Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

You are just as good as the last deal you made. This is a rule that is prevalent in the US and although it may not be written in stone, it definitely applies in your day to day life as well as in your business.

This pushes people in following en mass what they think successful people do. Fads and crazy trends are built exactly this way. When people where getting mortgages they could not afford 3 or more years ago, they did it because “everybody” else did. Now they are all going in foreclosure. It is true that your rightness and wrongness will be decided eventually by the results you get, but they also depend on how much you believe that you can get those results and work around obstacles to obtain them.

If you let external opinions or your temporary set backs tell you that you are a looser and that you should change what you do in order to comply with the desires of somebody else, you won’t ever stand out from the crowd and I am afraid you won’t ever accomplish anything because the very people that tell you are wrong can’t tell you what is right.

Don’t fall into the trap of believing you or your evaluations are wrong simply because they don’t fit somebody else. This is not just an American game. I remember when I was in Milan two years ago and was selling my personal house. We had hired a local Realtor who spent the following 3 months showing it to tire kickers and trying to convince us that we had to lower significantly our asking price.

So we lowered the selling price following his advice and we simply got more tire kickers. Eventually, me and Maria, my wife, came to the conclusion that such a Realtor was simply unable to sell above a certain price, whatever the house. So we dropped the listing with him and started marketing the house ourselves on the Internet and got it sold in 15 days at a price which was close to what we were asking originally.

I must admit that the Italian real estate market is more stable than the US scene, but the concept stays the same. We proved ourselves right by eventually winning and we later found out that the Italian Realtor had changed job and was now a school teacher: he had lost at in his own game.

Don’t care to be right or to have other people agree with you at all cost. Be reasonable and considerate, of course, but focus on winning and then you will also be right eventually.

Roberto Mazzoni