Gross Commission Income as a Yardstick of Success

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Or as a cat o’ nine tails! GCI is a metric we hear a lot in real estate. Everybody in an MLS can see how much everybody else is selling. For some of us, that means the pressure is on.

The tendency to measure oneself against one’s competitors is strong, I would imagine, in any competitive person. The ability to do that in an objective way by using statistical analysis is somewhat unusual in business, though less in sales.

But we real estate professionals have this ability at our fingertips! The different ways in which this is useful are numerous, but I haven’t heard anyone talk about the ways it’s not useful.

For a guy like me, having a yardstick to measure myself against my peers is not something I enjoy. My tendency is not towards feeling satisfied, but towards feeling as though I could be/should be doing more.

Maybe I’m unique in this way.

This aspect of measuring myself against others doesn’t feel particularly healthy or wholesome, and it’s not a good index of success. When I’m up, I enjoy thinking of all the agents that have sold less than me. When I’m down, I’m filled, at times, with envy and resentment towards my peers for being ahead of me.

The same phenomenon occurs when we see the highlight reel of people’s lives and we think, “Why isn’t my life so grand?”

The reality is that everyone has to deal with life. But we can get a distorted perspective of it due to only seeing one version of the life that those people want us to see.

The lesson for me is that sales volume isn’t the only way I should measure myself. I’m at a point this year where I’m at half of my annual GCI for last year, only it’s September 11th.

Ouch.

Granted, I have some plausible excuses, but what it really comes down to for me, is that it didn’t happen. I had several opportunities with buyers, who are real buyers, but they didn’t buy. Likewise with sellers. I’ve had several listing opportunities but the people didn’t end up listing. To be fair, I’ve also lost two or three to competitors. The market has become more competitive and more saturated, both in the sense of new agents as well as larger agents and teams gaining more market share.

Part of the trouble is that there aren’t many homes for sale here. We’re in a low-inventory/high-demand part of the country right now. I wasn’t able to put several of those people where they wanted to be, at least not yet.

Additionally, I could say that I worked the backend of building a real estate team with my business partner, and the focus on that this spring took precedence over production. I also had my fourth child in April. But more than anything, the first thing is the reason.

Unlike some, I work almost exclusively by personal referrals and direct clients that I know personally. Other than that, I have people that find me online and contact me. I do some intermittent advertising, but not really enough to talk about.1 Because of that, I get what I get to a large degree, and being 33 in an otherwise older community, sometimes that’s not million-dollar listings. Sometimes it’s piece of shit tear-downs where the guy needs someone to help him navigate the short sale process.

Now, in light of those things, it’s more reasonable that I’m at where I’m at. Furthermore, I have existing deals and will likely bring more to the closing table other than those between now and the end of the year.

Irrespective, it brings me back to the idea that I’m measuring my self-worth against other people’s sales volume. That’s the problem for me.

This is mostly a spiritual problem. I’m putting all my eggs in this basket (work) and consequently, I’m deeply disturbed in this situation because what does this mean about me?

So, if my identity is all wrapped up in my work, and I don’t feel like I’m making progress in other areas of my life, I’m going to be all fucked up when I’m not producing at work—even when it’s outside of my control. I have to diversify. Work is still work, and I still need to do it and do it well. But when I’m balanced in other areas of my life, I’m better able to endure difficulty when one area isn’t going how I think it should.

So, I blew the dust off of a novel that I wrote and began taking it through the fourth round of edits a couple days ago. I began making time to spend with my friends over coffee for a couple of days a week before work. I’m talking about the way I feel and the emotions I’m experiencing around this with my wife and my close friends. I just began a big reading project that I’m excited about. I’m considering how I can be of greater service in my life to the different people and organizations that I touch, especially my family at home.

I’m counterbalancing the other roles in my life. Ironically, I’ve been putting the majority of my focus on work this entire year. Between that and exercise and my family, little attention above what’s expected or required has gone into the other areas. A bigger conversation is my tendency to “work” more in terms of showing up, but not working effectively and efficiently while I am at “work”. So I could benefit from some practical remediation as well as spiritual, and that’s going to become a focus as I begin my business planning for next year.

