The recent real estate frenzy feels like our world has been turned upside down again. But underneath all the chaos, I see a real opportunity for us to turn this around for good and come back stronger than ever. I often think of the word “Anti-fragile” in the book of the same name by Nassim Taleb. The principle is that people and organizations can build their success by being able to bounce back from behind the wall, instead of simply resisting the impact. This is the time for real estate to resist weakness.
Manage our worth
As soon as the commission’s decision was announced, many big industry voices came out with marketing campaigns and webinars about how agents can show their worth. While this is all a helpful start to the new normal, we don’t need to prove our worth. We need to own it, too. Since we now need to have a signed contract with our buyers before we take them on a tour, we have an earlier opportunity to have a long conversation with them and sell them. I predict that these “buyer presentations” will start to have as much depth to them as our listing presentations. This means that we will need to have a lot of marketing materials and visual evidence of our achievements that appeal to consumers. But we will not risk these things being taken by others and used for their own marketing purposes. Whether it’s our upcoming home survey or our hard-won tips and tricks for navigating the market, it’s time to embrace the digital tools that give us ownership over the in-depth knowledge we each have about our markets.
Sharpen our way
As independent contractors we must continually refine and refine our approach. I often tell my agents that we are the Swiss army knife of real estate as we have so many different skills. With such diverse skills comes the need for different tools, but I feel like it has been taken over by many technology and software platforms. We need to reduce the burden while keeping up with the level of technology that other industries have set for their customers. Our differentiator no longer has to be the latest shiny app but the software that shows our customers that we deliver the highest standards of security for every step of a digital-based transaction.
CRMs Matter
And we can be very strategic in how we use our marketing materials. Before the digital age we had an idea of how much customer contact we had because we were often there in person while some of our customers were watching. Now that so much is being sent digitally, we need to use tools that give us deeper insights into how others are interacting with it. We can choose tools that will show us when they’ve downloaded content we’ve posted, shared it with others (and who), and spent more time than average reviewing certain parts of our websites that show their interest. All of these statistics give us a full, three-dimensional view of what our customers are thinking, giving us strong ideas about how to best serve their needs.
There have always been big shifts in real estate, and we’ve been responding and adapting in ways that strengthen us. With digital tools, we can build our way to an anti-vulnerability profile, so that we are not only resilient but immune to all the ways that people outside of the real estate industry try to undermine our value.
Allen Alishahi is the President and founder of ShelterZoom.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.
To contact the editor responsible for this piece: [email protected]
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