The single most important thing you can do to build your real estate business over the next ten years is simple: get digits.  When you meet people, get their mobile phone numbers, and get their email addresses. Why? Because even while we live in a world of “over-sharing” that has become increasingly open and less…

You know you’re supposed to make phone calls to help build your business. They’re essential.  A personal phone call is truly the best, sometimes the only, way to develop a contact into an active lead or cultivate a relationship with someone in your sphere.  We all know that. And yet many agents are afraid to…

People just love giving referrals. We love recommending restaurants to our friends.  We love posting our favorite movies on Facebook. We love telling people that we “have a guy” if they need a plumber or an electrician or whatever.  Indeed, hugely successful websites like Yelp and Angie’s List have been built around our natural impulse…

The real estate industry has become very good at annoying people.  Anytime there’s a new technology for communicating with people, agents seize on the new medium to inundate their clients, friends, and random people they don’t even know with information that those people don’t care about. Take, for example, those emails that go out to…

Imagine that you were invited to someone’s home for a dinner party.  You ring the bell, the door opens, the host looks out, and sees you standing there with a smile in your face, holding nothing but a knife and a fork in your hands.  “Let’s eat!,” you say, waving your knife and fork. That’s…