Three new dogs for the Bloodhound pack — Damon Chetson, Robert Worthington and Greg Dallaire — and a reminder about transparency

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Yesterday I had mail from a Realtor who had proposed the idea of custom yard signs to a listing prospect. The client’s eyes lit up, and he saw not only the immediate possibilities but the future portents. Here’s what the Realtor had to say about it all:

One thing I found so interesting is that any time you mention custom signs, all the agents who don’t use them make comments about how worthless they are, but this guy, the client, the seller, got it immediately. Got the reason for it, could see how it would stop traffic, understood it all — without me selling him on it.

Funny how you have to sell agents on stuff that would make perfect sense to their own clients.

We’re adding three new contributors today. Two of them are envelope-pushing Realtors, but one is a certified, bonafied real estate client, an educated consumer who can tell a hawk from a handsaw — and who isn’t shy about speaking his mind about the utility of either one.

That consumer is Damon Chetson, a BloodhoundRealty.com client from way back and a long-time contributor to our comments threads. Damon is a newly-minted criminal defense attorney in Cary, NC, but he will be talking to us here about how he perceives the real estate industry as an informed outsider.

Robert Worthington is another frequent BloodhoundBlog commenter. He’s a hard-charging Realtor in Manitowoc, WI, and he spends all of his spare time looking for technobabble bubbles to burst.

Greg Dallaire is another Wisconsin Realtor, working out of Green Bay. Not only does he have a first name that rings sweetly to my ears, he sings a song very dear to my own heart: “I’m passionate about implementing technology into my business to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and increase profitability.”

As you might have inferred from my absences, punctuated by brief bursts of brevity — the wit of soul — I’m a busy boy. I’m about to become a busier boy, because I want to undertake a task for the ages. In the mean time, this was my response to the email cited above:

The actual message of that Mike Ferry video was this:

“I don’t do high-tech and I don’t intend to, so I’m going to affect to undermine it in my marketing.”

You know when people know they’re being evil or stupid because they can’t resist the impulse to say so out loud. Accidental error is taciturn and usually tenuous. Willful error can’t shut the hell up.

Everyone understands everything there is to know about the world by the age of five. Conceptual fluency is the moment when the scales fall from your eyes and you understand what is going on around you. Everything after that is details.

We talk all the time about transparency, but the idea of being completely transparent is important for this simple reason: Your clients already see right through you. If you’re not doing something you could and should be doing because you’re lazy and cheap, you might as well say so. Making jokes about people who work harder than you will fool no one — least of all the people who congratulate you for being so lazy and so cheap so amusingly.

But: If you insist on loudly insisting that wearing a shit-eating grin is a marketing strategy, be sure to use the two-ply to wipe your face. You wouldn’t want to look even more like an ass.

Meanwhile, make our new authors welcome. If they are very kind, they will tell you everything you don’t want to hear.