  1. I’ll be doing more now. ↩︎
Gross Commission Income as a Yardstick of Success

Don’t Balk. Learn ASAP.

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Today we had a birthday party for my four-year-old daughter. My wife invited a few couples from the community as well as our immediate neighbors and everyone that had young kids brought them. The party was a hoot and we all had fun.

I, of course, am now ready to curl up in a ball with a book for an hour or so before I fall asleep.

Talking with one of the fathers and he asked me how work was going. This is what people do. They ask me how the market is, how work is going. I answer the question, on average, two or three times a day to different people.1

I answered like I would, telling him that the interest rates are higher than they’ve been in more than twenty years, which makes it difficult for people to want to buy. Being that many sellers are also buyers, there’s also a lack of inventory which is compounded with what is already a low-inventory market. So, things are going okay, but they could be better. What homes there are are selling quickly. There are more cash deals than what is typical, and most of the sellers that I’m working with are moving out of state for various reasons.

We somehow got on the topic of assumable mortgages. It was definitely something I brought up. It’s something I’ve been thinking about. Having gotten licensed in 2017, there hasn’t been a big reason to know anything about assumable mortgages. Now, with interest rates being as high as they are relative to how low they were three years ago, I know it’s something I should learn more about to help buyer clients secure loans on the best terms possible.

But, I have yet to learn about them. That is, until after my conversation with this guy when I proceeded to look it up so I’d know what the hell I was talking about.

Don’t talk about real estate things that you don’t fully understand with people. That’s my lesson for today. We talked in and out and all around the notion of an assumable mortgage. I hadn’t grasped the concept fully. It was only partially hatched in my little 2017-licensed brain. No appraisal? Couldn’t be. Has to appraise. Turns out that’s not true. Bank doesn’t give a shit so long as you have the difference between the loan and the sale price in cash. What kind of loans are assumable? Are there certain kinds that frequently are or certain kinds that frequently aren’t?

I knew nothing, other than that the point was to acquire the lower rate. I didn’t know that one then has to come up with a down payment sufficient to cover the difference between the loan amount and the market value/asking price of the property. I didn’t know that government-insured loans are often assumable, that conventional loans rarely are.

I didn’t know. But he asked, and I admitted I didn’t know.2

What’s worse is that I brought it up. I initiated it. I looked uninformed, professionally, which makes it appear that I’m not fully able to represent my clients. That’s true to some degree. This is something I should know about, like I said.

I don’t want to get myself into situations where I don’t know things that I should know professionally. Not going to win me any points with the public. So, I learned, and I’ll learn more. I’ll begin to use this for my clients, when possible. I will ask my sellers about the nature of their loans and will research this more effectively in my pre-listing process.

  • If the thought comes that I should know something because it will make me more valuable professionally, I shouldn’t balk. Learn it asap.
  • Don’t unnecessarily put myself into positions where I don’t have the answers that relate to my profession.
  • When these things happen, autopsy the situation, see where I went wrong, correct course, and don’t make the same mistake twice.
  1. It pays to have a canned response to this. It’s not something I’ve mastered. I usually make the mistake of being transparent and telling them how the market actually is or how work is actually going. Maybe that’s me being authentic, or maybe I’m missing opportunities to be a clever real estate salesperson. ↩︎
  2. This is a sign of progress. The new-agent version of Sam would have tried to bullshit his way through it instead of just admitting that he didn’t know and exercising even the smallest display of humility. ↩︎
Don’t Balk. Learn ASAP.

Top Contacts

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This is something I’ve yet to perfect but I have a belief in it because of how many people have instructed me to do it or something similar to it.

As a real estate professional, I’m in the people business, much as I hate to admit it. See, I don’t hate people, no not at all. But I don’t particularly love having to interact with them for my work.

I’m what is frequently referred to as an introvert. But, I get along well enough with others, so I’m moderately successful at real estate sales. This doesn’t help me though when it comes to spontaneously reaching out to everyone I know so I can be top of mind.

