Are your selling habits ‘1979’ or 2018?
I’m writing an article about how real estate has changed for a prominent real estate magazine. Here is the first part of that article, which will be continued in the next two blogs. As I write the article, I am actually stunned as I think about the number of habits we have carried over from 1979 (even though they didn’t work real well then and they sure don’t work now.)
Agents Were Hired to Sell and ‘Service’ Listings
“Sell, sell, sell!” I’ll never forget the cry of the vice-president of our company yelling that at the end of an all-company meeting. When I started in real estate, about four decades ago (wow!), a company wanted—and expected—agents to sell houses. That’s it. The company would take care of the advertising to gain leads, business plan, finances—and charge 50% of the commissions for doing it. Does that sound onerous to you? Well, to us, entering the business, it sounded great! After all, what did we know about how to marketing to find business, how to spend our marketing dollars, how to think longer-term about our careers? No. What we thought about was that we would probably see some nice listings that day, and we’d go home and try to find a buyer for that listing.
How Agents ‘Lead Generated’
Well, they didn’t really lead generate themselves. They waited for the company to spend money to get prospective buyers and sellers to call them. Here’s how it was done:
- The company placed ads in newspapers. Agents were assigned ‘floor time’ to answer these inquiries. The listing agent didn’t get the calls. Unfortunately, many times agents were new, and/or hadn’t seen the homes. But, the company ‘sold’ the opportunity—and agents complained that there were few ‘qualified’ calls. Fortunately (?), sellers didn’t realize how these calls were handled–and they weren’t told anything about call handling during the listing presentation. They were just ecstatic that their home would be advertised!
Agents: Are you trained to tell the truth about what advertising/open houses do? Are you still letting sellers think open houses sell that house regularly?
Contrarian view: As I write this, I’ll tell you how I bucked the practices of the day, because I found these practices to set up win-lose situations. Most agents sat and waited for a lead to come to them. But, since I knew 2 people when we moved to Seattle, I was afraid to ‘sit and wait’. Fortunately, I had a manager who told me to ‘go talk to people’. So, I did—for sale by owners, expired listings, farming—you name it, I did it (without any training–I just read articles and bugged agents!) I did proactive lead generating way before it was ‘in’ to do—and was named in the top 10 agents in my 400 agent company my 2nd year in the business (boy, was I surprised!).
2. Open houses: The office assigned agents to hold homes open (especially new homes). Most of the time, these weren’t the listing agents. Instead, the listing agents promised the builders that someone would hold the home open every Saturday and Sunday. So, agents (especially newer agents) were assigned these ‘opportunities’—even though the home may be on a lane in the woods….
Contrarian view: When I became manager, I taught our agents never to promise open houses if the house wasn’t situated in a high traffic area. Why? It’s unfair to sellers AND agents. Also, we kept statistics on how often a buyer walked in a bought the home (very, very seldom—in a normal market).
Agents Do you keep statistics on how buyers find the home they bought? And what happens in open houses? Do you educate sellers and buyers on why open houses are held and the results of them?
Big question
Agents: Are you still relying on the systems that worked in 1979 when you’re actually operating in a 2018 world? Are you still hanging on to the delusion that ‘sit and wait’ for clients will make you rich? Wake up! Client habits have changed and I’m afraid these systems and agents haven’t changed with them.
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