A short monologue by a real estate professional arguing that deliberate, timed gifting throughout the client transaction (from signing the listing to closing and periodic VIP touches) builds stronger relationships and produces high referral returns. The speaker cites Giftology and Cialdini's Reciprocity to explain the psychology, reports a roughly 20x return on gifting spend in past-client referrals and that gifting drives about 40% of their business, and positions gifting as a moat against tech disruption.
Should you or should you not give a gift at closing to your clients? I have come full circle on this one. In my early days in real estate, I thought it was actually ridiculous to give a gift to a client at closing. I didn't see any other businesses where, you know, like your accountant, they get paid once a year to prepare your taxes and like, you get a gift for it. It's such a weird concept. And then I read a book called Giftology and there is like science around the process of gifting. Now we actually integrate gift gifting into multiple parts of our transaction. Our goal is that within the client care part of our transaction. So let's say you sign new seller, sign the listing agreement even before we start the gifting process. So we send brownies. The best brownies you have ever tasted in your life arrive at that seller's house before you get there, whether or not they do business with you. And then we have a series of gifts that come out at each milestone in the transaction. And then at closing, there's an even bigger gift. And then once a quarter, we send gifts to our VIP clients and the amount of money we spend in a real estate transaction on gifting. And then in a year with our past client database, easily a 20x return in terms of the amount of referrals that come back. There's a book by Robert Cialdini called Influence, and one of the chapters in the book, it's called Reciprocity. And they have like simple studies around, like, if I give you something, how likely are you to return the favor or give me something in return? So this process of gifting, even something as simple as sending sending brownies to a seller's home before you get there, it has them feeling like they need to pay you back. Even it's if it's on like a total subconscious level. So I've really come around on this one where I thought it was just ridiculous, like I'm going to show up to closing with a basket of food and cheese. But we blow away our clients with gifts and we're able to generate like 40% of our business at scale, hundreds of transactions per year from our database touch system, where a segment of our database has these gifts that come out on a regular basis. So, big fan of gifting as part of a service business, and especially in a world of AI and tech and all of that stuff potentially disrupting our industry, the only way to build a moat around any local service business, it's the deep relationships you build with your clients. And part of that is just giving gifts. People love gifts.
