I was asked recently, what I love about real estate today versus what I loved about it in the past. It’s an interesting question, at least for someone like myself, because I embrace change. I’m okay with it. In fact, change is one of the things that continues to push me forward. In real estate today, the way it’s handled is different, and it’s changing all the time. It seems to me that a week doesn’t go by where there isn’t some announcement for a new piece of technology or the opening of an enormous new company. Take Amazon, for example; they’re jumping into the real estate space, whether it be to try and capture reviews, or catch “leads”, which is all about attention, by the way.
I tell agents I work with or the ones that I coach that there are big companies out there that are trying to capture the attention and trust of our people, the people we know best; I tell them because they need to be mindful of what’s going on, not fearful. I’m personally not concerned about what’s happening. Look, people are going to be buying homes for a long time into the foreseeable future. There will always be the buying and selling of homes. If people are going to be moving up, they’re also going to be moving down, how that process gets done may change year to year or every ten years, but as long as a real estate agent can adapt with change, they’ll be okay.
There was a point many, many years ago that the value of a real estate agent was held in the information, by delivery of information, meaning we exclusively carried the information about how many bedrooms and bathrooms the house had, the square footage and what the asking price was. Then the Internet came along, and, all of a sudden, we weren’t the bearers of the information anymore. Instead, we needed to bring our value someplace else. But I’m down with that. I’m down with my value being connected to my ability to negotiate contracts, or having the ability to foresee potential problems around the corner before they actually happen, and for the ability to market properties, to get people’s homes in front of the most amount of buyers, the interpretation of data, etc. I’m okay with that being what I bring to the table.
If that’s not what I bring to the table ten years from now, then I’ll make sure I bring something else to serve to people, something new and exciting, to help them understand and experience how beautiful home ownership truly can be. I love change, I embrace it, and I love serving people, and that’s something I hope won’t ever change!
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