Discounters Are OK 

July 6, 2006
Collectors Issue #1

Discounters Are OK

I know a lot of people thought I was crazy to leave my job a couple of month´s ago to move to an island 30 miles out in Lake Michigan. Now you must really think I´ve flipped. Too much time out in the hinterlands with wild turkeys perhaps? 

Let me explain why I find that discounters have done some good. First, do I like them? - No! So, what gives? The challenge from discounters is that, as an agent, you really have to prove the value of your service to beat them. As an agent who is truly committed to their real estate career, you have been forced to sharpen the saw, as I think, Steven Covey says. 

If you are one of the agents who wants to handle this market, you have know how to build the value of your service. You should learn how to use statistics to support your worth. Frequent communication with your client is a must. All good things, which many agents had allowed to fall through the cracks in the last few years.

When you are forced to justify your commission to survive, it is amazing how you rediscover all the things that you do. All of a sudden, presentations start to talk about benefits to the seller. Agents are using words like differentiation and concepts like value added. Selling the benefits of staging, marketing, cooperation with other brokers (often overlooked in the fast times of previous years and something most discounters are not good at), and negotiating skills become important factors in your conversations with sellers and buyers.

Dusty old listing presentations are being pulled out and updated. Company programs and their benefits are being rediscovered or in many cases just being discovered for the first time. Even some technology stragglers are coming out of the caves to learn how to compete with discounters who have used technology to pop onto the scene. Speakers, gurus and coaches are everywhere and agents are taking them up on their offers to provide them the skills to survive in a changing market. Did I mention I am coaching and helping agents develop moneymaking web strategies?

Discounters have forced a lot of mediocre agents to look at other avenues of employment. The flood of discounters forces an agent to face the question- Am I worth what I charge? If you can´t compete with the discounters, my advice is to join them or look to a new career. Complaining is not going to make them go away. In fact, they are here to stay.

So say thanks to the discounters for the wake up call. If you haven´t woken up, try some of those things from above. They really work.

Since you need to move into the technology era, I´m going to give you my monthly tech tip.

Monthly Tech Tip

Have you ever wanted to copy something from the Internet and after you mastered the basic skills of cut, copy and paste- the pasted part has all sorts of boxes or lots of junk you don´t want?

The simple solution to just get the text you want, is to highlight the text you want, click on edit, click on copy then when you have found the place you want to paste, click edit again and instead of clicking on paste click, on Paste Special, choose unformatted text and click OK. You just get text. Try it. This tip may have saved my hair had I learned it earlier.