Leigh Thomas Brown says real estate agents lose clients by ignoring calls, using free email, and building weak websites. Study how consumer portals work, then beat them by doing what AI can't: build real relationships and show empathy when someone's buying a home.
And how about the online portals? Well, in our bank of bad habits, we are not customer-friendly. You know this. It's difficult to get you on the phone because you were afraid to answer it because you didn't know the phone number and thought it was a spam call. That's a terrible habit, not answering your phone when you're in a relationship business. And then you're thinking, well, my website's not as good as theirs. Okay, it's probably not going to be. They have bazillions of venture capital hedge fund dollars that you don't have access to. You need to let go of that and realize your website is mainly an online business card so that somebody can look you up and figure out if you are in this for the long haul or if you are a fly-by-night, flash-in-the-pan person. You know how I can tell you're a fly-by-night, flash-in-the-pan? Your email ends in @gmail, @yahoo, and God love it, @aol. At least commit enough to get a real domain behind your real estate business or your mortgage business, friends. And no slam on the free accounts, but you can't also tell me you wish you had privacy and give everything up to the portals. Come on now. So look at those websites. If you want to overcome this piece of the bank of bad habits, which is understanding that you need to be more customer-friendly, go online, look for your own house on all those portals, and you'll realize why consumers like those websites. They're very intuitive, very easy to cruise around and get bits of information. You're not going to get the whole picture there, but you'll get some bits. This is why real estate has been so hard to interrupt with the internet. And it's why mortgage is also hard to interrupt. It's because these look like commodity purchases. A house looks like a commoditized item because it is a tangible asset. But there's a piece that is not commoditizable. And that's the emotion involved in real estate, which is why you, who are not AI, not a portal, and not every other agent in town, you have your own specific relationships. You're the one that knows how to talk to people and help them understand the pros and cons.