Yes, it’s not something I’ve been doing well lately. We participated in a coaching program earlier this year with Workman Success Systems and this is one concept they’re known for.

I identify my top contacts. This might be 250, 100, 50, or somewhere in between. The working notion here is that these people are the people most likely to refer me business. From here, I design a contact plan of how I want to keep in touch with them. At WSS, it was as simple as a phone call or a face-to-face meeting once per month.

A book that influenced me a lot earlier on is 7L – Seven Levels of Communication.1 Strongly recommend it. I may reread it now that I’m thinking about it. I could use some motivation around this.

The premise of the book is that trust comes as a byproduct of communication. When we communicate with people more and more, they trust us as professionals and become more and more likely to refer business to us.

So, how do we keep in touch with these people? WSS keeps it simple with a phone call or a face-to-face once per month.2 7L provides lots of ideas, an example of one is their emphasis on writing personal notes.3

7L also prescribes the task of grading one’s database. WSS had a similar suggestion. Most people think in terms of A, B, C, and sometimes D, and F. The point is that if I grade them, I don’t have to remember who’s at what stage, I just search for the categorical letter and see the list of people.

WSS used A is for leads that are expected to buy/sell/etc. within 30 days, for instance, whereas, A+ is an Ambassador in 7L — somebody who has before, and you expect to in the future, refer you more than 1 deal per year. Typically A (or A+) is the optimal grading, and people less likely to close or less likely to refer us business (depending on which model is used) would be graded as B, C, D, F, etc.

Some people make their entire careers just focused on direct referral. In order to do that, we have to be referrable. In order to be referrable, we have to behave remarkably when we’re dealing with clients.

Old Sam doesn’t always deal remarkably with clients. We all make mistakes. The important thing is to actually do our best so we can lay our head on the pillow peacefully, and so we can ensure that we’re going to be talked about positively by the people we’ve helped.

When it comes to this aspect of the business, we’re rewarded for being good at relationships. I sometimes feel that the effort makes it insincere, inauthentic. I have an angle, after all. So, I’m going to challenge myself to find a way to do it authentically for me.

Writing comes much easier to me. I could finally get serious about a work-related blog and send content out to my people once a month, once a week, bi-weekly, whatever. I could call the ones that I feel comfortable calling because I like them and they seem to like me.

Another way I could increase my SOI activity is by visiting people. I’m always so busy like every other real estate professional claims to be. 4 Getting out, intentionally, and visiting with past clients and friends in the area where I work is much more up my alley than the phone call. The visit, as opposed to the call, feels more meaningful for them, and it’s more fulfilling for me.

So, there I go! Win/win.

  • Begin a blog for my company and email the post however often I decide.
    • I’ll begin with a monthly newsletter with a market update and whatever other ancillary things that matter that I can think of.
    • I’ll post that as a blog post on our company website.
    • Maybe I’ll read the market report to a video screen and call it a YouTube video.
    • I’ll link both in our MailChimp account and send them out monthly to our subscribers.5
  • I’ll challenge myself to visit with one past client/member of my sphere of influence (SOI) every week.

For me, this feels both authentic and effective. It’s something I can get behind doing because it suits my personality and preferences more. Many people I know don’t mind making phone calls—it comes easily for them. Great. I think the important thing is mapping out a system and actually executing it for an extended period of time.6

  1. I’m a guy who’s had a considerable amount of my business come from people I know personally and from direct referrals from people I know personally. I believe this is due in large part to this book and the things it teaches. ↩︎
  2. I merely skimmed the Ninja real estate book you may have heard of. One concept that jumped out at me was this one. Very similar, they recommend a call every seven weeks to set up a meeting every eight weeks. Something like that. The approach is altered slightly everywhere but is otherwise ubiquitous. ↩︎
  3. Writing personal notes can be an effective and touching way to communicate. It feels very personal to see someone’s handwriting. A good rule of thumb with this would be to commit to writing X per day. In the 7L book, there’s an in-depth formula for how to write the cards. Use the formula if it’s helpful. If it deters you from writing them, it’s not serving you and you should just write notes. ↩︎
  4. But I’m rarely too busy for lunch with my business partner at the drop of a hat. ↩︎
  5. This will be distinct from the newsletter we’re already sending out, for this will actually be news! ↩︎
  6. Holiday cards, thank you notes, thinking of you notes, blogging, phone calls, client events, visiting them at their home, inviting them to visit you at your office or an open house, getting lunch/meals, play dates with their kids and yours, birthday parties, housewarming parties—the list goes on. ↩︎
Top Contacts

