t soften your clothes. They sell sanctuary.

pastedgraphic1

Most brokerages sell real estate services. Most agents sell houses. Most vendors sell products. Software. A website.

Few target desire.

In 2008, Anne Randolph from Murray Consulting produced a survey that revealed what people really want when hiring an agent or a brokerage. Turns out it’s not a home; people are seeking trust.

How many of you can offer your customers trust?

So how do you get to the heart of that desire? Put yourself through this simple exercise. Fill in the blanks below.

Realtor: I sell real estate because ________________________

Broker: Consumers should choose my brand because ____________________

Compare what you’ve written in that blank space against your current marketing material. Against your slogan. Against the reasons why you believe customers should want your products or services.

Then compare it against what Anne’s research tells us.

You might discover that what you have been marketing around for years doesn’t even come close to what it is people really desire from you.

- Davison
Twitter:1000wattmarc

Real estate technology is headed straight to the small screen

By Brian Boero | June 11th, 2009 | 22 Comments Categories: Mobile, Real estate search, iPhone

The announcement of the iPhone 3G S this week adds confidence to my belief that real estate websites as we know them are a legacy platform.

The handheld device will be the locus of real estate technology innovation in the coming years.

The inherent “limitations” of the small screen are in fact liberating for the people who count: End users. These are the folks too often forced to slog through a chopped salad of links, footers and gratuitous content served up by SEO-obsessed product teams. The small screen concentrates the developer mind and compels a better experience.

And, for now, the mobile platform is relatively free from ads. This is changing fast, but even when mobile advertising matures it is likely to be less disruptive than what users have come to expect on the big screen. Early data suggest they may even be more effective.

Most importantly, the experience is portable, which is perfectly suited to real estate.

This is why I think the Zillow iPhone app is better than Zillow.com. It’s why I am so excited about the numerous IDX-based native iPhone apps in development as I type.

But you may ask: “What about virtual tours, or big hi-res photos - won’t the small screen limit my ability to merchandize listings?”

Here’s a secret: Price a listing right. Take a dozen well-composed photos. Put it in the MLS. It will sell. No need to go nuts with Photosynth or lay down a John Tesh track behind your slideshow.

The small screen is enough screen.

The details

Consider these features of the 3G S:

1.    Location awareness in the Safari browser. This means you don’t even have to be using an iPhone app to have content - perhaps listings - served up to you based on your location. Right now, many real estate sites serve you listings based on your IP address, which is a notoriously imprecise way of determining location. A location aware browser improves location targeting dramatically.

2.    Video capture, editing and publishing. A year ago, everyone was raving about Flip cameras. Trouble was they kinda sucked. And they were yet another device that needed to be schlepped around, then plugged in to some other web-connected device for publishing. Now, users can take hi-quality video, edit it and email or text it with the click of a button. Or the video can be sent to YouTube directly from the device. Forget for a moment how this might be used by Realtors; think about how buyers will be able to document and share their home search.

3.    Speed. Mobile browsing - even on “high-speed” 3G networks — is still relatively slow. Mobile apps also hang more than those running on the desktop. But the claimed speed increase in the 3G S is an indication that the same leapfrogging advances in memory and processing power we’ve seen on desktops and notebooks over the past decade is coming to the handset. The user experience will only get richer as a result.

Of course, even with nearly 40 million iPhone and iPod touches sold to date, the mobile story hardly begins and ends with Apple. But I think it is safe to assume that many of the features in this new iPhone will appear in some manner across the mobile platform in the next year or two.

Do we need more real estate websites? Maybe not.

Do we still need a better way to find place to live? Definitely.

The small screen is where that better way lies.

From Carchemish to Ur

By Marc Davison | June 9th, 2009 | 19 Comments Categories: Advertising, Agents, Brokers, Commentary, Ideas, Marketing

img_0342I wrote about this home a few weeks ago in a post titled Susquehana Real Estate Company. Between then and now, I have been gone from home and focused on other things.

