I want to believe in reincarnation. Not because I want to live over and over again (well, that would be nice), but because I fear that when I am fertilizing the lilies, there will be so much I failed to achieve, a cookie jar of excellence on the top shelf which I couldn’t quite reach. I want to come back as Marc Davison.
This post is quintessential Marc – the perfect combination of fabulous writing and dead-on message.
For the most part, real estate just tries to throw a net around everyone.To be all things to all people. Well, the sad part is, that doesn’t work. You end up appealing to no one. You are like everyone else. Plain vanilla yogurt…
I want to be the more satisfying, fun flavor with sprinkles. And this is one of the greatest values of blogging to me and to my potential clients. You may not like sprinkles, but you at least get the opportunity to peek into the generic packaging to see what’s truly inside before diving in.
What you call a listing, is really my home.
What you refer to as a lead is really just a person looking for some information.
The neighborhood I live in you call a … farm.
Once I make a simple inquiry, you incubate me as if I were an egg.
To keep me interested you drip on me rather than shower me with affection.
When you sell my home, I become a notch on your top producer belt.
You market to me as if your personality means more to me than the value of my home.
Agents are trained to be vanilla yogurt. From the day the new agent is shown to his cubicle, he is enrolled in a total emersion class in the language of real estate. While he is taught to farm and drip mail and court his sphere of influence (formerly known as friends), the ideas of professionalism and excellence and integrity are swept under the rug like so much clutter. When lip service is paid to these concepts, it is as a throw-away line, subordinate to the primary goal of getting the deal.
To be a doormat you have to lay down. Agents whine and bemoan the pervasive lack of respect for their numbers, yet we have spent our history trying to enter from the off-ramp. No wonder we’re a wreck. Of course we need clients to make a living, of course we need clients to demonstrate professionalism, excellence and all the rest, and of course we need to market ourselves to earn the customer’s business. But we are coming at it from the wrong direction. The lessons we need to first master are not those involving bulk-mail farming, chasing “expireds”, or converting open house leads. How can we possibly expect the public to respect us when the most respect we can give them is a Recipe of the Month card or a reminder to set their clocks back on Daylight Savings day in the form of a PrintShop-generated door hanger?
On second thought, I want to come back as a real estate Broker-Owner. My office policy manual will include the following:
- No agent shall be allowed to participate in a real estate transaction until they have successfully completed training in basic business practices, contracts, liability, and ethics – real training.
- No agent shall be allowed to participate in a real estate transaction until they have successfully completed training in technology and demonstrated competence through application.
- Ethics violations of any kind will be immediate cause for dismissal.
- No agent will be allowed to even think about paying (or having their clients pay) a Transaction Coordinator to manage their paperwork until they have done it themselves, start to finish, and a minimum of six times. Veteran agents will be required to self-manage at least one transaction per year as continuing education.
- Any agent who even thinks about a marketing program involving unrelated content, including but not limited to “List with me and get a free (anything)”, “Forget-Me-Not” (seed packet included), and “Your Neighborhood Specialist” will be hog tied and left for dead in the title company’s lobby.
- Pop-quizzes will be administered periodically to test the agent’s knowledge of fundamentals such as statistics and trends for their market, statutory disclosure laws, Board rules, mortgage rates, and how to multiply and divide integers. Agents failing to receive a passing grade will be excluded from next year’s office holiday party and have mustaches drawn on their bus bench images (with Sharpies).
- Property brochures consisting of black and white photocopies of the multiple listing service entry will be set afire.
- Agents without a professional website and email address will be set afire.
- There will be annual performance reviews and minimum standards, not based solely on the agent’s “numbers”, but on the numbers measured against the satisfied customers versus destruction having been left in their wake.
Income alone will not be sufficient to ensure future desk space in my next-life office. This means that I will have to be selective, but I assure you that my office will be full. There truly are many, many exceptional agents out there; you just have to know what to look for, what to teach, and how to inspire.
I will let Marc work for me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kris Berg is Co-Owner and Designated Broker of San Diego Castles Realty. If not-so static web sites are your thing, go here at once where you will find loads of real estate information including homes for sale, market trends, floor plans and more. Kris's hobbies include fencing and spot welding. She likes kittens. 
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“No agent will be allowed to even think about paying (or having their clients pay) a Transaction Coordinator to manage their paperwork until they have done it themselves, start to finish, and a minimum of six times. Veteran agents will be required to self-manage at least one transaction per year as continuing education.”
The single most intelligent proposal I have read this year.
Why, thank you, Bob! It amazes me how all agents, even rookie agents, are encouraged to hand all of their transactional laundry to the TC and consequently don’t have the foggiest notion of how the process truly works.
You are a brilliant woman! People like you make me feel proud to be an agent. Thank you for your tremendous leadership.
I tried to get through that, Kris, but I had to leave to go out and hand out refrigerator magnets in my farm area
What we really need is a RateMyRealtor.com, similar to RateMds.com or RateMyProfessor.com. A third party rating service that people can use to quickly find out which agents are a waste of time.
Sven – I have seen that tried. How do you filter the competitors trash talking the competition? Not saying it is a bad idea, but just wondering.
Why wait for divine intervention to execute your vision? You’ve already written more of a business plan in this single blog post than most brokers do before they hang a shingle. Go for it. ~MP
It would need to be connected directly to property sales. Similiar to how feedback works with Ebay. Otherwise, people would just hype themselves up with made up names, and competitors would bad mouth competition. Specifically, you would have one survey every time you buy or sell a property that you would enter in. You could only do that specifically at closing.
The tricky part is that ebay can control everything because it controls the transaction. In the case of real estate, you have multiple title companies. The only way it would truly work is if the title companies were required by law to request feedback from the individual buyer and seller and send information received to a government reporting office. (i.e. the county recorder, where that survey would become public knowledge tied to the property sale itself) That would allow third party companies to spider this information on all the different county sites and create centralized, searchable repositories of the information.
The survey gathered would have different sections for the mortgage company used, the agent (if they used one), etc… A special law would also have to be added that would make it basically impossible to sue for liebal for information that is entered in the surveys.
Picture being able to look up every transaction a real estate agent has been involved in and all the feedback for those transactions. I honestly believe it would make all agents do a better job just knowing that their feedback rating and future business is on the line.
Obviously, for privacy reasons, the survey wouldn’t mention the buyer/seller’s name, and it would be completely optional.