Tailored Shirts and Lightning Rods

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Today I moved an old tiki bar off a porch and into a pickup truck in the middle of a thunder and lightning storm.

I was driving about 90 minutes to a closing. The listing is outside of my normal market by about 20 minutes, and the law office that handled the title work and the settlement was about 25 minutes farther still. From my office, the whole trip there was a little over an hour, but I was planning on stopping by the listing to get my lockbox and grab the key.

About 15-20 minutes into my ride, I got an email from the paralegal at the attorney’s office with a half dozen photographs of various things that were still at the listing during the final walk-through moments prior.

I look through them. Two of the items had been addressed, and the other four remained. I let the sellers know in a text and didn’t get a reply back until 15-20 minutes after that. The wife said she was on her way. I said ‘Me too.’

Turns out, the tiki bar was still on the porch as well, and the bedframe was still up in the loft area. Small bed, but the kind with drawers built-in. The fridge was still full, and there were miscellaneous things in the basement and carport as well as several large bags of trash.

The wife had been there helping me, arriving a few minutes after me. The seller (husband) arrived with his truck and we proceeded to break down and load up everything the best we could.

Long story short, we got it all out of there, torrential rain notwithstanding.

Only once have I had a client leave personal property at the house to be found during a final walkthrough. I resold the house this year actually. The then-buyers were pissed. I don’t blame these guys for being a little pissy in today’s situation.

The moral of the story is, to do the work. I’m all for solving problems before they begin. We have a client expectations sheet with a series of bullet points about the way we do business and what we expect from clients throughout our professional relationship for the listing/transaction.

This includes things like keeping the driveway plowed, keeping the lawn mowed, communication expectations – especially during negotiations, and getting all their things out before closing. Despite a form with their signatures and mine, we were still in a predicament.

Driving to the closing after, I felt as though I was above this kind of shit. My tailored, Brooks Brothers shirt was soaking wet. I felt kind of lousy. And I felt stupid. Fortunately, I was listening to a book called The Obstacle Is The Way, and the author talked about how only a conceited asshole would think they were above whatever it was they were doing at their current station in life. Caught my attention.

That may or may not be true, but the concept of what was being talked about was to be present for the things that we need to be present for, not completely focused on the later-on stuff. I had to get the deal done. It was a notably difficult and stressful transaction. The clients were friendly, but they were disobedient, busy, and likely dishonest with me at times.

Add to these things the fact that we had a difficult property to sell plus difficult buyers, and it made for a really challenging transaction.

But now it’s done. And sometimes we have to roll up our sleeves to get the thing done.

It’s not the type of work that excites me, and it does make me question whether there’s something better, but the reality is that all work is difficult and at times feels degrading. When I feel that way, it helps me to suck it up, get humble again, and focus on the task at hand.

The 22-year-old me would have been thrilled to be in a situation like that, helping these people get their stuff out so we could close a deal and make some real money. Surviving in this game is about not getting too big for my britches. And sometimes that’s a challenge in and of itself.

Tailored Shirts and Lightning Rods

Short Walks

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Sometimes you have to push. Today was one of those days. We had a large, unexpected shift occur today in our company. It’s very heavy and requires much processing.

Then the listing agent on a rehab-loan deal is all but begging me to convince my buyer client to let the seller stay for a few days after closing. This never seems to go well, and the agent took three weeks to contact me about it. Too late. I suggested we hold back $25,000 in escrow and then credit the buyer $300 per day after the weekend if the seller’s not out.

He called back a couple hours later to say that they figured out a way to make it all work and we don’t need to hold back the money.

Sometime in this same time period, my assistant called, frantic, because the final payoff hadn’t been received by the title company on another deal (Nightmare Deal) and the bank wouldn’t release it to anyone other than the seller. Closing is the day after tomorrow.

Mrs. Seller said the mortgage isn’t in her name and they won’t release it to her either. Mr. Seller is traveling for work and I can’t get ahold of him. To make things worse, the HOA contacted the title company in the meantime and told them that the outstanding compliance issue with the unit hadn’t been remedied yet either. Think we’re going to close on Friday?

Stress Fest.

A sense of overwhelm. The company issue is what clouded my thinking and feelings more than anything today. Couple that with new fires on two of these soon-to-be-closed transactions and I wanted to bury my face in a pillow and scream.

I have a new listing that wasn’t supposed to go live for another three weeks, but the sellers let me know they want to go public asap when I saw them the day before yesterday. So, now I’m working until after midnight to get it prepped to push the button tomorrow.

Finally, my other listing is in super rough condition and the showing feedback is indicative of that. New-listing-and-maybe-we-won’t-be-able-to-sell-it fears. Ever get those?

I had dinner with my family and tried not to obsessively think about the work thing. Dinner was good. My wife listened to me while my little children interrupted me repeatedly to talk with her about nothing.

She suggested we go for a walk. Just a short one, knowing that I had a lot of work still to do. It sounded like a refreshing idea after four hours in the car, difficult news, and firefighting the deals.

We walked, and I left my phone at home. My two-year-old son was riding his balance bike, as was my very recently turned four-year-old daughter. Watching them was when I first felt a flicker of a smile on my face. Then I noticed that at one point in the relatively short walk, the tension vanished. It was just gone.

I didn’t will it away. I didn’t figure out the solution to the myriad problems of Day In The Life of a Realtor. I just walked with my little family. And it went away.

I frequently spiral into this overwhelming state. I mean that relatively. A few times a month, probably.

But it’s the kind of thing that happens to a guy like me who’s doing things like these. This work can be really high-stress, and if we don’t find effective ways of dealing with that stress, it will kill us.

It will kill me.

And I know there are more stressful situations to be in. Trust me, I get it.

But it’s all relative to the person experiencing it. I have to take care of myself so I can continue to grow and evolve. That means short walks with my family even when there’s a ton of shit to do.

Short Walks

Pricing

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I’m grateful that I spent a disproportionate amount of time creating CMAs early on. Effective pricing is a skill that I’m really glad to have.

When I was pretty new, I discovered Bold Leads and thought I’d found the holy grail. To be honest, it really didn’t win me that much business, but I was thrilled to be getting in front of sellers in any capacity in my first year. What it did do for me, was it introduced me to the idea of creating CMAs for seller leads which is what got me very engaged in pricing property.1

I read The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch and it blew my fucking mind. I was aware of the notion of 80/20 from Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Workweek which was the first business book I read when I got back from the Marines. Fast forward like seven years and I’m reading Koch. From that book, I began really considering what the most important thing I did was to generate revenue. It was creating these CMAs and getting them into the hands of seller leads. So I doubled and tripled down on it.

This became my primary focus. I was engineering a script for seller leads based on the book Way of the Wolf by Jordan Belfort, laser-focusing in on CMAs and my Bold Leads seller leads, and working diligently every day to become the biggest REAL ESTATE AGENT I COULD.2

Because I was doing those CMAs like my ass was on fire and it was the only way to put it out, I learned a lot about pricing homes in my market — particularly in the average home price range.

I’ve never been a guy to look at the market monitor every day. The little thing that shows you what’s sold, what’s new, what’s under agreement, what’s terminated, etc.3 The best of us look at that once per day and know everything. I admire you and them. My business partner is this way. It’s great.

I’ve always thought it was a bit time-consuming, and maybe I’ve paid the price in terms of effectiveness because of that, but I don’t think I’ve missed much. What I do know, is that pulling comps, making adjustments, using a CMA software4 that makes the whole process streamlined, and doing lots of market analyses and BPOs have made it such that my pricing has rarely been off.5

Some notably successful agents I know will take a listing even if it’s highly overpriced. The logic is to get the price down sufficient to sell the property — even if it takes a while. That’s how I was first brought up.

