Why Most Real Estate Agents Fail
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…
Read MoreReviewing the iPad Apps from Realtor.com, Trulia, and Zillow: The New Home Search Paradigm
I love my iPad. Seriously. I find myself curling up in bed with it, with no particular idea of what I’m going to do with it other than that I want to play with it. I read my books on it, surf the web, read blogs, and I’ve even started reading comic books again because…
Read MoreClient-Oriented Real Estate in Action: The Guide to Grieving Your Property Taxes
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…
Read More"THIS IS THE JOB": Seven Things That Real Estate Agents and Brokers Do that Are Not Good Enough
In a post last week, I argued that the enemy of the good is not the great, but the crappy. That is, the classic cliche that the “enemy of the good is the great” has some truth for perfectionist types that have difficulty finishing projects because they’re never quite “good enough,” but the bigger problems…
Read MoreWho are your clients? Ummm, your clients, dummy!
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…
Read MoreThe enemy of the good is the great, but that doesn't mean that the friend of the good is the crappy.
I am definitely someone that needs to remember that the “enemy of the good is the great.” In everyday usage, the phrase refers to situations in which a perfectionist doesn’t actually finish anything because nothing is ever “great enough” to go out. That’s me. My worklife is just filled with projects that are incomplete because…
Read MoreThe Guide to the Best Smartphone Apps
A good smartphone is really a mini-computer in your pocket, capable of doings things that computers even five years ago could not do. But you’re not getting the most out of your smartphone if you’re just using it for making calls, checking email, and surfing the web. Those are all good things to do, but…
Read MoreAre Real Estate Agents Worth It? Yes!
NOTE: This is a reprint of a post I made in early February on the Market Intelligence blog that I write for my company in New York. Since it has some universal application to the industry, I thought I would share it here. The bottom line: good real estate agents are, and always have been,…
Read MoreBook Review: Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right — Achieving Operational Excellence in the Real Estate Industry
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…
Read MoreWhat's the Best Way to Build Marketshare? Make Your Clients Happy.
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…
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