Author: Greg Swann (page 57 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
I wrote this in the Summer of 2001, also. At the time, my friend Richard Riccelli convinced me to sit on it because it’s pretty arch. Even so, this is the counterpoint to Shyly’s delight.
How to succeed at failure
I work in sales, and while I don’t have many role models for success at my job, I am lucky enough to have an immense number of role models for failure. My co-workers fail all day, every day, and they are gracious enough to share ideas with each other about how to fail even more. Watching them and listening to them, I’ve been able to abstract the principles of a whole new self-help discipline: How to succeed at failure.
There is no better field in which to succeed at failure than straight commission sales. If you succeed at failure in education, they make you the principal. If you succeed at failure in politics, they elect you president. But if you succeed at failure in straight commission sales, you slowly starve to death… Top that!
And succeeding at failure in straight commission sales is easier than you think!
Here are a few simple rules:
First, start late and leave early. Some people try to make failure an endurance contest. This is a mistake. If you spend too much time in the office, sooner or later someone is going to buy your product from you just because no one else is around.
In the same way, when you do get to work, immediately do something useless, irrelevant and unproductive. The newspaper is a good bet. So is the restroom. The two together make for a perfect combination. Take your time. The point is to establish to yourself, to your co-workers and to the world that doing business is the last thing on your mind.
Once you get to the office — stay there. Don’t go out looking for business, make the business come to you. Show the customer who’s boss. That way you’ll have plenty of time to complain to your co-workers that customers just don’t appreciate all you’re doing for them.
Find innovative ways to waste your work-day. Do research about Read more
Chris Johnson pulled this out of our phone conversation the other night, quoting me on Twitter:
People don’t want a relationship with you. They just want your damn services.
We were talking about real estate weblogging, but the principle applies even more firmly to the world of social media — Twitter, Facebook, etc.
The notion that strangers are seeking out Realtors in order to befriend them is absurd. For a Realtor to get invited on a getaway weekend with three people who are not old school chums would require that all the undertakers and life insurance salespeople they know are already engaged. We all know what to expect from Realtors in any sort of social setting — which is why there is an entire mini-industry of RE(education)Camps to train Realtors to resist their smarmy, deal-probing impulses on-line.
That’s point number one, neatly Tweeted by Chris — who is, don’t forget, a vendor: You are the means to your clients’ ends, not an end in yourself. Even though you might sometimes hit it off just right with a client and forge a serious friendship, in virtually all cases — including those where you make a friend — it’s the mission-critical job that matters, not your sweet personality.
And that friendship? It will seem serious to you alone. If you are any good as a Realtor, your deep, deep friendship will be invisible to everyone else. You should be much too busy to be anyone’s friend. If you make a stout effort, you can hold up your end with your spouse and kids, but, beyond that, you should expect to hear this from the people you think of as being your friends: “The only time we ever get to see you is when we’re buying or selling a house!” That is real estate in real life.
Here’s point number two: “Marketing” by social media is a huge waste of time. Selling is one-on-one, focused, time-consuming and goal-directed. Marketing, done properly, is broadcast, diffuse, time-efficient and passive and long-term in its goal-pursuit. Even if you are really doing your best to market your services on-line, if you are doing it Read more
I was on the phone yesterday with Chris Johnson, talking with him about Realtor weblogs. He mentioned that some of the buyers of his real estate weblogs are having trouble coming up with regular content.
I have a solution for them.
What should they do? Stop worrying about it — and solve the real marketing problem instead.
Instead of building a blogsite around a regularly-updated weblog, it would make more sense to me for reluctant writers to build the blogsite around the mission-critical content instead.
Here’s the deal: There are a finite number of topics that you absolutely, positively need to cover. Whatever target-marketed niche the blog is concerned with, you need to document that niche in a fairly comprehensive way.
How many articles would that take? Five? Ten? Surely not twenty. If you’ve done what you need to do, you can ignore the blog except when you’re burning up with something to say.
A WordPress theme like Equilibrium would give your weblog a magazine-like look and feel. The “featured” section could highlight the three or six or nine posts that are mission-critical for your niche. And the “latest post” section can document your more-recent musings. If you write something crucial later on, you can rotate it into the “featured” section.
Here’s the thing: Everything so-called weblogging experts (including me) have told you about real estate weblogging is probably wrong.
You are not trying to build long-term relationships with regular visitors who will wait for your latest pronouncements with bated breath. Instead, the objective of your blogsite should be to provide mission-critical information to people who will find you by Google when they need you and who will be happy to forget you just as soon as they no longer need you. The magazine-style blogsite fits that approach perfectly.
The purpose of your weblog is not to be available for lonely people looking for friends. It is not to make you one of the cool kids, so that Realtors from all over the world can show up at your place to grouse about how awful the real estate market is. The purpose of your blog is certainly not to make Read more
So, the Arizona Republic ran an article yesterday on on-line real estate marketing and you will never in a million years guess who they did not call. I never get called for any of those kinds of things — the RaiseTheBarTab kinds of events — even though we’re doing cooler stuff than anyone I know of. I’m not weeping. I’m always very forthcoming with everything I know, but if there is going to be a cadre of Realtors dead set against learning how to do the work I do, I’m more than happy to have them working in my own market.
And I’m not bragging, either. We’re going to have a banner year, for us, in terms of volume of transactions, and we’re kicking the asses of all the canned-software Twitter-fidgets named in the article. But we are digging our way out of a deep hole, and we’re a long way from where I want us to be. I like to brag that we spend almost nothing on marketing, but the fact is that we almost never have any money to spend on marketing. I will put every Realtor in Phoenix on notice: When we have money and staff, we are going to be a force to contend with.
So, even though I don’t issue any Twitter spasms, at least not non-robotically, of late I am putting paid to a lot of new and interesting real estate marketing ideas.
What’s changed? Cathleen is giving me some Claudia time. Claudia Couts is the housekeeper I made Cathleen hire last year. She’s with us for two hours a day, six days a week. She keeps the house down to a manageable level of chaos and takes care of all the pet-maintenance duties. The idea was to open up the time that Cathleen was spending on those chores, and this has been a win-win all around.
Lately I’ve been buried in paperwork, at which I’m horrible, and I had marketing ideas that required small amounts of rote labor — at which I’m also horrible. I thought we might hire a virtual assistant, but Cathleen suggested giving Claudia a Read more
I’m living much of my time right now with my nose pressed right up against one tool or another — listings, DocuSign, the steering wheel, et endlessly cetera. That’s cool, we need the dough, and we can’t make it rain hard enough, fast enough. But by this point I have no idea if something I’m doing is an innovation or not. I’m just dancing as fast as I can.
This topic just came up, and I’m passing it along because I haven’t done that here yet. I know this because I hadn’t done it with my wife and business partner until just now.
Here’s the scoop: I’ve all but stopped taking earnest checks. I’m having almost all of my buyers wire their earnest money deposits directly into title. I never touch anyone’s else’s money — the only known way a real estate broker can be assured of escaping imprisonment.
But that’s not my reason for coming to do things this way. I used to take the check, made out to Chicago or Fidelity or whatever, then schlep it around while I waited for the contract to be executed. Not fun but not onerous — just inefficient.
By now, I do a lot of REOs as rental home investments for out-of-state buyers. I don’t know the name of the title company when we write the contract, and the buyer is back home by the time we need to deposit the funds.
I don’t even talk about checks any longer. I tell the buyer how things work and that I will have title email wiring instructions when we’re ready to rock. Totally transparent, totally arm’s-length, and no one involved in the process says boo.
If the lister is a little too adamant about receiving a PDF of a fax of a scan of a photocopy of a useless check, I will add language like this: “Seller is aware that Buyer will deposit Earnest Money by wire transfer into Title Company, to be determined by Seller, within one business day after Seller’s final acceptance of this Purchase Contract and any incorporated addenda.” (Reminder: I am not your broker.)
It’s the perfect Read more
Seen this morning in Surprise, Arizona. That’s a pre-printed rider, too, courtesy of the local board of realtors. I might have said “Not Bank-Owned” instead of “Not A[n] REO,” but, either way, we’re seeing the birth of a powerful new marketing message.
In my spare time I am more than a little annuckingfoyed at the state of whorebottery in the RE.net, which I had once hoped might be an antidote to the whorebots who have infested residential real estate since the advent of the NAR, at least. But: Teri Lussier advises me that the solution to all this annoyance is danceable music, so here do I deliver me of my frustrations.
First, Elvis Costello in an acoustic demo of Green Shirt that is better than the more-polished radio hit:
Second, live and acoustic, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with Chicago:
And finally, for Jim Klein and Don Reedy, Lyle Lovett puts everything in perspective:
A friend said this on the phone: “I’m sorry this is taking me so long. I’m really bad at computers.”
My reply: “Why would you say it that way?”
“Huh?”
“I understand that you’re reporting on what you see as being a matter of fact. But why not say it this way: ‘Computers have been a challenge for me, but I find I’m getting better with experience.’ You’re telling the exact same truth, not misrepresenting anything. But by focusing on what you’re doing right, you’ll improve your future performance just by changing your attitude.”
I’m not talking about canned affirmations. I’m talking about the words you choose when you’re telling the unshaded truth about your life, your mind, your talents, your work, your relationships.
You can say: “I’m a lousy writer.” But you can be just as truthful by saying this instead: “It hasn’t been easy for me to improve my writing skills, but I’m finding that hard work is paying off for me.”
You can say: “I always get lost when I go someplace for the first time.” But it would be equally factual to say, “I find it beneficial to prepare carefully before I travel to an unfamiliar neighborhood.”
You can say: “I’ll probably lose.” But you would be no less honest to say, “I just might win.”
The statements you make about yourself might seem to you to be statements of fact at the time you are making them. But whatever truth there might be in those expressions right now, you are also writing the script for your future. Saying “I’ll probably lose” is functionally equivalent to saying “I’ll never win.” If you don’t mean to say that you can never, ever get anything right, then stop telling these brutal lies about yourself.
If you invert those expressions instead — concentrating on everything you get right, not everything you get wrong — by that one simple change of habit you will rewrite the script of your future. There’s no telling how high you can rise, once you stop putting yourself down, but, at a minimum, you will write yourself a much happier ending.
Here’s what I say: I’m Read more
Main Street may be about to get its own gigantic bailout. Rumors are running wild from Washington to Wall Street that the Obama administration is about to order government-controlled lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to forgive a portion of the mortgage debt of millions of Americans who owe more than what their homes are worth. An estimated 15 million U.S. mortgages – one in five – are underwater with negative equity of some $800 billion. Recall that on Christmas Eve 2009, the Treasury Department waived a $400 billion limit on financial assistance to Fannie and Freddie, pledging unlimited help. The actual vehicle for the bailout could be the Bush-era Home Affordable Refinance Program, or HARP, a sister program to Obama’s loan modification effort. HARP was just extended through June 30, 2011.
The move, if it happens, would be a stunning political and economic bombshell less than 100 days before a midterm election in which Democrats are currently expected to suffer massive, if not historic losses. The key date to watch is August 17 when the Treasury Department holds a much-hyped meeting on the future of Fannie and Freddie.
What would be the motive for doing something this dumb? To buy your vote, of course:
Keep in mind the political and economic context. The nascent recovery is already running out of steam. Wall Street economists just downgraded the government’s second-quarter GDP estimate of 2.4 percent to around 1.7 percent. And as even Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is warning, the unemployment rate may well begin to rise back toward the politically toxic 10 percent level given such sluggish growth. Many in the White House thought the unemployment rate would be dropping sharply by this point in the recovery.
But that is not happening. What is happening is that the president’s approval ratings are continuing to erode, as are Democratic election polls. Democrats are in real danger of losing the House and almost losing the Senate. The mortgage Hail Mary would be a last-gasp effort to prevent this from happening and to save the Obama agenda. The political calculation is that the number of Read more
Vide:
That says: “Text HOUND9 to 88000.” If you snap a picture of it with a QR-code-reading client on your smart-phone, it should, in three steps or fewer, take you to a DriveBuy Technologies page for one of Cathleen’s short sale listings.
If you like good design, QR codes are plug ugly. But we’re going to start using them on our signs, commencing with the next listing. We often put the DriveBuy copy on a rider, so we’ll add the QR code there — on the order fo five inches square to make for an easy target.
Is anyone else playing with this technology?
I owe Glenn Kelman an apology. When Redfin.com was young — which is to say four long years ago — I swore that Glenn’s assertion that people would buy homes like books on Amazon.com was simply absurd. I have moved people into rental properties sight unseen, and quite a few of my investors let me pick out rental home investments for them. But I could not foresee a day when people would commit huge sums of money to purchase a residence they had seen only on the internet.
Today I am obliged to eat my words — and I’m damn glad I don’t wear a hat!
I had email this afternoon from a vistor to our Phoenix MLS search site, FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com. Writing to me from Florida, he had found a property on our site that he wanted to purchase. To his credit, the home is very aggressively priced to its competition, as well as being listed for several thousand dollars less than the lowest recent comparable sale. In other words, very far from being wrong about this offer, he is right on the money. Plus which, he’s an investor, so he’s not going to have to explain to his spouse that he bought her a mail-order homestead.
But still…
But: Still: Thanks to DocuSign, we had everything done 53 minutes later. I had Phoenix handyman Mark Deermer meet me at the property so we could take a look at it — this after the contracts were already executed — but there was no key in the lockbox so we weren’t able to go inside. But we have ten days from acceptance to look for red flags, so there’s no risk in the work we’ve done so far.
But still…
Took me by surprise, but it’s been utterly painless till now. We may end up killing the deal yet, but, if not, we’ll close in 30 days or fewer.
So: Glenn Kelman: My hat — the one I don’t wear and won’t have to eat — is off to you. It’s a whole new world of real estate.
Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.
One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.
For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.
Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.
Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!
This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, he turns to you for a solution.
Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.
Cain made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.
The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.
Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? Here’s how:
If you live in Cain’s world, stop pretending to live in Abel’s.
If your life depends on capitalism, private property and free trade, stop pretending to Read more