Today is June 9th, 2009. While driving to get coffee this morning, my wife informed me that the homeowners (sellers) have moved out. The home now sits empty. As does the flyer box.

Apparently, the first allotment of flyers, which I assumed were paid for by the broker, was a one-time option. Once depleted, his responsibility was met. Both to the seller and to the agent.

His hands were washed clean.

As for the agent, perhaps it’s unimportant to her whether this home sells or not. I have to consider that as an option after a conversation I had with an agent last week who currently holds 3 multi-million dollar listings that according to her “will never sell.”

“Why would you represent them if they’ll never sell?” I asked. “Because having my sign out there on the lawn for everyone to see will get me new clients.”

Ultrabrite smile.

I choose to not print the invisible thought bubble that popped over my head but thought about the post Brian wrote titled Secrects, lies, real estate and Zappos and about the invisible stain of distrust on this broker’s otherwise clean hands.

Maybe I’ve got the listing agent above all wrong. Maybe she really needs to sell this home to support her family. But what would it take to refill the box with a stack of new color flyers? $8.00? That’s less than two Venti Cappuccinos a month. What am I not getting?

It’s entirely possible that while real estate textbooks harp on contracts, laws and basic real estate mumbo jumbo, and though we all seek to jam a whole bunch of social networking down practitioner’s throats, I  wonder if today’s agent is missing some basic business fundamentals understood by the ancient merchants who ran the Mesopotamian trade routes from Carchemish to Ur.

Invest in a good dromedary. Load it with goods.  Schelp them across the Sahara. Sell them. Buy other goods. Schlep back and repeat the process.

Maybe I can draft a simple business course and offer it through the NAR. It would educate agents on the basic tenets of investing a little to make a lot. I could title it:

From Staples to the Flyer Box

I think this would fly. Especially if a designation was offered upon completion. All we need is a catchy Acronym.

One that would look good on a business card.

Any ideas?

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Rebirth of a brokerage

By Marc Davison | June 8th, 2009 | 11 Comments Categories: Agents, Branding, Brokers, Change, General Motors

It’s not often I find myself speechless when approaching the podium after an introduction. Actually it’s quite rare. But rare too were the words of Mike Hickman, President and General Manager of Seven Gables Real Estate who spoke before me setting the stage for the rebrith of his brokerage.

I hope they inspire you as they have me.

Rebirth

This is what Michael said, in a nutshell:

If for one more minute you believe you can remain doing what you’ve always done and expect to stay in business, stop your clock now. As a company we are moving forward. All of us. We’ve resisted change for too long and that has not served us well. We will be changing our website. They way we market. The promise we make to our customers and the standards to which we will adhere to deliver on that promise. This is long overdue.

Michael cited the GM debacle, completely unaware that just minutes prior to his speech I published this post. He talked about GM’s miscalculations and their inability to read the tealeaves. GM abandoned their commitment to their customers and lost their way.

In no uncertain terms Michael made it clear that real estate brokerages have also lost sight of who their customers are. “It’s not agents,” he said. “You are our partners. And we both should be working together to provide services for the folks that pay our bills.”

I looked across the room. 200 heads nodded up and down.

Michael cited first quarter losses posted by a competitor and offered it to the group without that typical lampooning you would expect from a broker basking in the glee of a competitor’s misfortune.

Michael felt the losses as if they were his own. Aloud he hoped the folks at this company were also taking stock of every assumption, every expense, every agent and every process. And measuring it against a higher aspiration. His point was clear: The real estate industry as a whole must do better.  We are all in this together.

I crossed checked Michael’s words, his emotions and the impact he was having on the room against the four key brand values of his firm:

Authenticity. Competency. Innovation. Creativity.

I began to think that maybe here, these things actually mean something.

Speechless

Michael then introduced me. I advanced to the podium and ditched my prepared opening statement.

“I’m speechless,” I ad-libbed.  “I not sure if it’s due to the boldness of Michael’s marching orders, which are seldom heard inside a brokerage overrun by fear of how agents will respond, or by the fact that just about every single agent who works here showed up to hear them. And appears to be inline with them.”

