See “The Pursuit of Happyness” — because there are worse fates than straight commission sales . . .
By: Greg Swann,
Phoenix Real Estate,
Post Archive,
RSS FeedPosted: Sunday, December 17th, 2006, 11:43 am MST
Category: Casual Friday, Marketing, Real Estate
We see everything through the lens of real estate, including films and television programs. It’s baked in the cake. Houses, always, and rooms and neighborhoods, and god help us if there’s a real estate transaction in a movie or TV show. When we were leaving The Pursuit of Happyness last night, Cathy said, “That makes starting out in a split shop look easy.”
(For non-Realtors, a split shop is one where you have to split your commissions with your broker. New agents often have to give the broker 50% of their earnings, and they may have to pay a mandatory mentor 50% of the remainder. The attested quid pro quo is training, but most new licensees starve and quit before they see much training. They often leave a ton of money behind in other people’s pockets, though, so almost everyone is happy.)
Anyway, the travails Chris Gordon undergoes in “The Pursuit of Happyness” make everything associated with mere straight commission sales look downright easy. Yes, I know successful salespeople go through a lot to get to a place where money problems seem remote, but few of us take the path through Dante’s torments followed by Gordon.
Despite a dogged persistence he is dogged by persistent failure. His wife leaves him, and he voluntarily undertakes the burden of single parenthood. All of his capital is invested in portable medical devices that street people keep stealing. He is evicted from his apartment. His limited savings are confiscated by the IRS. He and his son end up homeless, vying and sometimes failing to get space in homeless shelters. Through all of this, he is working as hard as he can in an internship at a stock brokerage, competing against nineteen other applicants for the one available paying position.
This is a Hollywood movie based on the real-life Chris Gordon’s autobiography, so you know how it’s going to end. It’s the getting there that makes this film worth seeing. To say it is inspirational is a massive understatement.
I’d tell you to go see it, but I can’t imagine that anyone who cares about human achievement would not see this film…
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http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_52/b4015085.htm
Time for a new job realtors. The game is up.
Housing: Curb Your Enthusiasm About A Recovery
Home prices still have room to decline, and it may take 15 years or more to reach new inflation-adjusted highs
Housing booms are short and exciting. Housing busts, on the other hand, are long and painful. So don’t put much faith in those oft-heard assertions that the worst is already over.
Prices are likely to fall further in many markets in 2007. In some others, prices may rise, but at less than the rate of inflation. A BusinessWeek analysis of the past three decades shows that if history repeats itself, it’s likely to take 15 years or more for many parts of the country to get back to their inflation-adjusted peaks
Greg Swann totally discredited by BusinessWeek magazine!
Home Buyer, Beware
Desperate sellers are paying brokers supersized commissions, which get incorporated into the price ultimately paid by buyers
But in many states disclosure is poor or inconsistent. In Arizona, for example, brokers who show houses are encouraged to sign agreements specifying how they’re compensated. But the agreements aren’t required.
Add it all up, and, “I don’t have to disclose to you how much I’m getting paid,” says Realtor Greg Swann, the designated broker of BloodhoundRealty.com in Phoenix, who says he voluntarily imposes stricter rules on his own agents.
By offering extra-high commissions without informing customers, he says, “the builders are trying to bribe me to sell their houses.”
http://businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/dec2006/db20061214_841972.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_businessweek+exclusives
Holy taken out of context batman!
Hey Greg,
Nothing against your content but if you are intending to reach intelligent people then you should check your work for grammer and spelling mistakes.
Adam, are you talking about the use of the word “Happyness”? I copied the text of the article into my spellchecker and found nothing spelled incorrectly, though I’m not a grammatical genius so I may have missed something on that end.
“The Pursuit of Happyness” is a movie so the that’s appropriate.
And Greg, you’re right about the movie, it was sincerely inspirational. Building my own business in an unrelated field, I had the opportunity to go out and have some fun this weekend but instead dedicated a few more hours to burning the midnight oil in hopes of getting further. And it worked! I’m a big movie fan but a good movie like this really lights the fire under your rear when you find yourself in a slump.
When I was a new agent making calls on expired listings and cancelled listings in order to get my foot in the door, you get tired of the telemarketer work. That scene in the movie really showed how the task SHOULD be approached so the process itself is more fruitful.
Had no idea it was based off of a real story until the end, so I’m glad I saw it right away.
Cheers,
Eric
Wow! I had no idea that it was going to be that good. I appreciate what you had to say, and will be seeing it tomorrow. Yep! Thank you!