Thank you, thank you, and thank you!

by Russell Shaw

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Thank you, thank you, and thank you! What a welcome. Just goes to show what a difference having an audience makes when it comes to doing a show. I had tried blogging before, but the only people reading it were friends of mine (who weren’t Realtors). Strange, I know – as the past few years you could almost ask anyone you met if they were a Realtor yet. If the United States has finally achieved the level of 300 million people and 1.2 million of them are Realtors (members of NAR) it would look like there is one licensed agent member of NAR for every 250 people in the U.S. This includes children.

If we excluded children and only figure the probable number of people who maybe could buy or sell a house is around 175 people for every Realtor. If the average turnover rate of the average neighborhood is about 8% and all sales were done through Realtors (they aren’t) this would be about 14 possible sales a year per Realtor. Coldwell Banker for example has national averages of about 10.5 homes per year per agent (same numbers for John Hall & Associates). Take the average sales price and what might be an average commission, less the splits to the broker and you this isn’t a lot of money per agent – as they all have business costs (car, gas, board dues, and advertising) to come out of that.

The average net income of an agent really isn’t very much money. For the most part, selling houses isn’t what would be called “creative selling” – which is to say that almost all of the sales would occur or not regardless of who is in the real estate business in any particular area – it isn’t the agent who is causing the sale to occur. That buyer or seller already had a need and decided to hire someone. So almost every time an agent makes a sale (listing or selling side) they “took” that sale away from some other agent. This is true even if the client never spoke to any other agent and never considered using any other agent. Just because one’s marketing or positioning is SO good that the buyer or seller would not have considered using anyone else doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have used someone else if that agent wasn’t there or in the business.

So the idea of “getting your share” if you are a working Realtor is quite a stupid idea.

If you only get “your share” you won’t have much income and what little you do get could ALL be consumed by the various lead generating companies and trainers (much more on that later) and now there are even legal loan shark companies being promoted by NAR in the official magazine, offering to advance you money against your next (only?) commission check. The cost? Only 10% of the check. If you had the money for a full 30 days, that works out to be about 120% annual interest. People who charged numbers like that used to be called loan sharks and it was illegal. Now they are respectable companies and can run ads in all of the national Realtor magazines. And please don’t get the idea that I am calling them opportunistic thieves or the people at NAR, the state associations and local boards complete and utter morons for even allowing ads like that – that are designed to take advantage of Realtors – to run in their publications at all. Oh no, that would be rude to say something like that. But what else would you call it? How does it align with NAR’s Purpose? Don’t get the idea that I am “anti-NAR” – far from it. Every Realtor benefits greatly due to the almost thankless (and endless) hours that some very fine and quite well intentioned people give up to serve on the various committees and work groups at the local and national level.

No, getting “your share”, if thought of as a “share” needs to NOT be an equal amount. If you are going to survive well as a Realtor you would need to get the idea that you were entitled to 3 or 4 times the “normal share” – at a minimum. It would have to be totally okay to win. I’ll write more on this later too: winning vs. losing – what goes into winning (as an agent) and how to get and maintain the winning viewpoint.

In conclusion (for tonight), thank you again to Greg for making this possible for me. Thanks to Cathleen, Michael, Joel & Jay for such a warm welcome. And thanks to the guy (whose name I could not figure out) from Livium who referred to me as “A New Top Dog”. Damn!