My presentation laid the groundwork for what was to come next. The changes that will take place, what they will look like, time frames and ultimately, what Seven Gables is on the path to becoming.

As I concluded, I suggested everyone place a sticky note next to their computers, on their car’s dashboard and by their nightstands with the four words that define their brokerage brand:

Authenticity. Competency. Innovation. Creativity.

To make these words count, they must make them their own. They must live them. Breathe them. Own them. Measure everything they say and do against them.

If that happens, the results will be breathtaking.

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc

Breaking through the haze of social media confusion

By Marc Davison | June 6th, 2009 | 15 Comments Categories: Agents, Branding, Brokers, Change, Social Networks, Web 2.0, Yelp

Since I don’t live in the Bay Area - where I hear posting Yelp reviews like this is prevalent - I snapped this photo prior to entering Damon and Pythias in Calabasas on my way home from a full week of meetings with brokers.

It got me thinking.

photo2

Breaking through the haze of social media confusion

As part of an all-day comprehensive analysis we offer brokers, drilling down deep into their systems, Websites, marketing, technology, vendors, etc., I spend time with their agents attempting to gain a deeper understanding of the broker brand and what it means from their perspective. Through this exchange I also gain insight into their understanding of social media.

Out of the four hundred agents I spoke with this past week, only eighteen dabbled in SM. Out of those eighteen, only three do it right. If you are Gabe Filkey doing it right leads to closed transactions.

Three out of four hundred. Wow. Something’s not clicking for me. After all, agents love people. It’s why they got into real estate to begin with. Many built their careers knocking on hundreds of doors a month for years. So how is it possible that these very same people are so reluctant to socialize online?

Can it be they don’t like change? I don’t buy it.

I asked the agents I met with to talk to me about social media. This is what they believe:

  • Social media is “stupid” and “full of people writing nonsense about what they are doing at any given moment.”
  • It’s a huge time suck and they can’t imagine where they would find the time to invest in it when they already work around the clock.
  • They think social media is a generational thing and many felt they were “too old” to learn new tricks. They don’t see how it can help sell houses.

And the big shocker was many saw no point in revealing personal things about themselves to others, which I found absurd considering the kooky things they already do and reveal about themselves on websites, billboards, etc.

My sense was that everyone I spoke with suffered from one thing: Confusion.

So I put it to them as simply as possible.

The first time you receive a comment on a blog post telling you how good it was, watch how much time you’ll find to write another one.

The first time a long-lost friend from college locates you on Facebook and coincidentally happens to be in the market to buy a home, watch how fast you start friending everyone you’ve ever met.

The first time someone posts a question on Twitter about your community and you respond seconds later with precise information that turns them into a follower, notice how your slogan, which has sat dormant on your business card forever, begins to glow with meaning.

It took mere minutes to get them through their haze of confusion. That’s because they all really want to get it. And if your experience is that they don’t get it, perhaps you haven’t done a good enough job explaining it.

No limits

Maybe blogging isn’t your thing. Or sitting around Facebooking with others just doesn’t suit you. And I get the fact that Twitter can be addictive. The incoming rush of tweets can derail your day if you let it.

So set up a profile on Yelp. Leave reviews of establishments in your area. It takes seconds and exposes you to a whole new audience through information that is uniquely yours. It’s locked up inside your head screaming to be let out.

Yesterday, Angie W. was a complete stranger. Last night I met her through my Yelp iPhone App. And as a result I enjoyed a great dinner. I even ordered the marinated steak sandwich she herself reviewed. I now trust Angie W’s taste. And will eat anywhere else she recommends.

Agents have spent fortunes trying to create that sort of trust connection through paid marketing. You can take full page ads out in your local paper and still never accomplish what Angie W. did leveraging her experience and her opinion through a free review that took her 60 seconds to create.

That’s social media folks.

Go for it.

- Davison
Twitter: 1000wattmarc