Posts by "Jonathan Dalton" http://www.allphoenixrealestate.com Jonathan Dalton is a REALTOR® with Thompson's Realty in Peoria and a 30-plus-year resident of the Valley of the Sun. He's the author of AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, RealEstate1point5.com and plays second fiddle in his own home to Tobey the Beagle.

A couple of weeks back, the esteemed Dean Ouellette asked on Facebook whether folks were using Gmail or MSN. Being the technological luddite that I can be at times, I asked what the big deal was about Gmail. After all, I had Windows Mail on my laptop, and all was well in the universe.

Granted, if I had to scan something, that file would populate on my desktop, and I’d then have to move it onto the laptop via my home network. And for reasons unknown, I wouldn’t take the laptop off my kitchen table, so I’d have to walk back across the house to get the file and email it to whomever might be waiting for it.

Rube Goldberg had nothing on me, I’ll tell you. But it worked. Or at least, until my laptop hard drive decided it was calling it quits.

Fortunately I had warning, which gave me time to get my email accounts set up on Gmail and to get my data moved over to the desktop. (Which itself had been in the shop two weeks earlier after a virus turned the hard drive into a doorstop. But I digress.)

Like the guy emerging from under the rock in the Geico commercial, I’ve discovered how much easier life is with Gmail. I’m sure I’m not using it to its full capabilities, and I still find the system of folders a bit clunky compared to Windows Mail. Tips always are welcome in that regard.

But if nothing else, being able to access my email from anywhere has been very, very welcome.

Perhaps I should listen to other people a little more often.

Posts by "Jonathan Dalton" http://www.allphoenixrealestate.com Jonathan Dalton is a REALTOR® with Thompson's Realty in Peoria and a 30-plus-year resident of the Valley of the Sun. He's the author of AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, RealEstate1point5.com and plays second fiddle in his own home to Tobey the Beagle.

By nature, I’m a remarkably stubborn person. It’s a trait, sadly, that I see more and more with each passing day in my daughter.

Perhaps it was due to the daily ritual of watching her thinking so hard about how to perform a flip off a diving board that she no longer can do what most kids do for fun, or maybe I’m just becoming mellow in my old age, but I’m coming to realize a lot of the stubbornness had little real point.

And so, with that in mind, I returned to Active Rain last week after a nearly four-year absence.

I already can hear the questions from the cool kids of the re.net … “why would you waste good content there?” … “Isn’t Active Rain for beginners?” … “Didn’t one of their people call you a mean but incredibly accurate name once upon a time?” … “Didn’t you write a post on Agent Genius years ago asking if Active Rain had jumped the shark?”

All are good points but all pale to the larger question that has been in the back of my mind for the past year or so … is there something there that could help my business that I may be missing?

It’s all well and good to have the nature of a critic, to find the flaws in almost anything that comes down the pike, from the latest social media effort that allegedly will revolutionize the business to the utter agony that is this season of “The Bachelorette.” But it’s not necessarily good for business.

If there’s the slightest chance spending a half-hour a day dancing in the rain can improve my online presence, can drive more traffic to my site (even if it’s agent traffic, in Google’s eyes traffic is traffic) and can give me a place to vent in hopes of improving someone’s lot … why wouldn’t I do it?

So, if you happen to have a profile there, don’t look back because something may be gaining on you. And if you don’t, I’ll be happy to send you the invite – oh, and collect 10 percent of whatever points you earn.

In the interim, do your best to not let stubbornness get in the way of your own business success. It’s a lesson well learned.

Posts by "Jonathan Dalton" http://www.allphoenixrealestate.com Jonathan Dalton is a REALTOR® with Thompson's Realty in Peoria and a 30-plus-year resident of the Valley of the Sun. He's the author of AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, RealEstate1point5.com and plays second fiddle in his own home to Tobey the Beagle.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Яick-Harris

In her Inman News column this week, Bernice Ross provided a handful of tips to make marketing more productive in the coming year. One that happened to catch my eye was the idea of becoming a specialist in a particular niche, an effort made remarkably easy by the Internet.

Nothing enables self-invention like the Internet. Back in early 2008, I stopped by a local title company and listened as underemployed agents talked about the influx of Canadian buyers. Yeah, they mused, maybe we ought to look into that a little. Though I don’t know for sure, I almost can assure you they never did a thing. Call it a reading of the collective vibe.

At the time, I’d already been working the Canadian market for nearly a year. And when I started, what did I know about Canadian buyers?

Nothing.

But I put in the time, learned the particulars of a transaction involving foreign nationals, picked up a little Canadian English here and there, learned to take my shoes off and, most importantly, wrote on my blog about issues of interest to Canadian buyers. Expertise was established before I necessarily had it, and off I went.

As Dr. Frank’n'Furter said, “Don’t Dream It. Be It.” Other agents were busy dreaming about working with Canadian buyers. I already had decided that I would work with Canadian buyers. And so I did.

You have the opportunity, with your online presence, to create the real estate career you want in the niche you prefer. It will not be easy. It likely will not happen quickly. Hard work, education and continuing expansion of your knowledge base are a must.

That change begins with a dream, but that dream has to become reality and quickly. Only then can you succeed.

Don’t Dream It. Be It.

It works. Even without the fishnet stockings.

Posts by "Jonathan Dalton" http://www.allphoenixrealestate.com Jonathan Dalton is a REALTOR® with Thompson's Realty in Peoria and a 30-plus-year resident of the Valley of the Sun. He's the author of AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, RealEstate1point5.com and plays second fiddle in his own home to Tobey the Beagle.

Ebby

On a sunny, hot day in June 1991, I walked to the office of my apartment complex and heard a meow. Looking down, there was a kitten sitting under a bush staring up at me. I’d never been a fan of cats, but living alone for the first time, I’d semi-adopted a stray so that I’d have a little company. I asked the office who she belonged to and they said, “you.” She’d been abandoned just that morning, and they had hoped someone would step in.

I was Ebby’s huckleberry. She was wonderful. She waited in the window for me to come home, came out of the window when I woke up to give me a kiss good morning. We had our issues, such as the 3:00am yarn rolling, but those were minor hiccups.

Here’s the thing, though… When I carried her into my apartment, I really had no idea how long cats could live. No one told me that I would have her through three presidential administrations, seven different apartments and houses, two marriages or the birth of my first child. In fact, she and I were together longer than my first wife and I — from dating to divorce.

Marriage is a commitment, but owning a cat, that’s Commitment with a capital “C”, my friends.

All of that ended when she passed away of renal failure three years ago. My second cat, who I adopted a year after Ebby, passed away of the same illness a year later. Seventeen years between the two; both were 16 years old when I had to have them put to sleep.

Just like I was woefully uninformed about the life span of felines when I let Ebby into my life, I was equally unaware of the eternal aspect of the real estate blog when I created my first on RealTown. (After six months, I moved onto WordPress where I’ve been for the last four full years.)

Every day I wake up and the blog is waiting for me, expectant as a pet waiting for food, waiting for me to add another blog post to the archives.

After nearly 2,000 posts, though, I’m all but written out. The logic of explaining to buyers how to purchase real estate finally has escaped me, if only because I don’t want them to purchase on their own using what I explained. I want them to work with me.

Experts have emerged like weeds after our winter rains, telling anyone who will listen exactly how to write blog posts, how to get the most SEO bang for the buck with packed keywords, how to take advantage of unique concepts such as “365 Things to Do in xxx” – a year’s supply of blog fodder based on what can be done in your city. Somewhere, I’m sure there’s an agent mulling “365 Things to Do in Ajo,” which will be the sign the concept has not just jumped the shark but tagged the shark and made a documentary for Shark Week about the thing.

Truth be told, I don’t get a ton of business off my blog. Compared side to side, my static neighborhood sites generate more contact per visit than the blog ever has. Maybe I’m not writing enough about the community rummage sale. Who knows? Whatever the cause, the reality is if I’d known at the beginning the level of commitment needed to make a blog work, I probably never would have started.

