Image: David Spiro

Facebook can sometimes be a gold mine for content. Consider these two seemingly unrelated events:

Marie is a friend who used to work in the real estate industry, as the Director of Marketing for MRIS. She relocated to Florida, and asked me months ago for some agents I knew in the area. I didn’t, so reached out to my friends who did, who promptly came up with a few local REALTORS who are supposedly at the top of their game, rock-solid professionals, top producers, and the like.

You see the result of that above: “Fourth time is a charm.”

What struck me was that on the very same page where I was reading this status update from Marie, I see this ad off to the side:

Look at the copy:

“Top Broker shares unusual marketing strategy for consistent commissions.”

Emphasis is mine.

Why do so many real estate agents spend so much time looking for “unusual marketing strategies”, talking about the latest social marketing tool, spend thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours doing the unique, the unusual, the different, the “this will help me stand out” stuff… and totally miss the basics like, oh, I don’t know… returning a frikkin’ phone call from a possible client?

Because there’s far too much magical thinking and far too little cold hard boring reality going on in real estate.

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