She did, however, write this post on raincityguide. Nice person that she is, she also took the time to write and welcome me to the blogosphere. And after reading her post, Real Estate 101 – Improving on “the basics”, I have several things I want (need?) to say.
Observations:
1. Ardell finds it quite easy to bond with her clients and for them to immediately recognize her as a nice, honest and professional person.
2. She – like all top successful agents is quite good at establishing someone’s level of motivation to buy or sell. Further, she has developed a workable system (she probably thinks of it as a “knack she has”) for detecting and routing nuts (crazy people).
3. Her “care factor” is quite high. She likes and truly enjoys helping others and making sure things “go right” for herself and others is quite important to her. Her ability to actually make things go right is very very good.
Why am I writing all of this about her, you ask? She and I have never met.
Because everything she wrote is completely workable and valid for agents everywhere, just so long as they are – each and every one of them – just as nice, as intelligent and as caring about others as Ardell. But if any of those agents don’t have each of the above qualities and virtues she obviously has – I see failure in their future.
On point number 1. above, I don’t believe that the average buyer or seller thinks of the average Realtor the way I described Ardell. NAR publishes our “improved rankings” in the Gallup Poll every time we get a slight improvement. Set aside the “we are up 3% in the polls” crap and you could just as easily say that the average buyer or seller is hoping to find the agent who will lie to them the least. So, unlimited credibility isn’t in the new agent’s arsenal. Most sellers (who aren’t family or friends of the new agent) may not instantly be moved by the agent’s opinion of value. I believe it is possible for the new listing agent to (this is where I go WAY out on a limb) wind up with an overpriced listing. It probably won’t sell. Right now in Phoenix (which has a very high ratio of unsold inventory) seven out of eight homes are NOT selling. One in eight is selling. It is easy for a veteran agent (with lots of contacts and prospects) to walk away from an overpriced listing. The experienced agent is not only better at seeing what the correct price should be (in some cases even possibly better than Zillow), but because they are busy and have other customers their judgment on who to work with isn’t clouded by their lack of other prospects.
On point number 2. we are looking at THE issue that makes the difference between success and failure in any endeavor. Is the answer YES or is the answer NO? MAYBE (which is a combination of “yes” and “no” mashed together) is the one answer that just won’t work.
“Do you want to buy a house?” “Do you want to sell a house?”
Oddly enough, a YES or a NO, works quite well as an answer for both the new and the veteran agent. It is the “MAYBE” that is the source of all of the agent’s difficulties. This is the customer who “sort of” wants to sell. He “sort of” wants to buy a home. He is “almost” a seller or “almost” a buyer. These ARE the people who literally drive agents out of the business.
As these people really can’t ever quite decide anything – caught in endless indecision, for almost everything – they then may need to see 50 to 100 homes, over a period of several months and to endlessly “think things over”. So before I can agree to allow the agent to consider that he failed I would first have to see that he was skilled in observation of was the buyer an unqualified YES to buying or selling (is the buyer’s motivation a 10 on a scale of 1 – 10). Successful agents normally are not spending their time with potential buyers or sellers who are not at least an “8”. New agents will tend to show property to “buyers” who are a 2 or 3 – no sale is really possible.
Successfully detecting and routing nuts is much less of a problem when an agent ONLY works with buyers and sellers who have a high level of motivation. I do not want to go into it in great detail in this post (an entire series of posts will be coming on this issue) but it should be pretty obvious that everyone in the world isn’t completely nice. By actual percentage 80% of the population consists of social personalities. They are nice people and will almost always at least try to do the right thing.
20% are in the Potential Trouble Source category. Dealing with these people can be quite difficult. 2 – 3% of the total (included in the 20%) are hard core crazies. Dealing with them should be avoided if at all possible.
The last one (point # 3 above), ability to Make Things Go Right, along with the Care Factor, is usually solved by the agent themselves not being “stuck on a maybe” with regard to their career in real estate. But as we already know, this does not extend to all 1.2 million members of NAR. One company, GMAC, even has on the website I just linked the following: “New Program Seeks to Halt Alarming National Trend at Denver’s Doorstep: 13 of 14 Real Estate Agents Fail, Leave Industry Within Just Two Years”.
13 out of 14 real estate agents fail. They are referring to it as “an alarming trend”. The way they seem to be using the word “trend“, it would make it seem that the 13 out of 14 agents failing is something new. This is my 29th year as a real estate salesman. To the best of my knowledge, that particular “trend” has been part and parcel of the real estate industry way before I ever arrived.
It isn’t new and yet it keeps happening. Why? For the 13 out of 14 who fail there is a lack of commitment – a “lets see how it goes” attitude. And when someone has a “lets see how it goes” viewpoint toward being in the real estate business (perhaps toward anything), I can pretty well predict right up front “how it is going to go”.
Some would suggest we raise the bar much higher on who can enter the business. Make it more difficult to even get a real estate license. But with the current political climate (just think of the know-best-boneheads at the FTC and the DOJ) regarding Realtor commissions, how do you think that is going to look? Make it more difficult to get in? Oh no! The failure agents are the very people who will do it for less – and it is all the same no matter who does it anyway, so lower is always better.
I suspect we will have a similar failure rate in the industry for some years to come. So then only dealing with the 1 agent out of 14 (that very same one that GMAC is going help, if they are going to be effective) and selecting them to help also becomes a prerequisite.
With all of the above qualifiers taken into consideration, I then agree with Ardell (and you thought I forgot about her!).
I appreciate all of the comments each of you have made but I don’t believe I can write a treatise for each of you like I did for Ardell.
CJ, Broker in L A, CA says:
Most successful agents I have met do score highly on the ARDELL INDEX of “Care Factor” and “Make Things Go Right”. Thanks Russell, you inspired a name for that
particular skill set.
There is another, rarer, model of excellence, exemplified by Greg Swann: Clarity of mind combined with technological skills and ability to discern large scale trends and patterns. I’ll call that one the SWANN SET.
And I can see it now, if there is an attempt to “raise the bar” for entry into the real estate business, there will be cries of “discrimination” from NCRC…..
November 5, 2006 — 5:09 am
Greg Swann says:
> There is another, rarer, model of excellence, exemplified by Greg Swann: Clarity of mind combined with technological skills and ability to discern large scale trends and patterns. I’ll call that one the SWANN SET.
This is very sweet, but I don’t belong in this company. We had a fantastic 2005 (who didn’t?), but 2006 has been a house-to-house existence.
A third set of skills, one clearly demonstrated by results, is the SHAW SET — large scale crunch-the-numbers yay-or-nay systems that turn residential real estate into a predictable praxis. I think we’re going to find out that the SHAW SET encompasses any other sets of skills we might name.
November 5, 2006 — 6:34 am
CJ, Broker in L A, CA says:
Re 2005: In preparing for our DRE audit, I looked over our record of deposit checks received-not depoosited into a trust account … in 2005 it was not at all unusual to write 6 offers in a weekend, and all 6 checks were to returned to the buyers, not accepted. Strange times indeed. I look forward to learning more about the SHAW SET….
November 5, 2006 — 8:11 am
Greg Swann says:
> in 2005 it was not at all unusual to write 6 offers in a weekend, and all 6 checks were to returned to the buyers, not accepted.
On the other end of that, Cathy wrote a farily eablorate program in Excel that would eat a net sheet and add it as a column to a spreadsheet, so we could present a side-by-side apples-to-apples summary of multiple competing offers. For sellers, the bottom line is the bottom line, and the bottom line of that tool would eliminate all but two or three offers without having to go through them all page-by-page with the seller. That was fun, and I sometimes wish buyers were that mercenary about money…
November 5, 2006 — 8:41 am
ardell dellaloggia says:
Russell,
My first week in the business I was put in “the pit” with the other “new” agents. I remember knowing from day one that the new agent in front of me was not going to make it. Only one hour in the business and I knew that. Why? Because she NEEDED someone to buy a house. She needed it so badly that I knew no one was going to hire her to help them.
I tried to coach her (one hour in the business and I’m coaching LOL) to at least hide the fact that she needed them to buy, and buy now! I told her she was going to make people very uncomfortable, as her need was showing on her sleeve. Her need to sell something was pouring out of every pore on her body. She of course left and got “a job”.
I say those 13 agents who don’t make it, are the same 13 agents they have always been. The agents thinking they are going to sell enough property each and every month from day one, to pay the bills, and can’t hide their NEED to do so.
I didn’t sell my first listing either. But it was one helluva Broker’s Open! I made big trays of lasagna, served wine and played Italian Music. Everyone wanted to know why the agents didn’t make it to any of the other broker’s opens on the tour that day. They were still over at my listing at 4 p.m. eating and dancing.
We all remember our “first”, don’t we? Do you remember yours?
November 5, 2006 — 9:32 am
Kevin says:
Russell, welcome, and great post. Working with indecisive clients is frustrating, and there seem to be more of them out there these days since the market itself is indecisive now. Apart from trusting your gut, it occurs to me that another way of weeding out the indecisive ones would be to charge a modest monthly retainer, which would be refunded at the close of a successful transaction. Nothing like a monthly fee of, say, $100, to focus the client’s mind on the task at hand.
November 5, 2006 — 11:54 am