Services
Five Mistakes Sellers Make When They Price Their Home, and the One Big Mistake They Make Afterwards
You’ve decided to sell your home. Now, you have a lot more decisions to make, like hiring an agent, creating a marketing campaign, or deciding on the work you need to do to “stage” your home. But your most important decision is simple: price. The nice part about pricing a home is that in most…
Read MoreWhen the Web is for Shoppers, Where Do You Find Buyers and Sellers?: Thoughts on Zillow Buying Dotloop
Take a look at your website. If it’s like most real estate websites, it probably has a lot of great stuff for home shopping. And we do an excellent job for our shoppers. We have pictures, videos, 3-D walk-throughs, mapping, school reports, walkability scores and like a million other cool little features. Plus, our sites…
Read MoreIf We Build it, Will They Come?
You know what most great real estate agents have in common? They’re really good at their jobs. They’re good at developing rapport and trust with sellers at that initial consultation. They’re good at marketing homes. They’re good at identifying what a buyer needs, even if he doesn’t know yet. And they’re good at putting together…
Read MoreBook Review: Stephen C. Lundin, FISH!: A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results (2000).
Stephen Lundin’s Fish!: A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results quickly became a revered text in modern management styles after its publication a decade ago, particularly well-known for its promotion of “fun” in the workplace to motivate employees. There’s actually a lot more in the book, though, than just its “fun”-orientation, particularly in…
Read MoreBook Review: Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
The E-Myth books are highly recommended by a lot of other business authors, and by a number of business people I have met. I found The E-Myth Revisited to be very flabby – lots of good insights throughout, but woven around a series of stories and staccato imprecations that made the book a tougher read…
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 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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