Sunday morning coming down

I’m halfway through five weeks of heavy travel. I tried to write my regular Friday post, but was just completely spent.

Flying and talking, flying and talking, flying and talking.

So here it is Sunday morning. I figured I’d share just a few of the things that have popped into my head recently.

What are you thinking about these days?

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A marketing executive at a mortgage company reached out to us last week looking for help. Her current agency was struggling because, to them, her company “Is not ‘sexy’ like some startup”.

B.S.

What could possibly be sexier than helping people achieve homeownership? In what other industry can marketing be as meaningful, the stakes being so high?

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People who compare real estate to other industries miss the point: real estate is incomparable.

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We’re talking to lots of real estate startups lately. So much respect for all of them. The most promising seem to have one or more of these traits:

1. They’re focused on solving existing and routinely felt problems for real estate pros instead of asking them to do something new.
2. They’re not trying to outsmart Zillow.
3. They’re not huffing the fumes coming off the real estate industry’s social media paint can.
   

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The best real estate companies see themselves as marketing companies.

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A few years ago, our friends at Hawaii Life started a conference called Worthshop. Marc has gone every year from the beginning, but I’ve never been able to make it work. I just booked my flights for this year’s event and am stoked to finally be going.

From what I hear it’s good people, good thinking and good energy all the way around. And yeah – it’s in Maui in December. Kind of a no-brainer.

Join me?

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Myra Breckinridge has the best opening sentence of any novel I’ve ever read. So much of marketing is writing; so much of writing is how you start.

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If you want to change the narrative about how homes are marketed and sold, change the listing presentation. It’s the Magna Carta of real estate storytelling.

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Middle age is pretty good so far. I care about less things, more.

This has helped me do better work.

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Maybe we’re missing the point with all this talk about “raising the bar” in real estate. Is it possible that a “good” agent is any agent that makes a particular person, in a particular situation, feel ok about the scary process of buying or selling a home?

The NAR surveys show, after all, that about 90% of people are happy with their agent when it’s all said and done.

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I believe paranoia, for the most part, produces false positives.

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The most recent issue of REALTOR magazine features an article called, “What brokers really think about teams.” It’s a nice piece.

There’s often a host/parasite relationship between brokers and teams. I mean that in a purely descriptive sense. It’s just the way it is a lot of the time.

But what happens if the host (the traditional brokerage) dies at some point? Could it be that we’re on a “back to the future” trajectory that has us headed toward an industry with lots of mom and pop, hang-out-your-shingle micro brokers?

That’s it. Have a good week.