In my last post, titled “Eight rules to avoid social media disaster”, I have mentioned that the first rule is to allow your customers to be in control of their time, to let them decide when they want to view or use your services or products. In the heydays of television, the best shows where always being plaid at certain times and in certain days. You had to be in front of you TV set exactly at that time if you wanted to watch it.

Allow your customers to have control of their valuable time.

Our life was actually running at the drum beat of somebody else. I remember for example when I was a kid in Italy, we had a very popular advertising show being run every evening at 9 pm sharp. It was a collection of very spectacular or funny (for the time) advertisements, it featured some of the best actors of the time, each one featuring a “short movie” centered on a specific product. It was very popular.

Almost every kid liked it and they watched it with their families just before going to bed. Therefore this show, named “carousel”, was the signal of the end of the day for a whole generation of kids, not the sun set or some other natural event. That how powerful the television was then.

Today, in the digital media age, we can view our preferred show when we want: we can record it, get it on demand from a subscription service, rent a DVD, download it from the Internet, and so on. Therefore the customer is getting used to control her own time and decide when he wants to consume our services.

This is applicable to any field, including real estate where I operate. It is becoming more and common with brokers or investors to have the buyers go visit a house that is for sale or for rent by themselves, without the escort of a Realtor or the owner himself. Maybe the listing broker or the owner gives them the code to a lock box or a neighbor lets them in. The prospective buyer has therefore the chance of looking at the house at her time and her speed, involving anybody he wants before coming to a decision that she is really interested in it and then you can move forward with the negotiation and the financing issues.

It has been noted that people feel safer when they have the chance of doing so and therefore tend to appreciate the house more, or they simply discard it, saving also you own time since you don’t have to go there and show the house to a bunch of people that will never buy it or wait for the arrival of a prospective tenant that never shows up.

There is of course lot’s of benefit also in having the customer escorted there by somebody who can describe the house and overcome comments and answer questions, but this can always happen after the first visit or drive-by. We all have very limited time and any system that goes in the direction of allowing all the parties involved to decide when to do something and the time to spend on it is going to be successful.

Roberto Mazzoni

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