Notorious R.O.B.

Click: The Magic of Instant Connections is a slim little volume that resists easy classification.  I suppose you could call it a book on psychology, as it explores a particular phenomenon that isn’t well-researched: how people connect with each other.  From Chapter 1:

This book is about those mysterious moment — when we click in life.  Those moments when we are fully engaged and feel a certain natural chemistry or connection with a person, place, or activity

Except it’s about far more than those “mysterious moments”.  And as it turns out, I think Click has a good deal of applicability to the modern practice of real estate in a bunch of ways.

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Joel Burslem over at 1000watt has proclaimed July 9, 2010 as the day that the real estate blog died, and given the thoughtfulness and intelligence of the author, it’s difficult to disagree with his conclusion.  Given how Joel defines “real estate blog”, the conclusions he draws are somewhat difficult to escape:

For every Phoenix Real Estate Guy, there are likely umpteen dozen soulless me-too real estate blogs in any given metro these days. Many are filled with meaningless “market reports,” meandering “community updates” – and most were last updated many moons ago.

These blogs float like drift nets on the web, hoping to snare the clueless web visitor who stumbles in through some long tail Google search.

I, however, don’t necessarily agree with his premise.  In order for something to die, it had to have been alive at some point.  Since I don’t believe that the “real estate blog” as defined above was ever graced with the spark of life, I don’t know that I would mourn its death.

Instead, I would like to recommend some tools that are critical to the aspiring real estate blogger in the hopes that we might change the definition of a ‘real estate blog’ from “soulless me-too” Google-farming wanna-be blogs to an actual blog: a weblog, a series of thoughts.

These are not free tools, unfortunately, but for someone interested in blogging — whether in real estate or hyperlocal or something else — these tools are absolutely essential.

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Image: AgentHarvest. Used with permission.

Recently, I ran across a hilarious little parody website called ReallyRottenRealty.com.  The site exposes some of the more compellingly awful business practices of some brokers and agents out there.  Check it out, and be prepared to laugh while grimacing.

Turns out, the website is a marketing vehicle for a company called AgentHarvest, based in Dallas, TX.  It’s basically a lead referral business, the likes of which we’ve seen before.  But there are some interesting, unique things about AgentHarvest that make it worth discussing a bit.

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The incredibly smart, sometimes bearded, Gahlord Dewald has a post up on Inman (will go behind paywall in 24 hours) in which he counsels brokers and agents to “break free from cookie-cutter real estate” by paying more attention to categories of information and data:

Think your brand is different from your competition? Go look at the categories for real estate on your site then go look at the categories for real estate on your competition’s sites. See any difference?

This isn’t a case of tools not existing. Categories are an inherent function in every database-driven content management system out there.

But a quick tour of real estate sites will reveal that most of these systems have been set on autopilot to mimic the same categories that were used for real estate in — you guessed it — newspapers.

His recommendation is to rethink the categories for a real estate search website, perhaps to better “narrowcast” information to a specific segment of the audience.  It’s an interesting approach, and one that I’ve recommended to others in a slightly different context via persona-based marketing, but… the post made me wonder about something.

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"A" in A-Team stands for Agent?

In 2007, Ralph Roberts, then the “official spokesman” of Guthy-Renker Home, published a brief essay on RISMedia called “How to Soar High with Power Agent Teams“.  In it, he recommended an approach to teaming that is much more based on division of labor and functions:

I was recently flying home from the National Association of Realtors convention in Las Vegas, and I began thinking what would happen if airlines followed the same approach that most Realtors practice. I would call the airline to book a flight, and the pilot would answer the phone. When I arrived at the airport, the pilot would check me in, check my bags, follow me to the inspection point to make sure I wasn’t trying to carry any prohibited items on the plane, and then escort me to the gate to make sure I boarded the right flight and secured a seat.

He also wrote a book on the topic, which I havent’ read so it may be that many of my questions and thoughts are answered there.

Nonetheless, with more and more brokerage companies enabling agent teams of various kinds, and more and more successful agents creating de facto agent teams by hiring administrative assistants, listing coordinators, transactions managers, and the like, it appears that the ideas of “Power Agent Teams” have taken firm root in the industry.

Those ideas, however, have not been fully developed to their logical conclusions — at least not yet by anyone I’ve read or heard from in the past three years.  I’d like to revisit the topic, therefore, to sketch out some consequences of the Power Agent Team idea and pose some questions.

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Image: takomabibelot, Flickr

In the comments to this post, I’m getting some rather interesting thoughts from a variety of real estate agents and brokers.  The question I asked was, “Why should I, as a consumer, care if you’re tech-savvy or not?”  The most popular answer was along the lines of, “Because tech-savvy agents have speed and ease of communications.”

This comment from Candice Donofrio was fairly typical of the responses:

Communication – ease and speed – are what make the tech savvy REALTOR the best choice from the beginning to end of the transaction:

Luddy’s transaction manager won’t be able to quell an emotional meltdown or provide a due diligence resource ‘off hours’ if Luddy’s not near the office phone–that client will have to wait for a return call ‘the next business day’. The client will DM Mara on Twitter, find her on 4SQ or simply text her to get an immediate response.

If one assumes that technology enables faster and more efficient communications, then the tech-savvy agent does indeed provide greater value to the consumer.  Question is, what technology are we talking about here?

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As a longtime watcher of real estate and technology, but still just a consumer in every respect, I have a question for the technology-savvy realtors.

What does it matter to me, as a consumer, if you’re a tech-savvy agent?

It’s a real question, actually, because at this point, I’m not sure what the answer is.  Let me explain.

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We worship creativity.  In describing a business, a leader, a product, or a service, I can think of no higher praise than to say it is creative, or visionary, or innovative.  Whether in marketing, or technology, or business process, or a blogpost, all of us admire creativity, strive for creativity, and think about creativity.

The real estate industry in particular has a love-love relationship with creativity.  NAR has its Game Changers, Inman has its Connect Create developer challenge, companies are lauded for their innovations, individuals praise for their creativity in using social media for real estate business (or whatever new creative thing they’re doing).

What I wonder about today is whether people truly worship creativity, or pay lip service to it.  Do you really want innovation?  Are you sure you’re prepared for what creativity means?  Are you certain that you want creativity in your life, in your business?

The Hindu deity Shiva is often said to embody destruction and regeneration, like the forest fire that clears out the dead leaves and old growth to enable new shoots to emerge.  To embrace creativity and innovation, then, is to embrace destruction.  Are you ready?

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A couple of days ago, I read this post on the Four Hour Workweek blog about a guy’s attempt to find out the limits of free credit card concierge services.  He had the free concierge do things like help him with a crossword puzzle and book space travel.

It’s a hilarious post and I learned that I do in fact have an extraordinary resource, seeing as how I have a Visa Signature card, which comes with a free Visa Signature Concierge service.

So I got curious.  And ran a couple of tests to see how much the Visa Concierge could help me in the world of real estate.

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One of the best things about conferences is having great conversations with really smart innovative people.  Garron Seliken of M Realty is one such smart, innovative person, and he and I (along with a bunch of other folks like Marie Still, Jay Thompson, Chris Drayer, and Daniel Rothamel) had lunch today at NAR Mid Year.

Which then led to a thoughtseed — nothing fully fleshed out, but an idea I’ll be exploring more in the days ahead.

Basically, the idea is that we are experiencing the transition from the Industrial Age to a New Artisan Age.  The Industrial Age is marked by large organizations leveraging the efficiencies of things like the assembly line, division of labor, vertical and horizontal integration, etc. to create mass-market products.  Levi’s can go from a one-man tailor shop to a global corporation on the basis of the Industrial Age.

The New Artisan Age, however, is marked by at least an homage to craftsmanship, the idea of a more personal, more customized, more intimate product created by a single artisan for a particular customer.  Maybe some designer might offer a custom-made bespoke pair of jeans, at $500 for a particular customer to fit her body and her preferences.

It seems to me that the general consumer behavior is heading in that direction.  Think about the explosion of microbreweries, artisanal farming, and so on.  People are willing to pay a premium for products they believe are more than just the bare product and its functions.

In my conversation with Garron, it seems to me that his brokerage M Realty, is practicing a form of artisanal real estate brokerage.  He spent a lot of time talking about how he works with each and every agent on an individual basis, creating strategies, offering advice, and offering technology that are custom-tailored to that particular agent’s strengths and weaknesses.  The best example is an agent who wanted an IDX website; Garron found that this agent got most of his production from five people in his sphere of influence.  The advice, then, is to forget about the IDX website, and spend more time with those five people, and maybe make that eight people in the sphere.

Customizing activities to the particular idiosyncracies of the particular agent… isn’t that sort of artisanal real estate (brokerage)?

Krisstina Wise of GoodLife Team also does this, in a different way by building a brokerage around the principle of coaching.

If you will, Keller Williams — a company whose mission statement says that it is a training organization that happens to run a real estate brokerage — is a product of the Industrial Age.  M Realty — a company that turns out to be a coaching organization that happens to run a real estate brokerage — is a product of the New Artisan Age.

Something to think about.  When I have more time.

One question is whether this difference between Industrial and Artisanal extends to the relationship between the agent and the consumer.  (Or better yet, a question might be whether the real estate transaction was ever Industrial to begin with….)

-rsh