I believe that this method of listing homes is ineffective. For me, the sellers being pissed off was the thing that made it suck. Something could be said about the ethical quality of the fiduciary who misleads the client into thinking the home is worth more. 6 It’s dishonest. If I’m upfront with them about price, they disagree, I go through my whole process and they still want to list high, we either agree to reduce the price after X days if X activity doesn’t occur, or I don’t take the listing.7 It’s not worth it to me.

Finding a good CMA software that helps to create not only the analysis but also the ancillary documents that make up a killer presentation packet has been essential for me. Just the other day, my business partner said that he now understands why I do full-on CMAs. Because he did (finally) and his soon-to-be clients were impressed as hell. Little do they know that much of that work is done by a computer.8

A lot could be said about making adjustments as well as pricing strategy. I live and work in a market that’s in rural New Hampshire, so I don’t have hundred-unit developments with identical homes throughout. We have to pull comps by knowing which neighborhoods are comparable, which municipalities are comparable, and then what homes are comparable. It’s more complex than what one will typically find in a city and more than in an area with large developments. We have historic homes here that are wildly different. We have acreage to account for. Every market’s different in some ways and similar in others, but it’s just to say that this one takes some attention when comping properties.

In closing, these are the things I did that helped me:

  • Finding a good CMA software
  • Familiarizing myself with how it worked and optimizing it
  • Creating Comparative Market Analyses and Broker Price Opinions for every seller lead I could
  • Generating seller leads to create these reports for
  • Presenting them9

There aren’t many skills I think are more important to a marketer and seller of homes than knowing how to price them.

  1. Another post should be written about the importance of learning contracts. Something I, for some reason, didn’t consider exciting enough to warrant spending my time on when I was newer. But I did create CMAs. I didn’t even need you to respond to me. I was making that thing and first-class mailing it to you. ↩︎
  2. The grandiosity was debilitating. I can recall sometimes feeling so anxious in my first couple of years that I would literally go to my little 800 SF luxury condo and lay on my pleather couch in the middle of the day to try to nap. This can be a hard business. ↩︎
  3. In our MLS, “Hotsheets” are basically the MLS equivalent of a spreadsheet with no photos and I don’t find them to be user-friendly. So, the tool that’s used by many is called Market Monitor. We use Paragon software for MLS. ↩︎
  4. Bold Leads introduced me to Cloud CMA back in 2018 and I’ve used it ever since. ↩︎
  5. I don’t like to take listings for more money than I know they’re worth. I hate it. ↩︎
  6. This was a tactic used to win the listing while competing with other agents. ↩︎
  7. I will walk away from a listing opportunity if the seller won’t come to terms about price or if it’s too far. I don’t like to compete for listings if they’re more than like 30 minutes from my home or office. If I know the person, I will list their house and sell the bajesus out of it. But I don’t want to make the trip unless I know I’m the only one gunning for it. ↩︎
  8. I don’t mean the selection of comps or the adjustments, but the averages and percentages and ratios and then all the extra documents that support the presentation. I spend more time than I probably should analyzing the comps, and I like to make adjustments to the comps in order to really dial in what I believe the list price should be. ↩︎
  9. Mastering the delivery of the presentation came with lots of practice. I took Public Speaking in my time in community college and it helped me a lot with presenting. I don’t look to that and think of the skills I specifically learned, but it popped my cherry a bit more and made it so this thing was just another performance. I have another group that I belong to where I’ve had lots of experience over the years speaking to a room full of people. I recommend it. Toastmasters is something I’ve been recently looking into as well. The CMA is the prop that also guides the presentation and provides cues throughout so you know what to talk about. It’s brilliant really. Use this shit. Most people print comps and wing it every time. Make it a science. ↩︎
Pricing

Reviews

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Several people I know in real estate don’t collect reviews. This is something I learned the importance of early on and made an effort to gather them since. I’m no multi-hundred review Realtor, but I frequently meet new clients primarily because of the reviews that I have displayed on the internet.

