Advice for Realtors

If you are a realtor wondering how you’re going to cope with the currently ugly housing market, Seth Godin has some advice for you: get another job.

That’s probably excellent advice for a lot of agents in a market that’s likely to be difficult for some time. For those who want to stick with it, Godin has some other advice, most of which boils down to this: add value by actually connecting buyers and sellers in useful ways.

That isn’t what a lot of realtors do, unfortunately; consider this:

The second asset to build is permission. It turns out (according to the NAR) that 91% of all Realtors never contact the buyer or the seller of a home after the closing. Not once. Wow. Someone just spent a million dollars with you and you don’t bother to call or write?

That is just shocking. The realtor who sold my house when I left Washington, DC still sends me calendars. She’s not your typical realtor; she did a fabulous job selling my house, made the stressful parts easier, and got me more money for it than I ever dreamed. Chances are I will never work with her again (because I live in Texas). But if I were to move back to DC, who do think I’d call? If anybody in Washington told me they were looking for a realtor, what do you think I’d say! “Call her!”

Seth touches on permission, too, which tends to be a difficult one for realtors; it often seems that if you pass within twenty feet of a realtor, you’ve opted into his or her email and direct mail lists.

When things get tough in any market, the weaker participants get shaken out; I expect we will be seeing that in real estate. What I find interesting about real estate, though, is that if ever there was a market made for social media, this i it; the best realtors do well because of offline social media (referrals and word of mouth); I think we’ll see some success stories among those who are good at taking that online.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.

The Opinionated Marketers | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice