Marketing is making you weak

Some of my recent posts were intended to fire you up and challenge your thinking. You might even say I was poking fun at a few of you - kind of like a couple of siblings do on a long car ride.

Having said that, you probably wouldn’t disagree that the business and the market has changed significantly over the last 24 months.

Further, we all know that the second half of the year will bring about some fundamental changes to the way residential real estate operates. (i.e. the NAR stuff)

So...

What are you telling yourself?

• Are you telling yourself things will be fine?
• Are you telling yourself that things will change but you will adapt?
• Are you freaking out?
• Are you hoping and praying nothing changes, the market goes back to where it was, and you can just pick up where you left in the spring of 2022?
  
  

“If you are defeated once and tell yourself you will overcome, but carry on as before, know in the end you’ll be so ill and weakened that eventually you won’t even notice your mistake and will begin to rationalize your behavior.”
    -- Epictetus, Discourses, 2.18.31

You can tell yourself any story you want, but as Epictetus points out, you might be living in a false reality that ultimately leads to a very bad outcome.

A few months ago I was writing about all the things that have come (and some gone) that agents have done to “get” business.

• Mailers
• Magazine ads / Print advertising
• Google ads
• Craigslist ads
• Email blasts
• Websites
• QR codes
• Facebook
• Facebook ads
• Facebook business pages
• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok
• Boosted posts (not even sure I know what that is)
• And my favorite catch-all: Video!

All of those things are...MARKETING! Marketing works. I think?

Marketing is pretty important when you run a high-volume, low-dollar business where you can’t afford to go out and sell one-to-one. Instead, you must rely on selling one-to-many.

If you run a coffee shop, you are in a high-volume, low-dollar business. If you are an accountant - maybe you are at a cross between the two?  A business consultant is typically in a low-volume, high-dollar business; as are most real estate agents.

Most real estate agents do business with people they know or, sometimes, people they meet - in person! Like...

• I was playing golf...
• I was at my kids' sports event...
• I was sitting at the bar...

You probably can relate to one of those examples, or you have your own similar story.

Then there are the deliberate places we may hang out to be in flow with people - church, school, volunteer, clubs/gyms, etc.

MOST SUCCESSFUL REAL ESTATE AGENTS BUILD A DATABASE WITH PEOPLE THEY KNOW. ‘People they know’ is a loose summary of the fact that they build, develop, and nurture relationships. The agents with the most high-quality relationships win. Not “win against other agents”, but win the ultimate game of playing real estate at a high level.

Yet much of the industry conceals this point so they can sell bullsh*t marketing products to realtors.

Do you want a list of 200 leads, or 200 people who know you as a realtor, like you as a realtor, and trust you as a realtor?

The answer is obvious. But agents are 'ill and weakened' because they are rationalizing some untrue story that they need leads.  Often leads come through marketing.

On the other hand, some agents with large, high-quality databases are not doing business at exactly the same rate they have in the past. Remember though that real estate does operate in cycles. We are in a different cycle right now. However, if you take these high-producing agents and average their production out over a greater length of time you will likely find that their database is still producing.

Back to the “ill and weakened”: they are the agents who have no database and are caught up in activities that don’t “seem to work” right now - and I would argue might never really have worked. Things like...marketing! I am not saying don’t do marketing! But if you think posting on social every day is going to save you, you are going to be defeated.

Continuing from last week: in my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes realtors have fallen prey to is that they are missing the most important component of being a successful realtor - knowing how to sell real estate! To be sure, much of the industry has been teaching “marketing”, and totally pushed “competence” to the side.

Going forward, clients are going to be paying a lot more attention to the commission they are paying - and they are not going to pay people who are only good at making videos (marketing). Instead, they are going to pay people who are highly skilled at brokering real estate.

Your real estate success comes down to three things:

1. Having a process where you develop and nurture relationships every week.
2. Having a schedule that you follow - on which it has the two most important things: a) when you do your relationship building and b) when you do your business (Note: those are different things!).
3. Developing and growing your real estate IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence).

Or keep doing video.