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Friday Aftenoon Theme Music: December 14

Jonathan Dalton, Phoenix Real Estate Agent This one’s for you, San Diego, my home for the past three days. Sort of.

After re-watching Anchorman for the 712th time I can’t tell you how much I want to head over to Tino’s to hear Ron Burgundy play jazz flute.

But I can’t. I can’t even throw a burrito at Jack Black on the bridge because the bridge is located in Long Beach. Maybe they didn’t get permission to film on the bridge to Coronado Island.

Speaking of which, that’s the most depressing object in San Diego. Seriously, can we have one more sign providing the number to the suicide hotline and urging us not to jump? Is this a common phenomenon in San Diego - people throwing themselves from the bridge?

In any event, today’s song is connected only because it appears on the soundtrack for Anchorman and at the end of the movie. And it always makes me think of wood paneling and fully mirrored walls like in my parents’ den in Panorama City some 30 years ago.

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Real Estate Agents and the One Out of 15

Jonathan Dalton, Phoenix Real Estate Agent Yesterday I heard this comment made during a convention session on rabbinic review; it seemed equally applicable to the real estate world.

“This is why many choose the rabbinate. It’s like when your child applies to 15 different colleges and gets accepted to 14 out of 15. The one that said no is the one that he’s going to obsess about. It’s our personality type. We’re sensitive to what others are thinking or feeling.”

I’ve lamented about listings lost and wondered what I did wrong that I couldn’t get the seller to see the reality of the market even with all of the data sitting in front of them. I’ve done the same when a buyer has elected to buy through someone else, such as a week ago when a buyer was agent shopping as well as home shopping without disclosing this was their intent until appointments had been set.

Jay Thompson long ago wrote about an expired listing and the sense of failure he felt, not that the listing didn’t sell but that he failed to educate the seller sufficiently to persuade them to put a sellable price on their home.

Steve Belt just the other day wrote about watching a renter go a different direction.

Our success comes not just from our knowledge but our empathy. Few are so distant from their last personal home sale that they forget the emotions involved. And much like the old saying that doctors make the worst patients, real estate agents often are the worst buyers and sellers … especially buyers.

Renowned real estate trainer David Knox says you “must let go” to prevent challenges of the past from impacting the future. It’s easier said than done. After hearing that quote yesterday, now I better understand why.

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Confessions of a One-Trick Pony

Jonathan Dalton, Phoenix Real Estate Agent I’m writing this as I sit at a little desk in my hotel room in San Diego, a couple of blocks from Petco Park and across the street from the convention center.

Not being in Phoenix has little impact on my real estate business, primarily because I’m a one-trick pony. All of my prospecting work is focused on the internet - the blog, my main website, one of my niche websites.

I don’t cold call because I hate being cold called. I don’t knock on doors because I hate being bothered myself. (Don’t expect me to answer my door if I didn’t know you were coming by.) Both of these activities would require me to be in the Phoenix area.

But since I do the bulk of my work electronically, I’m able to sit down in a hotel room 400 miles away from my business base with next-to-no interruption.

I’ve been told many times that perhaps I shouldn’t have all of my eggs in one basket, that I should think about open houses and magazine advertisements and such. I do think about them. And then I stop thinking about them and move on to what I find to be productive.

Tuesday morning I was discussing blogging with several of my peers (I actually was teaching a class, but the first version sounds much less egotistical.) One of the advantages of the blog is the ability to market to niches almost impossible to reach any other way.

For example, I’m Calgary’s best friend for local real estate. I’d post the maps but that’s a little complicated on this tube. But a large portion of my readership and at least 1/3 of my viewers for my Westbrook Village site come from Canada.

Someone once said in a comment that I ought to market to the Calgary area. My response was, “you found this post, didn’t you?”

How else could I possibly market what I do in Canada? Direct mail to oddly-formatted ZIP codes? Newspaper ads? Placing a sign on the side of a moose? None of the traditional methods would work.

This blog does. For my peer who loves her Harley, this is how she can reach fellow riders. Same for the one who’s passion is woodworking. Or those looking to attract the last Californians who haven’t already purchased here.

All of this can be done electronically at a minimum of cost and with small investments in time.

And you don’t even have to be in town to pull it off.

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