Do you want clients to view you as transactional or relational?

We all know the barriers to entry in our industry are very low. As a result, there are way too many real estate agents.

Furthermore, in this incredibly tight inventory market we have been in of late, I often see 10X – 12X the number of agents to listings. This makes it tough for agents to differentiate themselves if they are doing things the same way they have in the past.

You must get consumers to view you and your agents through a different lens.

We can’t get around the fact that most real estate salespeople are straight commission, independent contractors. That’s not going to change any time soon.

Time is money.

Too many agents act in a “transactional” manner versus taking the time and making the effort to be trusted advisors who are just as interested in the long-term relationship as they are in getting the listing or making the sale today.

What’s worse, it often shows and it’s why, as an industry, we don’t have the best reputation.

When a consumer engages a real estate agent, they have certain expectations.

Why should those expectations differ at any point along the home ownership lifecycle? Why do most agents only care about this dynamic when they smell a commission?

Besides the financial ramifications of the time it takes to deliver the level of service a consumer expects, there is also the challenge of way too much inefficiency when it comes to agents and the technology they use to try and deliver on these expectations.

Let’s take the CMA process as an example… it has not changed in 25-30 years!

Sure, there are very good CMA tools but, at the end of the day, they are still, mostly, manual and require an agent to spend 30 – 45 minutes, or longer, coming up with comps, a pricing estimate, and the corresponding report.

As I said earlier, “time is money”.

Most agents cannot, and will not, justify, even 30 minutes to do a CMA, unless someone is ready to act today.

What about everyone else?

This is why many agents are much more transactionally focused versus long-term relationship focused. And why there is such an amazing opportunity for those agents that take the long-term relationship approach.

Earlier this year, we partnered with the Residential Real Estate Council to survey their membership on how long it takes to do legacy CMAs. One of the questions in our survey asked if an agent would do more pricing estimates if it took less time.

Almost 60% of respondents said they would do more pricing estimates if it were easier, took less time, and didn't involve having to access multiple platforms to put their report together!

By engaging consumers with real data about their single largest investment these agents know they will stand out. These same agents also know that doing pricing estimates only for sellers is a mistake. Buyers are just as interested in this information and deserve it.

Helping a client understand pricing even prior to when they are ready to act makes the agent relational, not just transactional.

This leads me to my original point about how you and your agents want to be viewed.

Do you want to be viewed as “transactional” because you can't justify the time it takes to do more, or do you want to be viewed as a true “advisor” before, during, and after the transaction?

If you agree with the latter, you must find ways to deliver much more information in a timely and efficient manner. I like to call that "intelligent pricing".

When it comes to pricing estimates, if you do one for everyone you touch, you impact many more people who will view you as an asset, even before they are ready to decide.

How about all those past customers? What's more engaging, a detailed intelligent pricing report, or a refrigerator magnet?

Intelligent pricing reports are a way to differentiate and position yourself as relational and will lead to organic leads.

Legacy CMAs take too much time. They are just not designed to help agents deliver on consumer expectations in this manner.

It's clearly an opportunity that many agents are ready to tackle. Those that do will differentiate themselves, be viewed as relational, and will generate business because of it.

These are the agents that are actively changing the paradigm on pricing estimates and having consumers view them in a much different light.

How do you and your agents want to be viewed?