Maybe the book we need is not the BloodhoundBlog book…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…but the BattleBack book…

I’m delighted by the discussions I incited today, both public and private. I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve worked alongside so many people who inspire my undiluted admiration.

(Someday I should write a post about admiration. I see it as being the most important mental state in the future production of human values.)

But I didn’t intend to incite any conversations, and I internally debated turning off the comments in my foreclosure post. Certainly, I did not want to do anything to induce concern or pity or, god help me, charity. The first quarter paid for itself, and the second quarter is rockin’. I’m doing two and three appointments a day, plus lots of work in the office and on the phone. Refilling a pipeline takes time, and every transaction is a delicate dance right now. But lately I’ve been thinking about my first days in real estate, when I had my day divided in 90-minute segments to maximize my belly-to-belly time during the business day.

Here’s the thing: Despite the financial hole we’ve dug ourselves into, I’ve been feeling massively competent as a Realtor for the first time in my career. That might sound funny, since I’m such an arrogant prick all the time. But in our own battling back to a real estate market with a reliable supply of achievable transactions, I quietly feel myself the master — or the someday master — of all these tools I’ve been juggling these past few years.

I make the analogy of learning to drive, or learning to drive stick-shift, but lately I feel myself in that state of splendor, that flow, that I’ve always known in my work — for my whole life. I don’t mean that I felt less than adept before, because I’ve always been a very thoughtful Realtor — a Realtor very full of thought. But now it all seems kinesthetic, perfectly integrated into my bones. Not doing real estate. Being real estate.

It’s just there for me now, and I’m free enough in my mind that I can watch myself work, live inside the process in the same way that I used to live inside the algorithm of a piece of software, the same way I’ve lived within the digital/mechanical world of high-tech hardware for nearly my whole life.

Wanna know my trick? My trick is that I don’t play tricks. For everything we came away with at Unchained, my own personal best takeaway was a pretty obvious idea: There is no sales message more compelling than a sincerely-expressed commitment to doing the best possible work — and then delivering the best possible work. This is what I am to begin with — this is what nearly all of us are. But making commitments is hard, where making vague promises is much too easy.

The fun part for me, pure gravy, is that I deeply admire my clients. I don’t work with bad people, but I never have any bad people to chase away. To the contrary, my world at work is very much like my world here in BloodhoundBlog: Very smart, very accomplished, very generous people let me work alongside them. This is how I know that our financial problems, as dour as they might seem from the outside, are temporary.

I saw this slow market coming, and that’s why we started playing with Web 2.0 ideas, because we thought we would have time to learn new things. I didn’t expect this market trough to last this long, nor to run this deep. But we’ve been battling back against this market since before we knew precisely what we were doing.

I had the joy of sitting down today with two supremely educated buyers, and it was like going home. Sy Symns said, “An educated consumer is our best customer.” This is where our world is so much out in front of the traditional world of sales and marketing — the world of juice and jazz and jive. We know that showing our clients how to want the best, to know they they deserve the best, and to insist upon getting the best — this is our game to win. The dinosaur marketers may have the volume for now, but the future is ours…

And maybe this is the BloodhoundBlog book after all. We lead thoughtful lives here, don’t we? I think I might be the catalyst of that — really just the spark of the conflagration. But when we’re assembled here, warming our minds around this blazing bonfire of ideas, I think we all feel called upon to think a little deeper, to find the unexpected essence of things that might otherwise seem to be too obvious.

What if we shift our minds in that direction? What can we write about the Bloodhound way of thinking that informs our marketing? Or are we writing a book for consumers? Or maybe simply a book about a revolution in real estate that none of us are able to claim to understand fully, for now?

Patton said, “Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.” There’s a unifying metaphor in all these ideas, and when we unearth it, we’ll know what the BloodhoundBlog book is.

In the mean time, I’m up at 5, with two three-hour CE classes starting at 8, then two separate showing appointments in the afternoon — all on Mother’s Day. Activity ain’t income, but if you do enough of the right stuff often enough, the income will come pouring in.

So: Thank you all for your kind thoughts and your brave admissions. I’m battling back one day at a time. How about you?