Not Retail

When was the last time you had a friend that worked at Verizon Wireless who went to Facebook and bragged about selling a hundred phones in the past month? Or who mentioned to everyone how many lines of service they had previously activated? It just doesn’t happen. Have you ever heard a car salesman approach you telling you they sold fifty Honda’s in the past month? Again, it doesn’t happen. Why is it, that in the real estate industry, we think that it’s another bragging right we have in having sold another home? Is that not the purpose of real estate, for an agent to assist one in a purchase of a home? We are not retail. Real estate is not retail.

It’s not like a buyer just picks a house off of a shelf. Real estate is about building clientele, building rapport, building trust, building respect, and building a relationship that will compel them to go down this home buying or home selling process with us as their guide. This is absolutely not the same thing as a salesperson working at the Best Buy. It’s just not. Houses are not like appliances and cannot be sold in a likewise manner. Real estate does not work that way. We need to understand when people come to our site although we may tag our site as a retail store, or we might even think of our site as a “store” or “place of business,” that is only a small piece of the whole. If they put their information into a box, we need to have the goods ready and available to capture them and treat them like they want to be treated, not as someone who might wander into any given retail store and decide to purchase any given item.

People may come to your site and shop around for a house, but I cannot stress enough that it is not a retail sales group. We are not in retail! A licensed real estate professional, a licensed sales agent, is not the same as a Verizon or Best Buy employee. So, when people come in and are looking at our information and are looking at our website as we are attracting them in to our space and web presence, we must make sure that we have the content material, that we have the articles, that we have the graphs, that we have all the information available that will induce them to want to stay with and work with our group. When they stay, we treat them with the utmost respect and provide for them all the information that they could possibly need. It simply cannot be compared to a mere transaction of goods.