I am buried. I have five houses in play and Cathy is on compulsory bed rest — on pain of hospitalization. I have a zillion little jobs that need doing around here, and I keep coming up with new ideas. For instance, I think it would be cool to promote the long list of Odysseus Medal nominees as a feed, as they come in, so that people can see what others are nominating. I say “sufficient unto the day” all the time, but, for now, I have to really mean it, because I can’t afford to get sick.
Here’s a classic joke:
Q: How do you get a professional poker player off your porch?
A: Pay him for the pizza, cheapskate!
I’ve never been a big booster of the idea of real estate as a profession because I tend to associate the word “professional” with people who lie about what they do for a living and live in Uncle Bob’s basement. Real estate is a business, on its best days, and someday it might grow to be an industry — if it ever dares to wean itself from Big Mother’s teat.
Bill Leider from Real Estate Shows has a different take on the matter, and he deploys it to take this week’s Odysseus Medal with What Is A Professional?:
When we shift the focus of the term professional from what we do to how we are perceived and treated, the definition and the entire concept of the designation “professional” changes.
In that context of status and respect, what exactly is a professional? I believe that a “professional” is someone who takes what they do, whatever that happens to be, and transforms it into an art form. They make the mundane look magnificent. They make seemingly impossible things look drop-dead easy. They cover all the details, all the time. They master the subtleties. They silently acknowledge that they have a gift for what they do and they give that gift to the people in their world respectfully and compassionately. They know that they have never “arrived.”
They are never content with their present body of knowledge. They live with a constant, silent fear of becoming obsolete and irrelevant. They address that fear by continuously learning and growing and changing. They remain their own harshest critics, always looking for ways to be and to do and to deliver something better. They are consciously aware of their Values and they always strive to live them.
Becoming and remaining a “professional” is not bestowed on someone by virtue of a degree or a certificate. “Look at me, I took these courses, I spent this impressive number of hours learning all this stuff and I have this piece of paper to prove it. That makes me a professional. Bow to that.” No. That’s not how it works.
In the course of my life, I have known professional mail carriers, trash collectors, gardeners, housekeepers and baby sitters. And I have known amateur doctors, dentists, attorneys, judges and accountants. I bet, if you take a moment to think about it, so have you.
Brian Brady takes The Black Pearl Award by showing us all how to align our interests with our clients’ in Hire A Realtor Like You Would Sign a Top NFL Draft Pick:
I think a good hard look at performance-based compensation agreements in real estate brokerage has merit. Imagine, if you will, negotiating an agreement when you list a home that is akin to a professional sports player’s contract. The modern day professional sports contract is laden with performance bonuses. A MLB player gets a bonus if he makes the all-star team, hits a certain number of home runs, maintains a certain batting average, or plays in a specified number of games.
In the book, Freakonomics, the authors liken real estate agents to the Ku Klux Klan in their clandestine ability to exploit the information advantage they have over the average consumer. Summarized, they conclude that ANY brokerage or profession (doctor’s, lawyers, and yes, Virginia, even mortgage brokers) exploits this advantage in their ability to position themselves as “experts”.
The authors illustrate the real estate agent’s DISINCENTIVE to hold out for higher prices for their clients. The incremental fee increase on, say, $30,000 really doesn’t translate much to a Realtor when you consider the risk that is involved for not encouraging the client to accept a subpar offer. If $30,000 extra is paid for a $400,000 home, the incremental increase is only about $400 to the listing agent (I am assuming 6% commission, split with a buyer’s agent, a 70% split with the broker, and a combined 35% tax bracket). However, the lower offer of $400,000, accepted, does produce a commission of about $5500 (same assumptions) to the Realtor.
This inspires this question…Is the $5500 bird in the hand worth more than $5900 bird in the bush?Now, I’m certain that this very question will produce righteous indignation from Realtors. Many will scream ethical implications and bandy about esoteric phrases like “fiduciary responsibility”. I’m going to ask you to rethink your comments before you type.
I don’t love Brian’s math on listing incentives, but he’s thinking the right way. And, of course, this is all terra incognita to buyers. But we need to educate our clients about their interests and ours and how they can be better aligned with incentive-based pay structures.
Geno Petro won The Peoples’ Choice Award by a huge margin with Mademoiselle? Oui. La Spinster?…ZUT!:
I could see the fan and I could see what was about to hit it. We were all sitting around the closing table…signing, witnessing, and waiting to be paid (the latter being me, of course), when the question was posed to my client by her counsel—an attorney I usually recommend for relatively routine transactions. A nice guy but no Bruce Cutler if you know what I’m saying. He’s cheap, actually.
“Married, Divorced, or Spinster?” he asked my client, looking at a title form he obviously had never seen before.
‘BAM!’ (splat)… then dead silence for one of the longer two or three second periods I can recall in recent weeks.
Did I just hear what I thought I heard? I hoped it went unnoticed as I looked up from the mindless game on my Treo, just three deals away from completing Solitaire for the 100th time in about as many closings. Not a chance.
“Did you just call me the ‘S’ word?” answered my client, a lovely unmarried woman who, with pen in hand, was about to sign the final document and close escrow on her first condominium in Chicago. When a question is answered with another question in such a situation then the next one who speaks loses. We all know this. And I knew who wasn’t going to say anything as I went back to my PDA, clearing the game and pretending to enter something into the calendar, all thumbs in different directions on the tiny keyboard. I was careful not to make eye contact with anyone. I was listening though.
“Pardon me?” asked the attorney.
I felt like popping him on his forehead with the palm of my hand …”Dumb dog, dumb dog.” The funds weren’t transferred from the Federal Reserve yet. Say something stupid after we’re paid for our services and keys are handed over.
If you didn’t look at this week’s nominees for The Odysseus Medal, you should. As always, if a thing of enduring beauty grabs you by the cortex, nominate it.
Deadline for next week’s competition is Sunday at 12 Noon MST. You can nominate your own work or any post you admire here.
Congratulations to the winners — and to everyone who participated.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Steve Belt says:
Geno’s post was indeed a thing of beauty. It may have even been the case that an F bomb escaped my mouth when I was reading it…
November 5, 2007 — 8:31 pm