The same could be said about my nearly two decades with Ebby and Griff. (And probably my kids, but that’s another story.)

Then again, my life wouldn’t have been the same without them (cats, kids, wives and beagles inclusive). And my career wouldn’t have been the same without the blog, not because of the business generated but because of the connections inside and outside real estate.

Maybe you’re debating whether to start a blog and wondering if it’s worth the effort. I’m here to say it is, as long as you’re aware of one basic reality… you’re in this for the long haul, possibly longer than you ever imagined.

Posts by "Jonathan Dalton" http://www.allphoenixrealestate.com Jonathan Dalton is a REALTOR® with Thompson's Realty in Peoria and a 30-plus-year resident of the Valley of the Sun. He's the author of AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, RealEstate1point5.com and plays second fiddle in his own home to Tobey the Beagle.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Symic

Allow me to share with you a lesson learned while writing for the Arizona Capitol Times and reinforced during my four years as a manager at Charles Schwab – there is nothing that takes more effort and is less productive than busy work.

When I was at the Capitol Times, I had this very nasty habit of writing as much or more copy than anyone else on the staff and doing it in a fraction of the time others needed. My writing style, developed as a sportswriter on deadline at the Mesa Tribune and honed as a freelance writer with the Associated Press, was and is a basic, top-down approach – start at the beginning, keep going to the end, don’t look back because the first attempt’s almost always the best.

It’s quick. It’s efficient. And when you’re working at a weekly newspaper where you have 40 hours to fill and need only a handful of hours to write, it’s useless. Protocol dictated you spend the rest of the time shuffling paper from one place to another.

Fast forward five years and a career change later when I became a manager at Schwab, responsible for managing a dozen or so brokers in a call-center environment. There were calls to monitor and higher-ups’ tuchases to kiss and pretty Excel spreadsheets to make in multiple colors, easy for the disciples of the Peter Principle to digest … and that took far less than 40 hours a week.

And so I started surfing the Internet. Within a week, I found myself asking a more experienced manager what to do when I had reached the end of the World Wide Web. “Turn around and start all over again,” he said. “It’s all you can do.”

One of the incredible advantages of working for one’s self is there are no set hours and, if you’re smart, no need for busy work. But it’s inevitable that when the pressure to remember the feel of a commission check builds, even the smartest agent will start to shuffle some paper in an attempt to feel busy.

How do you avoid the busy work? By being actually busy, of course. But here’s the catch – you can be busy and doing all that your broker tells you to do and still not be productive. In fact, you can be spending time on appointments and clients and still waste countless hours that could be spent doing something more productive, that ever-present concept of prospecting.

Let me take you back to November 2007, my penultimate month at Century 21 Arizona Foothills. I spent the better part of three weeks that month showing properties to Canadian clients, visiting homes in such number that I became fond of saying that our Canadian brethren love looking at homes and sometimes they’ll even buy one. And for all that work, I closed one escrow.

Nearly a half-dozen different clients, countless homes, endless gasoline … one closed escrow.

Looking back, it was a tremendous waste of time especially when you consider the time I spent showing homes to clients who were not prepared to buy could have been spent developing relationships with clients who really did want to buy.

Fast forward to this year and I can count on one hand the number of buyers to whom I’ve shown homes who have not purchased, or at least written a viable contract. I can count on one finger the number of escrows opened that failed to close (scratch the main stay, spit three times and spin in a circle.) It’s not that I’ve gotten better as an agent, though I’d like to think I have, but rather that I have become more focused on focusing appropriately on client needs.

In a recent survey of my clients, the phrase “soft sell” came up over and over again. One reason my clients have this impression? Because I will work with them for months (and in some case years) waiting for them to purchase. But, truth be told, I’m not really spending hours on end with clients who aren’t buying in the near term. I need only do what needs be done to make sure their needs are met, if not exceeded.