Another friend doesn’t like the term “review” and instead prefers to call them “testimonials”. I can understand his reasoning. The word review has a negative connotation to it. I’m not asking people to review me, as though it’s a grading sheet for how I performed, but more so to validate that they had a positive experience.

I still call them reviews. But creating a process around this has made a big difference for me. I tend to meet people who are looking online for a real estate professional in my market. I don’t get everyone, but I often at least get a seat at the table.

I’ve found that a lot of the time these people only interview me, but not always. They’re often people who do not know another real estate professional. This makes them easier to convert to clients. Win for Sam.

The process is simple enough. I used to wait until the deal was over before I would ask for the review. Sometimes I still do (especially with people that I have a strong rapport with) but this is more a point of bad form than it is process.

When it’s optimally executed, I wait for a high point in the transaction. Sometimes for listings, this actually precedes the transaction and is somewhere in the time between taking the listing and getting an acceptable offer. But in either case, I wait for a high point when I’m the obvious hero to them. In that moment of elation, when they’re happier with me than they ever have been or perhaps ever will be again, I ask them if they’d be willing to do me a favor.1

I’ve never had anyone that I asked this say no.2 Usually people are delighted, especially in the elated moment, to agree to do something like this.

So, then what? Hope that they are disciplined and get it done, eventually?

That’s what I used to do. Not always effective. What I’ve found is that most people want to write me a nice review, especially once they’ve learned how helpful it can be for me.3 Sometimes, oftentimes, that’s the problem. They want to write me a nice review. An excellent review. A perfect review.

And so the review never gets written.

This is a human problem. Being that the content of the review seems to be less important than the quantity of positive reviews, I emphasize this to them as well. I take it a step further and offer to write the review for them, highlighting things that went well, and then encouraging them to edit it to their liking and just to use it as a starting point.

Well, I did that for a while, but then I took it a step further. I just wrote it, and sent it to them along with a direct link to my Google Business Reviews where they would then just have to paste it and click once for it to be complete—if they wanted. I do this all through text messages or emails if I have to. Texts are optimal because I can share the language and the link and they can do it quickly. Of course, they are welcome to just use it as a starting point if they want to write me a review of their own, but I’ve found that most people are content with the review I write so long as it’s honest and well-written. They’d rather not spend more time on this than needed, their ambitions about writing an excellent review notwithstanding.

Only one person has written a review altogether different than the one I provided them. As it turns out, I’m quite a bit better than the average consumer at writing a review for a real estate professional!4 I know which things to emphasize and am able to remember the points of the transaction that they may have forgotten. It all gets packed into the review. If it’s a high-priced property, or a transaction type that fits some marketing funnel I have, I accentuate that too so I can add it to those marketing funnels and channels. This will speak more specifically to prospective clients that fit those price points or demographics or stages of life. Did I get chosen over a well-respected Realtor in the market? It’s going in there. I wouldn’t name their name, but you better believe I’m writing it.

It works really well. I don’t feel shameful or unethical about it either. The client approves the language and posts it. That’s what’s important.

Some platforms have been easier to get reviews on than others.5 Zillow used to be a crapshoot. It might get published, but it might not. They would make the consumer click more times and go through more hoops. And it wasn’t always immediate. Bad enough I have to ask these people to do this shit. Worse still, when they do it and it doesn’t publish for unknown reasons, I have to politely ask them to do it again.

These reviews are money—they matter. But the client only cares a little about doing me a favor. After all, they’re paying for my service. “Raving fans” or not, the less friction I create by asking them for anything other than the order, the better.

In closing, I’ll add that it’s important to own the reviews as business assets. Keeping them published on these third-party sites (Zillow, Realtor, Trulia, Google) is good, but copy and paste them into a Word file and/or onto your website. If for any reason any of those companies dies, goes away, glitches out, deletes your shit, locks you out, etc., etc., etc., you are without those reviews. They own them, not you. Take it from me. I’m one of many people who were subject to a phishing scam where some jerkoff somewhere hacked into my Facebook profile and began posting obscene videos. Within seconds, Facebook locked my account. It was subsequently deleted and there was no recourse I could take. That was a kick in the balls for a guy with 2500 Facebook “friends” where I would post every new listing and sale. I still have some work to do around this gathering all mine into a file and republishing on my websites, and so I’m telling myself this as much as I’m writing it for others here.

