The Ethos of Professional Courtesy

Is it fair for a real estate agent to try to steal another agent’s client? What if it’s in that client’s best interests to switch? This issue came up recently in a discussion on the Inman Coast to Coast group on Facebook, sparked by a comment from a broker complaining about a Redfin practice.  Apparently, when…

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Stop Thinking Like a Salesperson!

Note: This week, I will be delivering a quick talk at the Connect On the Road Conference in Washington DC on “Stop Thinking Like a Salesperson.”  For people at the conference who want to review the points I made, here is a version of that talk that I wrote for the blog a few years ago.…

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Real Estate's "Original Sin" — Agents are not Salespeople

I had an opportunity this past week to talk with Brad Inman of Inman Media as part of his “Unlisted” Podcast.  It was interesting, because ideas that I would normally take hours to develop on the paper for an article came out real time in about 15 minutes.  Podcasts are fun — you start recording,…

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If 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…

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Is the Real Problem With the Real Estate Industry the Clients? Maybe

I was asked again last week to contribute a response at Inman News to a provocative article from Brad Inman.  Last time, he wrote about the potential disruption of the broker-agent relationship from online portals, in the way that Uber has disrupted the traditional limousine industry’s relationship with drivers.  And in my response, I challenged…

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No One Can Disrupt Our Industry Without Our Permission

If real estate brokers get disrupted and marginalized out of the real estate industry, we have only ourselves to blame. To paraphrase Ann Landers: No one can disrupt your industry without your permission. So how did we give permission? By ignoring what our clients needed. For a generation, the real estate industry has been focused not…

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The Real Estate Broker of the Future?

I was at a conference this week and one of the issues we discussed was the “Real Estate Brokerage of the Future,” a topic that has come up a lot in discussions at industry conferences in the past year. Unfortunately, much of the discussion drifted, as it tends to do, to a simple application of…

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Five 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…

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