Of late, Facebook and Twitter have come under fire as the bastion of failing agents. I’m not here to discuss the wonder of Facebook as a prospecting tool, not when I can charge $39.95 to explain in detail complicated concepts such as “Liking” and “Poking” like all the other experts. Truth be told, if you’re spending your time writing a half-dozen or more contracts trying to secure one home for a client or spending days out of your week showing homes and never writing a content, the agent fiddling about talking to folks on Facebook is a step ahead in that at least they didn’t use up any gasoline.

Appointments equal work but don’t always equal productivity. The same goes for writing contracts. You can’t succeed without either appointments or contract writing, but you can fail doing both if you’re not on the right appointments and writing the right contracts. Perhaps you’ll feel better doing it, but you’re going to be just as broke at year’s end.

Posts by "Jonathan Dalton" http://www.allphoenixrealestate.com Jonathan Dalton is a REALTOR® with Thompson's Realty in Peoria and a 30-plus-year resident of the Valley of the Sun. He's the author of AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, RealEstate1point5.com and plays second fiddle in his own home to Tobey the Beagle.

Image courtesy of Flickr user NASA Goddard Photo and Video

HOUSTON: “Eagle, Houston. You’re a go for landing.”

EAGLE: “Houston, Eagle. Roger that. We’re heading for Tranquility Base.”

EAGLE: “Um, Houston?”

HOUSTON: “Go, Eagle.”

EAGLE: “What’s that dark, flat area over there on the left?”

HOUSTON: “Eagle, it’s another ‘sea’. Don’t worry about it, though, Tranquility Base is at your 12 o’clock.”

EAGLE: “Okay … but why aren’t we checking out that other sea?”

HOUSTON: “Because it didn’t meet any of the mission parameters set before you ever launched. It might work for a future mission but it’s not the landing spot for you.”

EAGLE: “Can we go take a look at it anyway?”

HOUSTON: “Eagle, you don’t have the fuel to drift over there and besides, you won’t be able to complete any of your mission objectives there. We already researched this before you left. Focus on the parameters we set – you were at the meetings, after all, and go for Tranquility Base.”

EAGLE: “Gotcha, Houston.”

EAGLE: “Um, Houston?”

HOUSTON: “Dear God. Go, Eagle.”

EAGLE: “There are some interesting looking boulders at our 4 o’clock. Maybe we’ll go check those out.”

HOUSTON: “Look, Eagle. Don’t go looking at the frapping* boulders (*actual Apollo profanity.) Stick to your mission.”

EAGLE: “But Houston, we’re only going to be on the moon a day or two. We owe it to ourselves to make sure we’ve seen all that there is to see while we’re here.”

HOUSTON: “Really? How about you fly onto the other side of the moon and land in a crater, see if you get home.”

EAGLE: “Calm down, Houston.”

HOUSTON: “Then knock it off. We discussed this. You have a specific mission. Focus on that mission. You’re getting distracted by these other things like a 5-year-old soccer player chasing ladybugs. STICK TO THE MISSION!!”

EAGLE: “Okay, Houston. You’re right. We’ll follow the original plan and only look at Tranquility Base since that was the area that met all of our objectives.”

HOUSTON: “Thank you, Eagle.”

EAGLE: “And Houston?”

HOUSTON: “Yes, Eagle?”

EAGLE: “That red dot in the sky … is that Mars?”

* * *

When you’re working with clients, remember that you’re the professional. If you let your client get distracted by every for sale sign they see, how are you ever going to get them to focus on the mission at hand?

Posts by "Jonathan Dalton" http://www.allphoenixrealestate.com Jonathan Dalton is a REALTOR® with Thompson's Realty in Peoria and a 30-plus-year resident of the Valley of the Sun. He's the author of AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, RealEstate1point5.com and plays second fiddle in his own home to Tobey the Beagle.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Empirically Grounded

Some of you may recall the story of Joseph, who dreamed of seven skinny cows and seven fat cows and seven scrawny grain stalks and seven fill grain stalks and divined that Egypt would have seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine.

For contractors, roofers, handymen and the like here in the Phoenix area, these are the days of plenty. In fact, so plentiful is the business courtesy of the hail storm that hit the Valley earlier this month that many roofers, contractors, window companies, etc. can’t keep up with the demand. Sadly, this demand ultimately will lead to the times of famine.

The last thing someone with boarded-up windows wants to hear is that no one is available for a week or more; a homeowner who looks like their roof was borrowed from a house in Perth when Skylab crashed back to Earth and incinerated probably isn’t going to be content to wait a month before getting the damage fixed. When your answering machine specifically says that if you haven’t heard from someone within 24 hours, call back because there have been too many messages to return, consumers will move on.

That’s not so much an issue when there are hellacious hail holes everywhere. But once the business tsunami recedes and these same businessmen are staring low tide in the face – really, how many people do you know re-roofing just for the fun of it? – they’re going to wish they’d had a better service solution in place during the boom times to survive the bust.

It’s no different in real estate. As I’ve written here previously and also on RealEstate1Point5.com, the primary focus of any real estate professional has to be prospecting if they desire any kind of sustainability. There simply are too many agents and too many buyers and sellers who see no difference between you and their cousin’s brother’s son’s girlfriend managing a transaction to sit back and wait for the business to land in your lap.

Most agents realize that. Yet when we get busy what’s the first thing that goes out the window? Prospecting.

“I couldn’t make any calls today, I was showing homes.” “I couldn’t write any notes to past clients, I was on the road.” “My dog ate the napkin upon which I’d written my buyer’s phone number.”

Legitimate, some, yet excuses all. And all ultimately will lead you closer to the end of your real estate career.

No matter how busy you are, it matters not to the person inquiring about buying one home or selling their own. All that matters is that you’re available when they need you. Just like all that matters to a homeowner these days is that someone will be able to take down the plywood covering their windows and restore the glass as it was. And I assure you, the only people the owner will remember longer than the person who fixed the windows are the people who were too busy to simply return a call.

Posts by "Jonathan Dalton" http://www.allphoenixrealestate.com Jonathan Dalton is a REALTOR® with Thompson's Realty in Peoria and a 30-plus-year resident of the Valley of the Sun. He's the author of AllPhoenixRealEstate.com, RealEstate1point5.com and plays second fiddle in his own home to Tobey the Beagle.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Eusebius@Commons

So you’ve earned that real estate license and are in business for yourself. You told your friends and family that you were going to get your license and, amazingly enough, they waited for you and have decided to use you rather than one of the other dozen agents they know. In no time flat, you’ve got a deal in escrow, and all seems well in the universe.

And here’s the point where it’s easiest to lose track of the second part of a real estate professional’s two-pronged job description.

Recently, Rob Hahn (aka the Notorious R.O.B.) asked what a real estate agent’s job should be and even included the definition as provided by Wikipedia, the world’s most reliable almost-reliable source. To paraphrase, a real estate agent’s job was defined as providing the best possible service to his or her clients, whether buyers or sellers.

Pushed aside to some degree was the idea of lead generation, which, truthfully, is the more important part of a real estate agent’s job if they consider themselves to be business owners and are seeking some sustainability.

Whether you knock on doors a la Tom Hopkins or spend your days writing cards and popping by as Brian Buffini tells us, without lead generation your business is not sustainable. Low-hanging fruit only lasts so long; as Adam and Eve discovered, once that fruit has been tasted you soon find yourself in the wilderness trying to survive.

Inevitably, though, lead generation takes a back seat whenever we, as agents, get busy. All it takes is one or two escrows, and the day soon is spent scheduling and attending inspections, visiting title, calling lenders and otherwise managing the transactions using the time that otherwise would be allocated toward following up with potential clients. It’s this tendency toward forgetting the lifeblood of the business, lead generation, that causes agents’ monthly production to whipsaw from feast to famine.

By defining your job as lead generation, or at least recognizing lead generation as the more important portion of a two-part job description, it’s much easier not to lose focus on what will keep you in business beyond the current deal.

Success is not an accident. It takes work. Take low-hanging fruit when you can, but realize someone else put in a lot of work from planting the seed to watering and cultivating the tree from which that fruit came.