Do you smell the salt in the air? Doesn’t it make you crave linguine in clam sauce? Welcome to the Hamptons Real Estate Blog, a place of salt, surf and sand — and huge, rambling, very expensive houses.
There’s little enough we have to go by, in reading a weblog. Style is a hard thing to develop. You write and write, and for the longest time, you write every which way. If you didn’t attach your name to your prose, no one would know it was yours.
This is not true of weblogger Michael Daly, who has a voice all his own. I’ll read just about anything he writes, simply to have read him.
Confidence – Many of today’s agents come from other successful careers in finance, advertising, law, hospitality, and retail. But real estate is a product unto its own. I’ve seen successful bankers crumble at the rejection and lack of loyalty that a real estate agent sometimes has to swallow. I’ve seen grown women brought to tears because their best friends from childhood bought a house from someone else after they dragged them around for the past six months, looking at everything they said they wanted to see. If you don’t have the confidence to take the ups and downs, and if you can’t accept that fact that real estate agents are often held in the same regard as car salespeople (which encourages clients and customers to be less than completely truthful due to the intrinsic lack of respect for the industry in general), then you’re going to struggle. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about who you are (or who you were) – it’s about how you conduct yourself in the moment.
Commitment – Working as an independent contractor in the real estate business is different than working a 9-to-5 job on Lexington Avenue. If you don’t show up, you don’t have a chance to make a commission. Getting to know the market, attending brokers’ open houses (not just the ones with lunch), learning how to read tax maps, negotiating the web-based tools of the trade, and standing in line and begging for property information at town hall, are all actions that are very new to most people. Real estate, especially in a market like the Hamptons, is a 16-hour per day, 7-day per week business. That’s if you can sleep, of course. You’ve got to be in it to win it, as they say.
Closing Skills – At the first interview or the first training session for new recruits, when I ask why they want to be real estate agents, it’s common to hear things like, “I love people and I love houses, so I figured I’d get a job where I could work with both.” Well, six to nine months later, it’s not uncommon for those same new agents to be foaming at the mouth about “those idiots” who didn’t buy “that dump” they showed them. It doesn’t matter how much you love people and how much you love houses. If you’re not able to bring people together in a deal, if you’re not able to facilitate agreement in a transaction – you’re sunk.
The blogging platform is Blogger.com, about which I’ve already made enough nasty cracks. Michael makes it endurable in any case…
Technorati Tags: blogging, sellsius 101, real estate, real estate marketing
jf.sellsius says:
Michael’s post on Boston Chicken is a classic in my book.
He recently launched a luxury property RE/MAX in Southhampton. The next time I go clamming in Hampton Bay I’ll be at his office with a few dozen tasty ones—the clams there are the sweetest I ever tasted.
September 26, 2006 — 5:28 pm