Real Estate in the Country -- or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Competition

I had an interesting conversation with someone today in our beautiful town. I was at an unnamed restaurant waiting for one of the four best sandwiches you can get in town (I'll let you make your own assumptions on the locale). The person in question said that he knew someone who was selling their house, and that he thinks that he is listing it with one of my fellow agents in town.

Note - This conversation happens DAILY for us. There are something like one hundred real estate licenses in Young County, although only 1/3 of those people who hold licenses are actually active. Chances are in such a small community that we are all going to know someone who lists their house with someone else. I digress and continue...

This person, (let's call him "Yim" for ease of use), tells me that he was sorry and that he didn't know why his friend picked this particular real estate professional to help him sell his house other than the fact that he bought the house from this agent and felt "guilty". With a shrug of his shoulders, Yim gave me a sideways headbob like he was giving me sympathy for a dead relative.

One of the first lessons I've learned in this town since I moved here four years ago is this: Things move very slowly here, and if you try to speed things up you'll just end up wasting your time and waiting on other people who refuse to speed up. I think that's partly true...if you move to a new town (or a new industry, new club, whatever) and you immediately try to change the ways of procedure or how they do things, you are going to either fail or die trying. Selling real estate here is no different...people buy from people, and in a community where we know so many different people and our relationship lines tend to blur from agent to agent, it is really easy to do what everyone else in town is doing in order to not rock the boat.

But there's nothing that says that we can't do what everyone else does in addition to a few good practices of our own. Good business practices that are "closest to the dollar" activities and things that move each transaction to a close as quickly as possible. At Weatherbee Real Estate, we are doing that. We are working together to add new activities to our daily lives to increase exposure to new potential buyers, spending time investigating new technology in order to find a bigger audience of home buyers, and taking the time to reach out to our community proactively to invite homeowners to our office to talk to one of us about their future plans, their economic goals (as it pertains to their home investment), and where they would like to see themselves in 20 years.

Back to Yim...

It's hard sometimes to hear that there's a place on the lake where fish are biting, but that there's already a fisherman with his line in the water. I assured Yim that the agent in question was a very solid professional that represented our industry well, and that I wished his friend the best and that if, by some odd chance, things aren't a good fit in the relationship with the other agent to give us a call and see if we might be a better fit.

If we keep this sort of mentality, it will help all of us. Maybe if we're lucky, these new inventive ideas for how we go about our business might catch on and in five years someone new to the market and/or industry can write a blog about some new idea on how to make things better. Either way, we're all in this together and it's best when we can work together.

M