Notorious R.O.B.

There is an interesting little dichotomy in the results of the survey that Inman ran recently, and published as a Special Report: “To Be A Broker: Charting a Course for Recovery“.  It’ll cost ya some money, unless you’re an Inman Premium subscriber, but I think Inman did a great job here in putting the information together.  If you care about the industry, brokerage models, and the like, you’re going to want to check out this report.  So go buy one, or subscribe.  (Disclosure: I am a columnist for Inman.com… so uh, if you subscribe and such, I think I benefit through that.  Plus, you can see my archives on Inman.com, which might be entertaining later.)

My first thought upon reading the Report was that the sample might be skewed — after all, presumably Inman contacted brokers in its database of subscriber or some such.  They have to be among the tech elites, these brokers, to be subscribers of Inman.  Then my second thought was, that real estate brokers, more than perhaps any other group of business owners in America, need a remedial class on business strategy.  My third thought was, hey, this might be a good blogpost!

Said blogpost follows.

Read the rest of this entry »

So earlier tonight, I asked a simple question on Twitter:

Question: How many of you Realtors have a business plan? How many years does it cover?

The answers I got were somewhat amazing.  The replies ranged from “I have a 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year business plans” to “Business plans are too complicated”.  What an amazing variance!

So I ask a follow-up question:

so for those who said they don’t have a business plan, or a bizplan that is defunct, how do you know you’re successful at any given time?

The answers were as follows:

Such interesting responses there as well!

Realtors, it appears, have inverted the classic Jay-Z line, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man!”  A realtor is not a business, man, he’s a businessman.

This… has consequences.

Read the rest of this entry »