Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Realtor formal training is often very dry, focusing on legal issues and contracts. Sometime you can get private training on prospecting and closing techniques and some of the usual motivational stuff, maybe sponsored by your broker. Yet today for closing on a deal and for building a customer base one needs to be more than just very good at the technical or communication aspects, one must be able to put together everything that is needed to make the transaction happen and to make the two ends meet, WHATEVER it takes.

Realtors need to become artists in their profession

The Realtors that close deals regularly know this very well. It is often something unexpected that holds up a sale, and when you hear all these “gurus” talking about their systems for prospecting and selling on automatic one cannot refrain a giggle.

You can delegate most of the work and leverage the work of other people for sure, but it is going to be people not systems. But what people again? The people who add emotion into the the action. Sometimes you meet Realtors that are very dry themselves. Professional, but boring to say the least.

I understand that selling or buying a house can be a serious business, but chances are that the more serious you make it the less it is going to happen. You don’t need to ridicule the house of course or any of the parties, but you definitely need to put some emotion into the deal. That is what people are responding to today.

But let’s not confuse true emotion with what they call “emotional labor”: the display of fake emotions for the sole purpose of obtaining an end. You know, like one of those stereotyped smiles you see around.

When you can display a real genuine emotion, you can tie up with the person in front of you. An emotion he can respond to. You are liable to see some amazing results and what before was impossible now becomes possible.

So more true in the web and social media arena where people are attracted by emotional factors and “artistic“ factors more than anything else. I was befriended just yesterday by a Realtor on Facebook. The next day I got in my Facebook e-mail a request from her to like her Fan page. She would not try to even connect, not even provide me the link to it. I was supposed to search for it myself.

No this is definitely the wrong way to go about things. This is again the export in social media of the old habit of going around in meetings and exchanging stacks of business cards without ever really meeting anybody.

This is not going to work anymore. There are tons of mediocre Realtors and real estate investors out there. Why should people chose one of them? Because they bring them a better deal? Because they ask for a lower commission? There can be an art in everything you do, even a real estate transaction. There is no manual to follow but you are expected to create your own . Mediocrity is going out. Art is coming in.

Roberto Mazzoni