Category: General

At last year’s ACC Tournament semifinal (basketball) game between Notre Dame and Duke, the halftime entertainment included giving someone an all-expense-paid trip to the game with the chance to take a half-court shot for $1 million. Scott Park was the lucky winner, and he and his wife made the trip from Virginia Beach to attend the game and for Scott to take the shot. When the time came, he took the ball in both hands, eyed the basket, ran to the half-court line, and launched the ball into the air with everything he had. And it sailed . . . to about the foul line.

Almost immediately, this seemingly epic failure of a grown man to throw an air-filled leather ball just over 45 feet was turned into vines and videos that littered the Internet. Comments were immediately flowing like “can you believe how bad that shot was” and “why did that dude even try”. With the virtual anonymity of the Internet, people can be brutal!

What these anonymous couch potatoes didn’t know was, that for the past eight years, Scott has been through a horrendous medical ordeal that resulted in his undergoing a very rare type of kidney transplant. Since the transplant, he and his wife make a five-hour journey every other Friday from their home to Baltimore for him to receive an infusion of an experimental drug, and then they drive home. All of this has severely weakened Scott.

Going into this moment, he KNEW there was absolutely no way he was going to come close to making the shot. In other words, he KNEW that he was about to have a very embarrassing ten seconds in front of A LOT of people. He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to let those ten seconds define him – at least not negatively. He was just glad he had the chance to walk out on the court under his own power and give it a shot.

As real estate and mortgage professionals, we meet people almost every day who feel like they have “ten seconds” of embarrassment that has defined their lives – it usually comes in the form of a bankruptcy, a foreclosure, or some other financial reversal of fortune. The moment we meet these folks, we have an almost immediate opportunity to help them realize they don’t need to let that embarrass or define them. While the realities connected with a bankruptcy or foreclosure cannot be wished away or made void with a hug, we have a special ken of knowledge that enables us to give them hope and a way to pursue the dream of owning a home again (or for the first time) – THAT is what makes us essential to this process, and we should never tire of letting people know this.

The very people we touch (figuratively) and help then become our biggest advocates and referral sources – advertising and marketing you CAN’T buy. “You HAVE TO go with my real estate and mortgage folks!!! They helped me get into this house when I was convinced I would NEVER be able to afford a house IN MY LIFE!!!” You’ve suddenly become their genie and their fairy godmother all rolled into one. Don’t take that too literally, though – it’s not a look most of us could pull off.

It’s highly likely that almost every single one of you already read the Yahoo! Finance article about the survey that Chase recently completed. For the seven people who decided to take a nap under a rock last week, I’m going to share some of the major talking points here – the rest of you can step away and have an ice cream or paint your cat’s toenails.

First off, the survey shows that an ALARMING 68% of Americans are starting the home search on their own (gasp!) with 45% using a computer or laptop (as opposed to some other type of technologically advanced processor like a microwave oven) as the first step in this search and 13% using their mobile devices. (In other related news from the Department of the Obvious, scientists have found that fish still have no use of a bicycle and looking directly at the sun is inadvisable.) With numbers like these, we should just throw in the towel and join the circus, right?

Here’s the weird thing: in the very same survey, they found that homebuyers – after all’s said and done – rely on the pros to get the deal done. In fact, roughly three quarters (that’s scientific talk for “every three people out of four”) of Americans want to meet with a mortgage professional to consider their financing options; these same people feel that a realtor is essential. Yes, you read that correctly: ESSENTIAL!

The survey also reveals a couple of other things that allow us to be optimistic:

• 72% of homebuyers don’t plan on staying in their home for the long term. A big part of that mindset is based on a “fear of missing out” – in other words, homebuyers are viewing their residences more like a wardrobe: it needs to change as their life changes (a starter condo downtown could be the real estate equivalent to a concert t-shirt and jeans while a 5-bedroom rambling ranch in the suburbs might be a Brooks Brothers suit). The key, of course, is for us to be the clothier and the tailor that accommodate ALL of these wardrobe changes (with no wardrobe malfunctions).

• 66% believe that the value of their home will increase over the next five years. Couple that with the “fear of missing out”, and you have a very motivated mindset to help you sell a lot of real estate.

