The Irresistible Bastard: Building the perfect marketer for the Twenty-First Century real estate industry . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

UrbanDigs.com offers some great practical advice on timing low-ball offers. TrueGotham offers further thoughts. Both of these posts are Manhattansized, so you’ll need to scale accordingly for your local market.

Bonnie Erickson at Real Estate Snippets has excellent advice on the subject of your Realtor’s excellent advice. We’re not being pushy, honest! We’re helping you quarry your home’s inner greatness.

From Jeff Brown at Behind the Curtain: What do you want from the news, truth or accuracy?

PressReal.com (blogrolled — sorry, should have done this a while ago) asks Who pays the commission?, a question near and dear to Bloodhound hearts.

On the subject of “discounting” generally, Greg Tracy at BlueRoof.com composes a symphony:

But the best part about our new company is all the support we get from our clients. The consumers like what we’re doing because we are a new business model and most consumers really don’t like the traditional real estate models.

It’s funny if you think about the whole criticism of “discount broker”. Some people from my previous brokerage say that I’m selling out because now I’m a “Discount Broker”. Well, what does that mean?

That means that I’m doing the same thing for less…

And that’s the criticism? Even funnier is when the large companies take out ads that put down “discount brokers”. It’s like Albertson’s taking out an ad that says don’t buy from Safeway because they sell things for less. That’s what these agents are saying. And it’s really funny because most of them discount their commissions too, they just don’t admit it. We don’t discount our service or cut corners, in fact we have higher minimum standards for marketing our listings than most of the industry.

When I meet with people and show them our model and how we can help them they get excited about our model. We’ve had people tell us they were going to name rooms in the home after us and they send us incredible testimonials and they refer all their friends to us, which is the greatest endorsement they can give.

(Gentlemen: If you have a lingering problem from the photo in Greg Tracy’s post, The Phoenix Real Estate Guy has the perfect remedy.)

I have to laugh when the typical kind of know-nothing, do-nothing Realtors presume to lecture US about service. We deliver value our competitors don’t even want to think about. So why are we willing to do it for less money? Flank to either or both: We want to take all the business, not just some of it. No matter what pitch you bring to the client — service or price — we already have you beat — and that’s the point. This is not a Country Club “profession.” This is a nascent industry that is only about a century-and-a-half late for the Age of Industrialization. If you want to see the future, keep your eyes on people like Greg Tracy.

But wait. There’s more. Redfin.com is going to show houses after all. It’s a niggardly and stupid program, but it’s growth in the right direction. For the money they’re taking in, in the markets they’re working in, they could afford to offer full service to buyers — if it weren’t for that huge, parasitic head-count. Oh, well. One day at a time.

But here is an important point in the immediate neighborhood, one of the reasons I keep drawing your attention to the idea of divorcing the buyer’s agent’s compensation from the Listing Agreement: Redfin.com is the sine qua non inventor of the flat fee commission structure BloodhoundRealty.com is deploying. I don’t like the way they do business — because for this money there is no excuse for not delivering full service. But someone at Redfin.com — or perhaps an earlier innovator — understood that the contradiction of having the buyer’s agent’s compensation come through the listing agent could be exploited to market advantage.

Do you see? Because listing agents are scared to death to offer less than 3% for the co-broke, there is a ton on money, especially on pricier properties, to be disbursed at the buyer’s agent’s discretion. This won’t last, but it doesn’t have to. By the time other Realtors finally give in and start negotiating with their buyers, we will be a very big, very lean machine. And we will still be delivering insanely great service our competitors can’t match at any price.

Flank to either or both. For now, we’ll beat you on price and on service. By the time you finally catch a clue about price, we will still beat you on price and service — most especially because you’ll insist on cutting service to try to milk the maximum profit from the lower price. The one redoubt at hand is effecting Divorced Commissions now. And, obviously, this won’t happen. Flank to either or both. We win either way.

You can have your pantomime of Nordstrom’s. It doesn’t mean squat to me. I’d rather take genes from Steve Jobs, Sam Walton and Herb Kelleher and build the perfect beast, The Irresistible Bastard. Now that’s a real estate marketer for the Twenty-First Century!

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