So, go get those reviews! It doesn’t have to be a terribly uncomfortable act to ask someone. Wait for the high moment, ask them to do you a favor (after you’ve just made their day), and write up a scripted text that you send after they agree explaining that your business is dependent on people like them leaving positive feedback for other people thinking about doing business with you in the future. If they agree to write a review, then send them another scripted text explaining that in your experience, oftentimes clients want to write the perfect review, and so it never gets written. Because of that, you took a couple minutes to put together this quick review for them to use or not. They can use it as a starting point or just copy and paste it if it’s easier for them. Then send the direct link to whatever platforms you prefer if they agree. Follow up as needed if needed and be politely persistent.

  1. The closing is not always the high point. In fact, it’s usually not. It’s also awkward to ask for it because, at least for me, it feels way more forced and like they’re expecting me to ask them for a review before/during/after the closing. I think the client sometimes feels they’ve done me a favor when we’re at the closing because they’ve acknowledged once if not more times very recently just how much money my services cost them. ↩︎
  2. I don’t typically ask people for a review if the relationship feels strained for any reason or if something went poorly through the transaction. Call that what you want, but I’m actually not interested in people leaving me a negative review on the internet. ↩︎
  3. I explain to them that this is how many people either find me online or “interview” me before they reach out at all, both of which are true. ↩︎
  4. It’s important not to write it in Realtor jargon though. You’re playing the consumer here, so don’t say deal, double-side/double-end, over ask, DOM, or any of this other nonsense language we squawk to each other. The consumer doesn’t have a goddamn clue what any of that means, for one, and for two, they’ll likely intuit that it wasn’t their fellow consumer that wrote it. ↩︎
  5. I’ve found Google My Business (GMB) to be the easiest to work with. I have some on Realtor.com, more on Zillow.com, and most on GMB. I think I’m going to begin trying to get more on Zillow again but will prompt clients with both links and will not ask. The instructions will be to post them here and here, not one or the other. Ask for what you want, don’t hope for shit. ↩︎
Reviews

Colleagues

samuelabbottiii, , , , Leave a comment

Feels good referring to your coworker as your “colleague”, eh? Did for me. I came from a background between the Marines, factory work, and the culinary industry. In none of those situations did I have colleagues.

In real estate, it can be tempting to be a solo agent and do your own thing. Most companies don’t have tons of support and comradery built into them, and you can pretty quickly and easily find yourself not really spending time with anyone in the business other than your own clients.

It’s been important for me to have people that I was close with. I have a business partner now who’s somebody that I’ve known for about ten years — prior to either of us getting licensed. We’re close. We were close before we worked together in the partnership, and even before we worked together in the same company.

If I had a stupid question early on, I would call him. Sometimes he asks me about things that I’m more adept at than he is. I pay attention to and admire the way he handles certain social situations. We feed off of each other.

There are a couple other colleagues and former colleagues we have and we’ll reach out to each other when one of us has a question or if we’re looking for buyers for a listing or a listing for a buyer or whatever. Having people that you’re close enough within the industry goes a long way to making this game seem less lonely, and it contributes positively to one’s success.

I’m not as interested in giving 30% of my commission to a company so I can have weekly office meetings and rah-rah get-togethers. If that’s where you’re at or what you prefer, more power to you. My point is that even if you’re in a low-touch firm without much support or face time with colleagues, creating a circle of people that you can (mostly) trust makes a difference in your ability to thrive in real estate brokerage.

While it may be possible to be successful and do it alone without other agents, it’s going to be easier and more enjoyable to do it with other agents. And that’s coming from the guy who’s never attended a Christmas party at my local Realtor board since ever. They’re still my competition, but having a few close ones that are good is important, and then I smile and nod at the rest.

Colleagues