Unleashing Your Unique Real Estate Superpowers: Stand Out From the Crowd!

How in the world, when there are 1.5 million REALTORS®, how do you set yourself apart from every one of the rest of them? When at the end of the day, we're trying to accomplish the same goal, buying a house, selling a house, renting a house, selling land, businesses, whichever angle of real estate you're in, the end goal is that transfer of ownership. So how do you stand apart? Lucky for you, I've been rambling on about this literally for years. I'm really proud of the fact that my first book from 2016, which I hate to even acknowledge that was 8 years ago, called Outrageous Authenticity, was about this very question. Too often in real estate, when you get your license, you get the same training that everybody else got. Once upon a time, that was a 3-ring binder with a bunch of laminated pages in it, and you got a desk and some business cards, and you were told to call your cousins and go find somebody to buy or sell a house with you. Now, You get the same information, but it's in a PDF or maybe in a one-week online class. And that's great, but it never ever teaches you how to differentiate in the marketplace. And if there's anything we know in 2024 and beyond, we as individual professional REALTORS® are going to have to differentiate in the marketplace. And that's good because we've always been doing different businesses. Every one of us serves a different client group. We serve a different sector of the market and we serve it in our own way. The place to really start with this is figuring out what it is that you do for a living. If there's anything that makes my heart sad, it's how many real estate professionals have a hard time explaining what it is that a REALTOR® does. They start hemming and hawing and say, "Well, I sell houses." Well, do you? Or are you helping somebody else sell their house to capture the equity? Well, they say, "Well, I show houses." Do you? Or could a buyer actually use an app to get into a house? There has to be something more to what you do than just the tasks at hand. And if you've never read Simon Sinek's book, Start With Why, from, I don't know, 15 years ago, high time for you to go read it or read it again if you read it a long time ago, because he breaks down the fact that most people know what they do, but they don't know why they do it. And if there's anything that should differentiate you in the real estate market, it has to go back to why you do real estate. Let's be honest, this is a hard job. This is a job where you could work 16 hours a day and still feel undone. You can call yourself a part-time agent if you're working 40 hours a week, which is crazy, but that's what we do. You might work for months on end and never get compensated. You are doing so much out there with so much risk, and then you get cussed at, yelled at, your family gets abandoned at suppertime because you have to run out and show a house and You've dragged your kids on showings that they didn't want to go on. So if all of those things happen, it's hard. You're not getting paid. You're exhausted. Why are you doing this? And I know why most of y'all do this. I know exactly why, because I've talked to you. I've met you. I've heard your heart. I've heard your pleas. You do this because you have a servant's heart and you love helping other people get what they want. Now, of course, there are some real estate agents that don't give two rips. Luckily for us, they don't tend to carry the message forward for long. Because if you're chasing only money and you're chasing only your own best interest, real estate can eat you up and take you out fairly quickly. The ones that survive long-term, they love serving other people. They listen, they care, they pour themselves into it. So how exactly does this play into that question of how you differentiate in the marketplace? Well, I think it has to do with how you put forth that servant's heart. Are you the person who cries with people and holds their hands and you nurture, nurture, nurture? That is an amazing way to differentiate because there's a huge piece of the public that craves that intimate connection with you. So, if you would talk about that more, talk about the fact that you really enjoy the process and the relationship and the connection and the listening. There's somebody in the public that does not know there's a REALTOR® that operates that way. They only know what they saw on Selling Sunset, and that ain't real. Or they watched HGTV, and for some reason they think that House Hunters is accurate, and in 30 minutes you can look at 3 houses and never have an inspection and appraisal Puzzler survey and you just buy it. And that's not real either. But you who listen, who care, who pour into these relationships in a way that benefits the other person, well, you're real and you're operating every day, but the public doesn't know it. Now, some of you are not that warm and fuzzy, but you still care intently about somebody else's best interest. You show you're caring through checklist and through processes and systems and through your high level of competence and professionalism and the fact that you chase education nonstop. You don't tell the public you do that though. It's kind of crazy. I love it when y'all come sit in a class for 8 hours and you take pages of notes, pictures of slides that you'll never look at again, and you are ready to serve. And then you go back on social media and say, "Oh, I sold a house in 5 minutes." What are you doing? Why aren't you telling people that you're chasing more education? You're chasing this ideal REALTOR® status, and you've got to let people know that that matters to you, that you're focused on systems and organization because there's a consumer for whom that matters. They crave your professional expertise and attention to detail. And let's be honest, in the real estate space, if you have an intense attention to detail, you're probably fairly unique