Humility

Never Judge the Lead

samuelabbottiii, , , , , , , , , Leave a comment


Here’s how I almost threw away a $1,250,000 lead.

The day before yesterday, I showed a $725,000 house to a buyer I connected with through Zillow.

I’ve primarily done referral-based business for the last three years, with some early help from Zillow and Bold Leads. We recently decided to throw some money at Zillow because we’ve heard from so many people (watched so many people) significantly augment their business with it.

That being said, I don’t love it. I get the value, but the forced intro, the expectation that I’m going to get you your appointment in 45 seconds, the expectation of seeing a home together before meeting in person to talk and form a client relationship — these things all go against the grain of what I’ve done for a while.1

So, I got connected with this guy. He seemed a little terse or timid (couldn’t tell) on the phone, but I hung up, scheduled the appointment with the list broker, called him back to confirm, and sent him a subsequent email with the showing packet.

He doesn’t respond to the email… Alright. Whatever.

The next day, I finish a late-morning listing appointment and head to the general area where I’ll meet this guy.2 I have lunch. Then I called to confirm the appointment.3 He doesn’t answer.

At this point, I’m saying f-it and going for it with the hopes that maybe it will all come together. And if not, I’ll autopsy it and get better with my process — especially around these strange leads I’m not used to.4

I pull up. Nice house, amazing view, excellent plot of land. I’m pulling up the long driveway after driving up the long road, and two cars are in the driveway. A man and a woman (the listing broker is a woman), a late-90s drop-top Mercedes SLK, and a black Chrysler 300. Here goes.

Turns out, the Chrysler is here from the owner, and the SLK is the buyers’, and it’s him and his wife. They’re friendly and pleasant. All is good.

The other agent shows up. She’s a stud that’s been doing it for 100 years. She walks us in around up and down and talks the whole time. Little for me to say other than my little noises affirming what she’s saying and occasionally chiming in.

We finish up, say goodbye to the list broker, and go to depart. He thanks me for my time and getting them in there, shakes my hand, and says take care. The wife shakes my hand and says it was nice to meet me.

What would you think or feel when you got into your car and they were already driving away?

Did they really just want to see the house and are otherwise not interested in anything? Did I not say enough, or did I say something wrong or something that bothered them? Did I seem desperate?

Mind you, the showing was positive. All was good, or as good as one could expect, regarding establishing rapport with people you met in the last thirty minutes. But there was no, “We’re going to think it over,” or, “What do you think?” or, “We’re going to chat and let’s touch base later.” I had to insert something to that end and was met with no affirmation in return other than them saying it was nice to meet me.

So, I’m driving away thinking I just wasted a goddamn afternoon on this. Not to mention money and resources.

Something Brian Moses taught me was to never judge the lead. He hammered that, and I didn’t understand it at first. As time has gone on, I’ve grown to understand it more.

I knew these people just fucking blew me off. Still, I persisted.

Internet, or the lack of it available there, was a concern they mentioned. A large one. The wife works from home, and the husband owns a company and needs to be accessible even when he’s not at work.

Best you can do up there is satellite internet. The listing broker texted me later and said she spoke with a neighbor, and they said they had a high-speed provider. I had the thought of suggesting Starlink as well. So, I put together a simple email explaining that I couldn’t verify the availability of the Internet provider online but that they still may be worth a call. I mentioned, too, that Starlink was another option that appeared to be available, and I included screenshots and links and such.

No reply.

At this point, I expected that he wouldn’t reply to the email. I planned to call him yesterday to follow up on it and get some feedback.

That I did. I called him yesterday afternoon before I left with my family for a weekend getaway. No answer.

I left him a voicemail with something to the effect of, “Hey ________, it’s Sam. Give me a call when you get a second? 603-____-_____. Thanks.”

I expected I wouldn’t hear from him.

As we drove north to Lake Winnipesaukee, I got a call back. Spoke with him and he told me that, while the house was interesting and had beautiful views and a nice lot, it needed too much work. He explained some more about his reasoning and told me to let him know if something came up that checked those boxes or if the price on this one trended downward.

Fuck me, right?

It was fine. Everything was fine. But I about talked myself out of wanting to deal with this guy. I had begun to convince myself that he was just a jerk who didn’t care about wasting my time and didn’t even have the respect to call me (or respond to me) to let me know he wasn’t interested.

I was wrong. Never judge the lead. That’s. a $700,000+ buyer lead and a $500,000+ seller lead. That’s a $1,250,000+/- lead!

And I was about to flush it because I judged the lead. Thanks, Brian.5

  1. I’m trying to be open-minded in the interest of generating new business and leaving no lead source unexploited. ↩︎
  2. My immediate marketplace has next-to-no Zillow availability. So, I bought some in a small city about half an hour from my office. Not a place where I love to work, but the only viable option to experiment with Zillow. ↩︎
  3. This is typically not something I do. I want to show up and have them not be there so I can have a justifiable position of what-the-fuck for when we next talk because it puts me in more of a powerful position in the relationship. Unless they’re very callous (or if they just never respond again), they’re typically apologetic and regretful and experience the burden of reciprocity. In this situation, I didn’t want to drive another 20 minutes farther away and have this guy not even be there. Mainly because the showing was assisted, and I’d be wasting the listing broker’s time as well as my own. ↩︎
  4. This is something I’ve decided to do anyway. I need to qualify these buyers on the phone after I make the appointment. I need to develop a list of qualifying questions and run through that every time. They’re not warm, referral-based leads like I’m used to. To them, I’m the equivalent of a telemarketer, somebody who gets them their real estate showing and unlocks the door. ↩︎
  5. This is not an extreme or unusual example. This happens to me fairly often. Sometimes, people don’t fit into the mold of behavior that I expect them to. I trust this will happen less and less as I gain more experience, but it still gets me. How much money have you lost in commission income from judging the lead? ↩︎
Never Judge the Lead

Gross Commission Income as a Yardstick of Success

samuelabbottiii, , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

samuelabbottiii, , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

Tailored Shirts and Lightning Rods

samuelabbottiii, , , , Leave a comment

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