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

Most artists can’t draw, are Realtors amongst them? is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Realtor need change approach to selling

It was enough to show up at the brokerage office, or to show up at a house showing with a potential buyer or to show up at social events to network with other professionals and gain referrals by just exchanging business cards. Now that the ABC approach is falling apart everywhere (please read the book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
by Seth Godin on how and why it is falling apart – I don’t like the second half of it, with all the “Lizard Brain” discussion that doesn’t seem factual, but the first half is worth reading). We are now facing an increased majority of Realtors that just don’t know what to do to bring their income levels to a reasonable level.

We complain about the market, the financial credit crunch, the economy, the slow buyers and the unreasonable sellers. It is very true that many things have changed and doing business in real estate is much tougher than before, but just for this reason one cannot expect to continue being paid for just showing up.

People are looking for somebody and something remarkable. In real estate they are looking for someone who can truly answer ALL their questions. It is funny for example how many times I have personally ended providing sources for tax information and immigration information to my international buyers. These were central concerns that came before any discussion about the size of the house, its location ans so forth.

Their main concern is naturally to protect their investment, to be able to live or use their house in a foreign country, and to save on taxes as much as they can. And indeed many of them made the most profit in currency exchange or in tax savings other than just getting a good bargain price. And it is not just applicable to international sales. In any kind of transaction there is information and service that a salesman or Realtor can procure in oder to give the perfect or best experience to its customer that no one else would be able to replicate.

So let’s forget the ABC we have been taught for so long time and let’s start working on a new approach to our business. Let’s become artists in our field, people that are simply indispensable because what we offer cannot be found easily elsewhere. Let’s become the linchpin of our business model.

Roberto Mazzoni

Realtors need to forget their ABC to be successful is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Managing change successfully

My repositioning is still underway but I want to share with you my evolution because I have realized that actually continual evolution and change are a necessary ingredient in today’s world. You can never reach the perfect setup, the perfect positioning, the perfect knowledge, since every day and week there might be changes that bring major shifts to your operation and to your way of viewing things.

So I will share with you the changes, and the methods I am using to master them, hoping you find them valuable. The key concept here is mastering the various phases and motions that life demands of us while focusing more and more on a set direction a and making so that our eventual destination is reached despite all the detours, but also be ready to change destination as soon as we realize that we got onto a wrong course or that there is a better a more direct way to get where we want.

Quitting is not necessarily wrong, actually it is very right sometimes. Seth Godin, in his book “The Dip: A Little Book that Tells You When To Quit (and when to Stick)” tells us: “Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing, like stuff from Vince Lombardi: “Quitters never win and winners never quit”. Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”

Choosing when to stay and when to go is in itself an ability and I believe that in this era of excessive information and “biased” information everybody gets swamped under an overwhelming number of options and doesn’t quite know where to go and why he should got there in the first place, and when to quit doing what he is doing and going somewhere else.

I have not transformed my self in a new self-help motivational guru, not yet at least. Don’t worry, but I believe that my down to earth experience as a real entrepreneur faced with the real challenges everybody faces every day, main of which the challenge of change, can offer some good and honest advice by sharing with you my itinerary and talking also about my business of course. In the end I have managed not only to change country, language, culture and business altogether, but I have also succeeded in pulling it through and coming out at the other end with a much bigger experience and with a better understanding of how to find the best directions ans more importantly how to change them when it is needed.

Let me know if you like this kind of subject and what you would like to know more on it, and I will do my best to offer you valuable contributions that will help you manage your change.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Get the time to read The Dip. Its is very short but it is worth your time.

Mastering change in continuing evolution is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Is the real estate blog really dead?

Should you provide valuable content that improves your image but drains your time and energy with no apparent immediate result or should you just focus on getting on the first page in Google no matter what the content and then try to convert your leads? My personal answer is that you probably need to do both, but the article describes very clearly that while SEO is the real deal when it comes to business generation,  a full fledged SEO strategy is well beyond the means of the average real estate investor or agent.

