Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire - Getting Listings

Getting Listings

Let’s face it. In order to sell a property, you must first list it so that you (or anyone else) can sell it. Listings are after all, the core of the business. The question is: how do you get listings?

I’ve got to say there are a million ways to do this, most of which are never used. For starters, most real estate sales people are not really sales people to begin with. They are hard wired for rejection. If someone seems willing to do business with them, they automatically get suspicious. I think the business of direct sales is a foreign concept to most sales people that is difficult to grasp.

I remember once when our company closed our office and moved us to another in a consolidation move, several agents in the office we moved to quit the business altogether, citing a lack of referrals coming into their office and how would they make a living now? These were not sales people. They were sales clerks and didn’t know the difference. That’s the thing. Direct sales are a whole different category. You need an entirely different mindset for that.

I remember the old Xerox course in direct sales that was so simple it was understandable by most everyone. It said (more or less) to paraphrase; find (or establish) a need and present your product to fill that need, answer any objections until the need is met; ask for the order. Well it went something like that.

There was another course called the Spech sales course for real estate. It was also an excellent course in having the (potential) client participate in establishing a price for the property. I used its philosophy quite successfully in my marketing technique. On Dwight Whalley though, it had the opposite effect. He was a friendly, gregarious fellow whose personality invited friendship. Dwight was literally making an excellent living selling real estate with never much of a problem. But once he got into this method, his sales began to slow down to the point he wasn’t making any sales at all. Finally desperate, Dwight went back to his old ways and business picked up for him.

The point of the whole story is that not everything works for everyone. You have to take what matches your personality and go with that. Not even drumming into our heads that in cold calling we needed to call, make the appointment and get off the phone got through our heads (well not all of us anyway). It seems the blockage occurred in identifying oneself as a real estate agent and the perceived tirade of abuse that was sure to follow from the person on the other end of the phone. Well it was a time when lawyers, used car salesmen, and real estate salesmen were all the butt of many jokes. Agents would identify themselves in the strangest of ways to avoid saying “real estate agent”. Some would be “doing a survey”, others would be selling insurance, etc. – anything but looking for real estate business.  Then, if they didn’t get their ears burned off from the other end, they would begin to talk to the potential customer and blow their whole cover.

We had one agent in our office who I think I’ve told you about before who had mastered the art of getting appointments. He was indeed an experienced agent who would go around the office asking people how many appointments/listings they wanted.  Of course, everyone was happy to get a listing or to and would be happy to pay a referral on the sale of a property.

“Listen,” he would say in response to a tirade about real estate agents. “I’m with you sir/madam. I just hate them crooks. I’m an agent myself and I have no end of trouble with them. They drive me nuts!”

First thing you know he’s got the party on the other end agreeing with him. “Tell you what,” he says. “I’ve got some good people I trust working with me. I’ll send Mrs. Palmer over to give you an evaluation of your home. No, no, there’s no cost or obligation. But I’m sure you’d like to know what your home is worth.”

Of course they would. Who wouldn’t like to know what their home is worth? “Is tomorrow evening good for you – say 7:00 p.m. or should we make it 8:00?”

“No, seven is fine”.

“Mrs. Palmer will be there.” He hung up the phone and went on to the next.

The thing was that he wasn’t ashamed to be a real estate agent at all. He was rather proud of it in fact. In the course of the evening he had racked up thirteen appointments, with a referral of ten percent on each sold listing. Not bad for sitting on the phone enjoying yourself for a few hours.

So there you have it. You need to be proud of what you do to do it well. It works.

Liar, Liar,Pants on Fire - Purely a Business Venture

Purely a Business Venture

I don’t really know where to begin this story because it really comes in two parts. No, not two parts but probably four or five. Life cannot ever be simple it seems. It started off with our company hiring a Mrs. Park, a somewhat controversial commercial agent. Not that she was so controversial but rather she marched to her own drummer and had difficulty with Real Estate rules in Canada. I spent a lot of time sorting out her real estate problems during the course of her business. She somehow couldn’t get the hang of doing business in Canada, more or less following her Korean ideas.