While there’s very good reason to be optimistic (I’ll pause here while you do the happy dance), this doesn’t mean we’re returning to the Pre-Bust days when anyone with a pulse could sell a house or write a loan – and that’s a VERY GOOD thing. Our performances MUST live up to the expectation that we are professionals – that the homebuyer’s belief that we are ESSENTIAL is well founded. How do we do that? We learn that one extra new “thing” each day; we put in an extra hour or two to make sure we know and can do more than the people in the next office over who are off eating ice cream or painting their cat’s toenails.

You may make fun of me all you wish, but I’ve been known to watch PARTS of the television show “Say Yes to the Dress” – though I can honestly say I have never watched a full episode from beginning to end. In one snippet I happened to catch while I was in the kitchen getting something to eat, a bride-to-be walked in and told her consultant that she had a $2,000 budget but had already fallen in love with a $10,000 dress. She insisted that she try on the $10,000 dress first so she could “get it out of [her] system” and then go on and start looking at dresses that fit her budget. (Red flag!) Since this is a show on TLC (The Learning Channel, really?), the consultant was probably precluded by the producers to tell this bride-to-be that she was smoking crack if she thought trying on this too-expensive dress was going to get it out of her system, so she gave her the dress and trundled off to find other dresses that the woman could afford.

Cuckoo Bride tried on the $10,000 dress and fell in love with it – of course. Then, she checked back into reality, looked at her bank balance, and started trying on the other dresses the consultant had searched high and low for her to consider – dresses, mind you, that looked VERY similar to the $10,000 dress. Huge surprise, the woman didn’t like ANY of these other dresses. She just kept saying they were “cheap” in comparison to the first dress.

Undaunted, the intrepid consultant went to the area where her boutique kept one-off samples, which are usually very expensive but DEEPLY discounted because they’re sold “as is” to the public. She found one that she thought her client would like that had originally been priced at $16,000 but was now being sold at $999. Fast forward to the happy ending: the woman loved it and felt like it was made JUST for her. I’ll pause here for you to get a tissue.

What they didn’t show, but I’m fairly sure took place, was the consultant returning to the bride-to-be and having the following conversation: “I have another dress for you to try. It’s more beautiful than the first dress you tried on, and it was originally priced at $16,000! (Pause for dramatic effect.) But I can get it for you TODAY for only $999. Would you like to see how it fits?” At this point, the bride-to-be is not only willing to push over small children who might be standing between her and the dress in question, but it could fit like a sack of potatoes, and she’d still buy it: she now had a story to tell anyone who will listen that she is wearing a $16,000 dress. (And this is what convinced me that the story was what the bride REALLY wanted: the $16,000 dress didn’t look ANYTHING like the original $10,000 dress.)

If it had played out that way (and I’m reasonably certain it did), the beauty of the lesson in all of this is the consultant didn’t lie or exaggerate even once – and she kept her cool. By keeping her cool, she was able to let enough of the drama play out to recognize what lay at the base of this woman’s quest for a wedding dress: she wanted it to “look” expensive. Once that clicked, the consultant made off for the samples room to see what she could find that fit that bill.

While many people try to tell you otherwise, buying real estate is an emotional decision (there are exceptions, of course). The key to your success in a transaction is being patient enough to determine the client’s emotional trigger. Ask a lot of questions and be patient until you’re able to figure out the emotional hot button in the sale . . . and heaven help any small children if they stand in your way!

We have a guy here in our office who always has an interesting story. He’s never told us that he stole the hat off of Fidel Castro’s head and played “keep away” or beat the pants off Usain Bolt in a private, closed-track race, so we tend to believe him and get a good laugh whenever he tells us about an experience he had or about one of his family members. One of his stories goes like this:

He’s the youngest of four kids, and the brother just older than he was a huge fan of sugar and all things sweet when they were growing up together. This love for sweets went to the extreme as, according to our office mate, his brother insisted on putting sugar on his Cap’n Crunch cereal. Never mind that it tore up the roof of your mouth to the point which you had to wait five to seven days before eating another bowl of the stuff, the cereal itself isn’t much more than processed sugar anyway! Upon hearing this, you would think you were about to be on the receiving end of a cautionary tale, that his brother’s teeth all fell out by the time he hit puberty, he weighed 400 lbs. by the time he started high school, and his growth was stunted to the point that he was the same height as he was wide – throw in a love triangle, and this would be the ideal guest for Jerry Springer.

