Achilles Slays Hector, Peter Paul Rubens, 1630-1635
So Gahlord Dewald, seriously one of the big brains in the real estate industry, puts up a thought-provoking post on strategy. It’s worth reading in full. But I got obsessed with his definition of strategy, especially since I just wrote a post on strategy. Funny how things seem to come in bunches. Anyhow, Gahlord on Strategy:
Strategy
The art and science of maintaining and deploying resources in order to have the freedom and flexibility to continue operations.
There are a few things to unpack in this definition of strategy and since I’ve come this far I may as well unpack them.
- Strategy is an art because it involves personal choices.
- Strategy is a science because there are often visible and repeatable results.
- Maintaining resources is about conservation and growing.
- Deploying resources is about spending and taking action.
- Freedom is your ability to execute your plans at will.
- Flexibility is your ability to respond, react and pivot when required.
- Winning means to continue operations.
So that’s the root theory of strategy that I follow, as much as a bullet list will allow anyway. For the purpose of our “Large Business vs Small Business and the use of Social” conversation, the most important part is what I see as “winning.” It’s merely the ability to continue to operate.
It’s a really nice formulation. I posted a response on his blog in which I reveal that my definition of winning involves not just continuing operations, but getting the other guy to cease operations. It’s a far more martial, more violent, less peaceful view of the term, I guess.
So how might the above be modified if you believe, as I do, that strategy cannot be divorced from conflict. In business, we call that conflict “competition”.
Sun Tzu: The Art of War
At REBlogWorld 2010, I moderated a panel discussion on whether the real estate blog was dead or not. My friend Garron Selliken, a technologist and broker in Portland, wrote up a post that stemmed from a long discussion he and I had with several others in Las Vegas, in which he argues that the “real estate blog” as he defines it is indeed dead as the Monty Python parrot:
When it 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.
Then the brilliant Gahlord Dewald, a SEO consultant and an all-around smart fella, chimed in with his own post on the topic.
Both of them are worth reading in full.
While agreeing with both Garron and Gahlord in terms of what works for lead generation, conversion, and actual revenue generation for a real estate professional… this whole line of thinking raises a couple of questions for me, so I thought I’d puzzle them out with you all here.
Basically, the question is whether a SEO-focused strategy is viable competitive strategy for a real estate agent or small brokerage.
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.