because real estate pros are not known for their attention to detail. They're known for their ability to connect and for their personalities and for their general likability, but they're not known for expertise and organization. So if you have that, talk about it. Now, let's talk about what else you could be doing to differentiate in the marketplace. Maybe you differentiate by the way that you connect to your community. Maybe you're the person who has a heart for the public school system, and so you dial into helping the PTA and you show up to spell the teachers when they have an in-service day to give them lunch, and you're the one that sponsors the 5K fun run to help the school raise money. If that's who you are, You've got to be dialed into what matters to you and your community, because that could differentiate you too. I mean, let's be honest, most of the public thinks that REALTORS® are a bunch of bloodsucking money grubbers, and they don't even think that you're out there giving, giving, giving, when the stat is crazy cool. Did you know it's estimated that 87% of REALTORS® do some kind of volunteering and give back? I mean, if there's anything about our people that's very consistent, We love rolling up our sleeves, volunteering, and giving back. However, there's a disconnect in where that fits into your marketing. Now, the marketing might show up as you make a donation to whatever nonprofit matters to you. I have, as an office, we've done ours for Habitat for Humanity in Cabarrus County for years. We've also done donations to the REALTORS® Relief Foundation, and we let people know that they, by choosing us, are part of something bigger. And if that's you, you've got to figure out how to incorporate that into your messaging, because not every REALTOR® has those same proclivities that you have. And it doesn't mean that you're worse than, because you're not doing all of them, because let's be honest, you can't take care of every charity in town, but you can let people know where you're dialed in. One of the fallacies in real estate marketing is that you have to be the best REALTOR® for everybody. And let me just tell you right now, that's not the case. You don't have to be all things to all people. You don't have to be everybody's choice. How about that? You are running a business and you are going to be the best fit for a lot of people. And for some people, they will say, "No thank you, let me walk on." There are people in my county that don't want to use me. That's okay. If we're not a fit, there are so many other options for them, which is the coolest part of real estate marketing. Because when you know who you are, you also know who does business in a different way than you do. So when you encounter the consumer who wants something different than you provide, you can absolutely give them a recommendation to somebody who will fit their needs better. Because if you have that servant's heart, at the end of the day, what you're looking for is that consumer to be served in the best way possible. So in thinking about this, the differentiation comes in with who you are, how you serve, where you serve, and all of that feeds into your brand. Now, let's talk about what the value is to the consumer. There is a huge value in using a REALTOR®, whether you're selling a house or buying a house. Now, some folks don't recognize that value, don't want that value, and that's okay. They always have the option of striking out on their own, although the statistics don't lie on that one, even though statistics can be made to lie. If you talk to people who have done a buy-owner transaction, most of them wouldn't do it again because they had no idea the intricacies of this huge financial transaction. And why don't they know the intricacies? Mm-hmm. 'Cause y'all don't talk about it very much. You're too busy telling people that you're cute and you're going to make it easy, and you forgot to tell them that what they're hiring in you is not just a servant's heart and a likable friend, but they're hiring somebody who's able to shepherd them through whatever they encounter. And that's where the value lies. The value doesn't lie in what you know, the value lies in how you apply what you know to the situation that's unknown. End of the day, that's what it boils down to. Because every real estate transaction is going to have a hiccup. You just don't know what it is until you're smack in the middle of it. In fact, in real estate, you're going to encounter one perfect transaction in your career. And it's going to be so perfect that you're going to spend all of your time looking over your shoulder wondering what's coming next. When are you going to get contacted by the Real Estate Commission? Because something else must have been unseen, because we're so accustomed to hiccups. And the longer you stay in this business, the more accustomed you get to finding an answer to the hiccup, whether you have the answer or you just know somebody to ask. So what I want you to focus on in 2024 and beyond, if you're in real estate, focus on the fact that you provide something. You might not have ever recognized that you're providing something. You saw yourself as a door unlocker or a putter into the MLS of a listing person. That's not what you do, and that's not what a REALTOR® does. Those are tasks. What the REALTOR® does is help people manage the unexpected problems so that they can get what they want. Now, when you start changing that message up, it's going to change your business. And when that happens, you're going to have the opportunity to serve more people, which is probably going to feed your heart and help you stay in real estate no matter what challenges we have in the market. So hang in there, my friends, and let me know how I can help, because we need good REALTORS® in every zip code. Otherwise, there's a large segment of the public that may never know the American dream. So get after it, because somebody else is waiting to hear from you.