Alas, this brother of his has all of his teeth (still), was a multiple-letter varsity athlete in high school, and he hit 6’2” by the time he was a junior. Wait, there’s more. He went on to get accepted to and graduated from West Point, received an officer’s commission in the Army, and later went on to Harvard (the university near Boston, not the typing school in Wichita) and got his MBA – and, according to the guy in our office, he was still eating sugar on his Cap’n Crunch whenever he got the chance during this time.

How is this possible, we all asked? The answer is simple: his mom and dad picked their battles, and they decided sugar intake wasn’t one that needed to be pitched. They could see how active he was, and his drive to get the grades and amass the resume needed to get into a military academy was more than sufficient to keep him focused on his studies. In other words, they saw the bigger picture and knew that he saw it, too – that was the key.

More often than not, your success as an agent hinges upon your ability to see the bigger picture and make sure your client sees it, too. That’s, of course, easier said than done. When your client tells you how much she loves a particular house (it has everything she’s looking for: big kitchen, great school district, convenient shopping, etc.) but dismisses it as “the right one” because she doesn’t like the pink paint in the bathroom, your first inclination is to grab the iPhone out of her hand and make her eat it. However, that’s frowned upon by the NAR for some reason. What you can do, though, is take a photo of that bathroom, and with the help of one of numerous smartphone apps, change the wall color to a neutral white and say, “See how much better it looks in white.” You give her a new vision – and it’s a heck of a lot easier to do with today’s technology than just asking her to picture it in her mind’s eye. You already knew this, of course, but it bore repeating. With that said, though, do you have the latest apps to help you make these on-the-fly adjustments? If not, let us help you figure out which ones are best for you – and we promise they’ll be better for you than sugar on Cap’n Crunch.

At some time in the past (I’m purposefully leaving the details a bit hazy – I don’t want to date myself), I had the chance to see a band in concert in a very small venue – seriously, the whole thing was about the size of a high school gymnasium. This was the very first concert my friend had ever attended, and as we were walking out that evening, I told him that he’s sort of been ruined for future concerts because he got to see this particular band – who was obviously going to be very big, very soon – in such a small setting. He just smiled and laughed.

About a year later, the band in question HAD gotten much bigger, and they were now appearing in large auditoriums. My friend had decided that if the band was so great in a small venue, they would have to be even better since they were now rating bigger places that could hold twenty times more people – and he got tickets to their upcoming show. A few weeks after the show, I asked him if he enjoyed it. He started telling me about the pyrotechnics and some of the other theatrics that they had put into their new show, and then he paused for a second and said, “You know what, though, you were right about being ruined for future concerts. The band, as expected, was awesome, and the production was really cool, but seeing them in a huge auditorium was like watching a movie. Seeing them in that small theater the first time let me feel like I was part of the experience – I’ll never forget it.”

Which concert experience would your customers use to classify the customer service they received from you in their most recent transaction? Did they feel like they were in a small, intimate setting where you interacted with them, looked them in the eye, and made them a part of the experience? Or, did they feel like they were sitting in one of the nosebleed seats of the ginormous auditorium hoping you’d get around to playing their favorite song before saying goodnight and moving on to the next city? For numerous reasons, they sought you out – they bought tickets to the show – so the question remains: how are they going to remember the show you put on for them, and what are they going to say to their friends about it?

Some companies and individuals in this industry think that bigger is better, and when you ask them to explain why they feel that way, they’ll give you reasons like “increased resources” and “larger reach” – not necessarily bad things in and of themselves – but those reasons are generally one sided: they’re for the company, not the customer. When it comes right down to it, each customer NEEDS and DESERVES to feel like you’re putting on a private performance JUST for them – that you’re taking their requests and playing your heart out. Remember: packing an auditorium full of people doesn’t enhance the fans’ experience, it only serves the performer’s wants and desires. And just like those performers who play the smaller venues for more appreciative crowds, their careers last a lot longer.