World's Best Service Standards
Book 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 MoreFive Things to Stop Doing in 2010
This past week, I gave a presentation at the Inman Connect Conference in New York with the great Steve Harney on “10 Things” real estate agents should do in 2010. My feeling was that agents are already doing too much, so I decided to talk about five things that agents should STOP doing. Given that…
Read MoreClient-Oriented Real Estate in Action: HomeBuyerTaxCredit.com
The purpose of this blog is to promote the concept of Client-Oriented Real Estate, or C.O.R.E., the idea that real estate agents should be focused primarily on identifying and servicing the needs of their clients. Not only do we think this is a better way to run your business, we think it’s a more productive…
Read MoreNovember 30th is a HARD Deadline — Be Prepared
It has occurred to us that we should send out a general alert to all of you to start preparing for November 30th. What’s November 30th? It’s the last day that first-time home buyers can close to take advantage of the federal tax credit. It’s going to be a massive closing day. It’s also, unfortunately,…
Read MoreGiving our clients good pricing advice
A year ago, I was in car accident. I was on Kinderkamack road in Emerson, and stopped because a line of geese were crossing the road (new rule: drive over the geese), and a woman who apparently wasn’t paying such careful attention smashed into the back of my car. She pretty much destroyed the rear…
Read MoreStaying on top of things
If you’re going to be the “World’s Best Real Estate Agent,” you have to stay on top of things. For those of you working with first-time home-buyers, be advised that the New York State government just shut down the state’s first-time home-buyer tax credit. As we predicted in the Market Intelligence blog a few weeks…
Read MoreClean Windows Service — Getting Property Taxes Right
In a “World’s Best” class we had last week, agents in the class firmly made the point that a fundamental aspect of a great service experience is getting the taxes right. From a listing perspective, you have to go to the town or village to get the right taxes, not just trusting the seller to…
Read MoreWhat Would the World's Best Real Estate Agent Do?
We just had a great session today with about 300 agents covering how the World’s Best Real Estate Agent would develop her business. The question I’m posing to the class is “What Would the World’s Best Real Estate Agent Do?” with regard to all aspects of her business. How would she manage her clients? How…
Read MoreYou guys are wonderful…
In our recent “World’s Best Real Estate Agent” class, we discussed all the tasks that a professional real estate agent performs in taking care of a client. My point was this — You guys are wonderful. For the work you do, the time you spend, the efforts you make for your clients, you are simply…
Read MoreWho is the World's Best Real Estate Agent?
We’re going to be on a mission in this blog to identify the tools, systems, and processes that we need to put in place to help you become the World’s Best Real Estate Agent. But even before we do that, we have a pretty good idea of what we’re looking for if you want to…
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