I just received my copy of the 2008 Annual Member Profile from the National Association of REALTORS. Amazing – just amazing – how many of you aren’t going to be around next year. But this isn’t another requiem for the change-resistant REALTOR. Believe it or not, this posting will explore a simple suggestion that NAR could implement to speed up the housing market recovery. And let’s be clear: Except for places that are still returning to market norms (some people call them “declining or falling” markets) a lot of places in America are bouncing back (or continuing along just nicely) like Des Moines, Austin and Charlotte. So for everywhere else, where the market doldrums are more media hype than market reality, it’s time for REALTORS to stop waiting around for the market to fix the consumer. It’s time to do something about it.
The navel-gazers have been shuffling around whining that the Fed, the market, the interest rates, the consumer, everyone ELSE other than the REALTOR is holding the market back. Using our famous contrarian logic, what do you think we think? Right – maybe it’s time for the REALTOR to heal thyself.
Sales is a perception-driven business. People purchase just about every non-staple good based upon some degree of emotion that can be influenced by sales professionals, marketing and other consumers. Shoppers for new cars are keenly aware of the models their friends just bought last month; and they’ll be hard pressed to overcome their emotions not to try to “keep up with the Joneses” in their purchase, too. Smart marketers play off of this; even smarter sales people leverage this emotional response – if they can learn about it – when working with their prospects.
This isn’t deceptive or sneaky. People buy things on emotion first, reason second. It may not be “right’ but that’s the human consumer for you. Most buyers will tell REALTORS that they want to get a good deal on their home, at the very same time that they are placing bids on homes that are far outside of their reasonable income levels. Sellers always protest at the REALTORS’ commission, arguing for a “deal” and discount, at the same time they are making offers on their next home that are insultingly low or pitiable. Even REALTORS make emotional decisions – such as taking overpriced listings because they “like people” or “want to be helpful” rather than reasonably backing away from the unreasonable seller as if they had seen a ghost. It’s all emotion; and only when sales people understand this can they understand that their job is to help their buyers and sellers “manage” their emotions to find or sell their most personal possession, while at the same time making sound decisions. One sound decision for sellers would be keeping a home off the market if there is no immediate need to sell it today; rather than months of anticipation and anxiety because nobody will make an offer. Another sound decision would be for buyers to start making offers now, before historically low interest rates start to climb. Remember, the Fed held rates steady yesterday. Guess where they are going after the election, to combat inflation? Up.
The media has certainly learned how to manipulate emotions. You would be hard pressed to find one story about any aspect of the housing industry that portrayed the “complete picture” or solid facts. It’s all innuendo, partial sentences, facts out of context and heart wrenching sob stories that cause consumers to become depressed and politicians to become enraged. Along the way, the media is selling like crazy – ads, sponsors, spots, fees – all based upon the fact that they can play the consumer’s emotions like a harp. (The media is just another sales industry these days; journalism is mostly reserved for rare moments on television, web or print – that none of us see because real facts don’t get sponsored by Coca Cola or Ford).
How can REALTORS – and their chief spokespersons, the National Association of REALTORS – win in such a contest? Is there a way that about a million members might be able to capture the attention – and the hearts, if not the minds – of the consumers to tell their side of the story?
Let’s return to the NAR Annual Survey of its Members. Unfortunately, the NAR couldn’t send an email to its members with this kind of information. Most of them only check their email once or twice a day – and while they are all out running around (doing what, exactly…?) only 34% of them have wireless access to email. How about getting the message out to everyone by IM? Naaah…61% of REALTORS report never using Instant Messaging – and another 21% only access it a few times a week or a few times a year.
There is one possibility, though. Apparently some of the REALTORS – somewhere, we aren’t quite sure – have started writing blogs. Now, don’t get too excited – it’s only 3% of all REALTORS who have blogs. But the math works out in a way: 3% of 1 Million REALTORS is a LOT of blogs. Imagine if 30,000 of them channeled a RSS feed from the National Association? I’d bet that very few other organziations have this kind of media reach – even if you get a press release noticed on REUTERS, it’s only going to be distributed once or twice across the news sites. With a NAR RSS feed on 30,000 sites, plus the state and local Association sites and you’ll have a tsunami of traffic.
If the feed changed a couple of times a day – with a short update or new headline – the feeds would cause natural SEO to push the topics to the top of the Googles and Yahoos. Even the major news sites would have to pick up the story – especially because they really don’t do their own research any more but just repeat other people’s pseudo-news and press-releases as if they were real facts. Go one step further, and get someone to translate the NAR messages into a few different languages, and the RSS will skip across the globe, bringing “the rest of the story” to the rest of the world. With so much of the U.S. housing market relying on currency markets and financial tools subject to international economic forces, getting the message to London and Tokyo is as important as Miami and Sacremento.
It’s absolutely incomprehensible that this isn’t already happening. The NAR sends out “weekly news” by email, but I’d put serious chips on the bet that says more “non-REALTORS” get that message than their own members. Here we have a professional trade organization with about a million members, and some 30,000 of them with the skills to push content into the blogosphere every day: Most companies would die for that kind of reach. It’s not even necessary to ask the members to write anything on their own – just get a professional writer in Chicago, who can make sure both sides of the story are being told (oh, heck, how about just the good side for a while?) and send it to the members. They can repost or push the feed without even doing a spell check.
And every day, the blogosphere and media would be hammered with the REALTOR perspective – not just the screaming political hack who never passed economics in high school, or the regulator who just wants more power over the banks, or the parroting tele-journalists who would know a real fact if it jumped off the page, like a rising mortgage rate, and bit them in the nose.
Isn’t that what NAR should be doing? Helping its members help themselves? Other than RPAC – which sadly is necessary to buy off the politicians and keep their pea-brained ideas from turning our sector of the economy into another “health care success story” – NAR should just drop everything else. MLS rules are like writing incantations to try raise the dead; MLS’s are gone – just bury them already. Code of Ethics rewrites aren’t going to help members be more professional if they can’t convince the public to buy homes. Stop looking inside the halls and fixing the plumbing; NAR, look around and figure out how you can use technology and 30,000 of your members (just to start) to tell the story that many people are still successfully selling and buying homes – and your members are the ones who should be saying so!
Filed under: REALTORS | Tagged: Blog, blogging, fed, housing industry, inflation, interest rates, media bias, Member profile, N.A.R., realtor
Good Post, with interesting and practical ideas for using technology to your advantage is a definite plus.This way of marketing is within everyones reach and with thousands of blogs going out a daily, it’s an inexpensive way to get some good exposure for your business.