Her husband was an entrepreneur, buying and selling things between Korea and here and he seemed like a personable fellow. We first got involved in a meat plant I had for sale in Killarney. It didn’t work out in this case because the plant was only provincially licensed and in order to export one needed a federal approval.

Well we got to talking on the way back and I discovered that Peter had apparently escaped from North Korea and had come to Canada. While here he had written a book on martial arts of some sorts. He had opened a grocery store which had been highly successful and had become an elder in the Korean United Church. He had also been an elder and advisor in the Korean community. Something happened to his business and he had to sell the store, causing a diminishing “respect” in the community for him, but somehow he prevailed and exercised a still formidable respect in his community.

All of this is a pretext to the story I want to tell. I had been working with an Indigenous group of artists in connection with a non-profit organization I had founded.  One day I get a phone call from a fellow who said so and so had recommended he speak to me about an animated video project he was trying to get published. He needed me to find him some funding and/or some means of getting it done. Could I please meet with him? Well of course I could! This would be another adventure.

We had to meet at his place since he had everything laid out there. I got to the door at a nice little place in Fort Garry and it was all surprises from here on in. Firstly, a six foot six bodybuilder filled the door frame as he welcomed me in a soft spoken voice as his big hand closed over mine.

Up in the loft of his house there were drawings and notes of all sorts spread out over a variety of tables set up between weight lifting equipment. His day job, or rather night job as it turned out was being a bouncer at a local bar, which then turned a light on in my head. His friend who had referred him to me was also a bouncer (and an artist). I couldn’t figure out how that squared up but paid it no particular mind.

Basically what my new friend had was a whole raft of beautiful and articulate drawings that followed a story line, but he hadn’t got beyond the concept of what he wanted to achieve. There was another thing he wanted to achieve (which didn’t make any sense to me on the surface of things). He wanted the proceeds (or a portion thereof) to go to rescuing the endangered white rhinoceros. That didn’t make any sense to me either until I discovered that the L.A. zoo was working to do just that. Also, Lou Ferigno was in the area and would do a video on the animal. The light went on. My client wanted to meet Ferigno. Well alright then, who was I to argue?

When I told all this to my Korean entrepreneur friend, his eyes just lit up. He could accommodate this. He knew people in Korea who did this sort of thing. He would make a few phone calls and get back to me. I in the meantime got to work to complete a formal business plan including naming all the stakeholders and payment schedule for each.

There are many side stories I could tell about this adventure but the whole thing would become too cumbersome, so I’ll just summarize as best I can. To start with, I completed my business plan for my friend with what information I had and left it with him. Funding was scraped together by my Korean investor for the trip to L.A, and for a trip to Korea to meet the animators which was apparently necessary according to custom. Five days in Korea got the business started and the animators were then to come to Winnipeg to present their story board to my client.

The first thing I know (just before the arrival of the Korean delegation) my investor is driving a brand new Cadillac. Well, he reasoned, you can’t drive around in just any crummy car so he dipped into the budget for that. Another five days went by and I heard from my animator client that he had been approached by my Korean friend to have me removed from the equation. What did he need me for anyway? By eliminating me from the profit picture, he would save a lot of money.

Things went quickly south from there. Apparently the Korean company had been cleaned out (by my investor friend) and they had to go home with their tails between their legs and declare bankruptcy. He in the meantime saw his chances of being a big time movie director slipping away. So he decided to have it out with me and came to my office.

Well, we sat down and began discussing the whole affair. It didn’t go particularly well. Did I get paid for any of my services, he wanted to know. Yes of course I did. That seemed to inflame him. Didn’t I know he had come from North Korea? He had killed a lot of people before and it wouldn’t bother him to put me away too. When I didn’t react to his threat, he decided he had other things to do and left my office.

I don’t think I ever spoke to him after that, but came to a satisfactory conclusion with my animator friend. In fact, he sent me the most hilarious copy of the tape with Lou Ferigno trying to get that stupid rhino to co-operate while he was speaking. That in itself was reward enough.