Also interestingly, Hann devalues the hyper-local approach that we have seen evolving in the last few years. We have been invited by the Internet Marketing “gurus” to go local, to focus on local search keywords. here is what Hann has to say about it: “When a Big Company decides that it wants to compete in SEO for some desirable keywords, it will simply outspend the little guy and just crush him.  The focus on hyperlocal and “long tail” strikes me as the result: small companies and individual agents pick up the crumbs that the big guys let fall from the table. In other words, their SEO-based strategies are viable only insofar as some Big Guy allows it to be viable.” (read the full article by Robert Hann)

So even if SEO has a key effect on your ranking it cannot be the backbone of your marketing effort as a little entrepreneur. Yet even blogging is not enough, and here we have the opinion of Garron Selliken, a technologist and broker in Portland: “When comes to generating leads from search, the past, present and future of real estate sites is SEO, not blogging, transparency, authenticity and finding your voice.  The way to get clients is to show up where the most concentrated group of most motivated buyers/sellers are hanging out and ask for the business. This is why SEO focused content kills blogging…it is targeted directly at the relevant phrases and lands on pages designed to satisfy needs AND convert into conversation.” (the full article by Selliken is well worth reading).

Gahlord Dewald, a SEO consultant, adds more weight in reducing the value of blogging as a business platform in this article: “Online business strategy and blogging” He says that “The real estate blog may have never been alive in the first place” and comments: “Though I don’t have any data to back it up, I’d wager that for every solid, compelling and meaningful real estate blog there are twenty zombie real estate blogs: packed with stolen/poorly crafted/duplicate content that is either devoid of purpose or stuffed to the gills with SEO keywords”.

Do you think this would be applicable for many other fields in addition to real estate? I do

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Share you experience on this topic by commenting on this post, or simply say hi

The death of the real estate blog is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Foreclosure fraud can undermine international real estate investing.

How did it work?

To gain an understanding of the complex system that brought is where we are today, you can read the following very well written articles that go in the detail on how it all worked out and the key role that the State of Florida in playing in the scene:
Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 1: The Chains and the Stakes that explains how the court system was fooled into accepting forged or non existing documents for their foreclosures.
Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 2: What is a Note, and Why is it So Important? that explains you why even having the original and proper mortgage document (that often is not there) will not do and how this could heavily affect investors.
How to Find the Owner of Your Mortgage which gives you practical tips on how to trace the paperwork back to its source.
Unfortunately there is a lot to know and understand about this subject and it is unlikely that title companies will catch up with it in the short term, so some of them already are refusing to issue title insurances on properties that are in some way connected to foreclosures.
What are the liabilities for you?

If you are an investor, you run the serious risk of acquiring properties and then have your title of ownership challenged down the road with little or no support from your title policy. If you are an international buyer or and international real estate investor you find yourself potentially mired down into a legal mess that would be very difficult to solve from a distance even if you had the rights to defend yourself and the cost of the defence would easily surpass any profit or cash flow you have gathered on the property.

If you are a Realtor you could be involved into a transaction that either can’t go through, because title companies won’t provide an insurance on the property, or that can be challenged down the road and you might have been liable for not disclosing material facts on the property of which you should have been informed (the foreclosure fraud story is all over the media now).

But what is more important here, I believe, is that this particular crisis, that is going to last for a while, until the have found a way to clean it up in a legal and orderly way, will reduce one of the attraction factors of the US real estate market for international investors and buyer: the protection of private property and the transparency of the transaction. People from all over the world have been purchasing  properties at very low prices counting on the protection of their investment, many of these properties where bought, remodeled and rented on a lease option basis. This whole flow or capital into the US was based on the reasonable certainty that the investment was going to be protected by a very solid and tested judiciary system that has always been protecting private property. With a significant percentage of foreclosures running the risk of being challenged what do you think will happen to this flow of money?

It is likely to flow elsewhere, in other countries or maybe towards properties that have been owned free an clear for some time by private sellers, or there will be a whole new market for people and companies providing services in checking out the legal status of a property.

Roberto Mazzoni

Foreclosure fraud liabilities for investors and Realtors is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate