More Than Ever Before

I’m selling my house.

The last time I sold my personal residence and moved was 2006. Remember 2006? In Tucson, we were just cresting off the top of the peak of the bubble. Inventory levels were just starting to rise and home sales prices were starting to level off. My house sold in 10 days for full price and I scoffed at their repair list.

Selling in 2010 is a whole different ballgame. And I know this – I’ve been an agent for 7 years, I’ve seen the shift up and down, walked buyers and sellers through the process. So I knew what to expect: longer time to sell, more buyer demands, lowball offers.

What I didn’t expect was that I am less immune than I thought to the negative messages we are bombarded with by the media, by our friends and neighbors, by our own experiences in the real estate market. What I didn’t expect was the anxiety. The need to reach out to my friends at the office and have them reinforce what I already knew, to run my decisions through an objective filter. How much more so do my clients go through the same experience, the same fears and anxieties?

More than ever before, our role as a trusted advisor to our clients involves managing their anxieties, their stress, their expectations and frustrations.

More than ever before, it is our obligation to keep our clients informed about local market conditions, so that national media outlets don’t supplant our superior local knowledge.

More than ever before, it is our responsibility to stay in touch, to keep informing, to keep assisting and helping our clients to make confident, informed decisions.

And to meet these increased responsibilities, we need the right tools and systems in place to make sure it all gets done, and that it gets done as efficiently as possible.

More than ever before, it’s time to invest in our tools and systems as agents, to seek out new solutions, to challenge ourselves to learn something new so that we can be more effective. To use a transaction management system that works for us, not makes our life harder. To use a contact management system that keeps us in touch with our sphere of influence on a regular basis, not on a random guess at a schedule. To understand our calendars and email and photos on our smartphones. To learn how advanced features in the MLS system can help our clients find the right home and keep our business moving forward.

It’s time to tackle that learning curve, to examine our business and systems and make improvements. It’s a difficult market out there – which means we have the opportunity to address those difficulties, and put systems and tools in place to minimize them.