I didn’t much stay in touch with the animator/bouncer after that. His father had recently died and left the family in somewhat of an uproar. I did speak to his mother though a few times on advice about their real estate, but slowly that all petered out and I went on with my business.

Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire - The Broker

The Broker

Sometimes I think the job of being the broker in a real estate organization is directly proportionate in size and importance to the number of agents in his office when it comes to solving problems. An agent, for example will have a question, any sort of question or problem, he comes to the broker for advice. The broker of course has to know all the answers, based on the rules of the game, and advises accordingly. It’s pretty impressive; almost like a tribal chief.

But that only holds good in a very small brokerage. As the company grows and takes on more agents, a surprising phenomenon arises. Of course you have agents who are new to the business and then you have others who have been around for a while and joined our company for their own reasons.

Normally my advice was not overly encouraging, but it was fact based according to the rules set out by the board and/or the securities commission. I didn’t often get into moral issues since that was another subject entirely and I generally kept my own counsel.

It wasn’t long before I began to notice complaints crossing my desk over things happening against the advice I had given. What the . . . . ? Was I losing my mind or were the agents just not listening? It turns out they were listening alright, but just not to me. What they would do is go around the office describing their particular situation to various other agents, all of whom had different opinions, and then pick the one they liked best, and act on that one. That usually ended them up in the kind of difficulty I had predicted in the first place. Well, it did provide work for a broker to iron out all the wrinkles in a crumpled agent’s life.

As our company grew, so did the number of agents who were disgruntled with the owner of the company. Well, he was getting on a bit and they wanted to take the company in a new direction, so negotiations got under way and seven of them bought him out. Can you imagine seven owners of the sort I just described owning a company? It was sheer pandemonium.

I wasn’t part of the partnership, not that it wasn’t offered, but seeing that I was the broker and I was needed, that was good enough for me. I wasn’t going anywhere anyway so we were all more or less well satisfied. The first thing the new company did was take on the Sutton Group franchise which was probably the best thing that ever happened. No, that’s not true. The best thing they ever did was to hire Roberta as office manager. She came to us in an opportunity resulting from mismanagement of a local Remax office. Well, their loss, our gain.

The partners meetings were loud and boisterous. There wasn’t a wall flower in the bunch. But with all the diverging opinions, it wasn’t long before the partners fell off one by one. It wasn’t so much the different opinions as it was the expense of the company. It wasn’t long before there were only two partners left. Nobody left the company but five of the partners just didn’t have the wherewithal to foot the bill. We were growing into a family of sorts.

One of the partners decided that he should become a broker so that we could open a second office as per his agreement with the franchisor. These were rather uncertain and tough times for the company, what with meeting the daily bills, looking for a new office, recruiting new agents and so on.

I was involved in very little of this except as an outside observer, just doing my job as a broker and taking in all the machinations of the company. I’m going to tell you that once Roberta got her hand on the tiller, it wasn’t long before the company started moving forward. Of course there were discussions, disagreements, insults and threats, but she prevailed and slowly it all came together. I have to say I understood all these things and Roberta’s approach to them. I have two daughters who have exactly the same personality, whom I admire tremendously too, but I wouldn’t want to be caught in their crosshairs.

Finally we got another office at the opposite end of town which I was the broker at while Blaine presided over the original office. They sent me about fifteen agents and a sweetheart of an administrator with a part time assistant. It was quite a set up. Every once in a while Blaine would drop in to see how things were going and we’d have a good chin wag.

One day he showed up at our office and was talking to the girls when the assistant administrator complained to him about my wanting things done. She wanted him to speak to me about this attitude of mine. In other words, who did I think I was being so demanding?

Well Blaine, in his inimitable laid back style only chuckled, saying that she must realize that I was the boss (broker) here and could easily fire her if her work wasn’t up to snuff. Apparently her eyes widened somewhat and she busied herself doing what I had asked in the first place. Nothing more was said. I only mention that last bit as a point of amusement in the many adventures we had together, especially at the North Kildonan office.

I still go in once a year to look in on my real estate family, pretending to be on inspection. Judging by the hugs I get, I think I am well remembered and am still part of the family. I guess I had a good time working there.