At Your Service

Following the lead of other industries, REALTORS® are working to give customers what they want, when they want it.

By Michael Fenner

It’s no secret that virtual companies offering real-world benefits have made a huge impact on a range of businesses, from taxis (Uber) to grocery delivery (Peapod) to home entertainment (Netflix). Now real estate practitioners are beginning to realize that the “Uber-ization” of their services might make the home-buying and selling process more seamless for consumers — as well as the REALTORS® who serve them.

This concept was a recurring theme of the Inman Real Estate Connect conference, which was held in July in San Francisco. Many of the presenters drove home the idea that REALTORS® need to deliver service that will improve and simplify the customer experience and offer them more choices. Technology often offers a means to accomplish that noble goal.

“What (technology does) is to provide a platform to reduce the friction in the transactions in a market,” said Inman Connect presenter Gagan Biyani, CEO of fresh food-delivery service Sprig. “Technology allows us to completely revamp the consumer experience.”

For example, the Uber model, which enables customers to see where there are available cars near their current location, gives customers a “profound and satisfying experience,” Inman chief Brad Inman said. What’s more, customers can see ratings of the drivers who are in the area before they agree to ask for a particular driver.

But when consumers look for REALTORS®, the end-user experience is altogether different. “They find a REALTOR® somehow — they aren’t rated, they aren’t ranked. You don’t know who you’re dealing with. That’s a disconnect,” Inman said.

REALTORS® need to come to terms with this market reality. After all, online rating services are the new normal. “It’s the future, and it’s the present and it’s not going away,” said startup investor and conference speaker Cyan Banister.

Defaulting to ‘Yes’

One way to garner positive ratings from clients is to focus on not only serving them well, but “enchanting” them, according to speaker Guy Kawasaki. His resume is well-known, and with good reason. The author and current chief evangelist of Canva, an online graphic-design service, he was previously chief evangelist of Apple and an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google.

Some of his tips for being enchanting are straightforward: Smile more (a real smile, not a fake smile); learn to reciprocate favors with others who have helped you; and don’t interpret other people’s gain as your loss. But other tips were somewhat more complex, and they have a direct bearing on the way real estate agents do business.

For example, Kawasaki advised people to “default to ‘yes.’ Always be thinking, ‘How can I help you?’” REALTORS® who have a predisposition to be agreeable will find more success, he argued, and “the upside of defaulting to ‘yes’ far outweighs” the potential downside of saying “no.”

He also said if agents want to succeed, they need to accept people as they are without regard to their appearance, background or race. That mentality will help you agree on something with that person, whether it’s a client or a fellow REALTOR®. By finding common ground, Kawasaki said, you can build a productive relationship that will help you get business done — or even solve a crisis.

He also urged agents to remove any roadblocks that might hinder their interactions with clients or fellow REALTORS®. For example, he mentioned Captcha, the annoying (to some) and inscrutable (to others) online verification tool used by many REALTOR® websites to register potential clients who would like to receive home listing emails.

“The purpose of Captcha is to reduce the number of customers you have,” Kawasaki joked. “Why don’t we just say, ‘We don’t want you to register?’” The key to building good customer relationships is to avoid creating these kinds of “speed bumps” in your interactions with others, he said. By reducing the friction in your client interactions, you can improve your customers’ experience from the very first contact you have with them — on your website.

A New Reality

The announcement of listings aggregator Zillow’s blockbuster $3.5 billion acquisition of Trulia only reinforces the main theme discussed at the Inman Conference: Give the consumer what they want and make it easy for them to get it.

Time will tell what effect the merger will have on the real estate industry, but Wall Street seems to see Zillow’s potential. The company, which launched in late 2004, had a market capitalization of a whopping $6.1 billion on July 29, and the company’s stock price has risen steadily from $28 in January 2013 to $123 in late July 2014.

Speaking at the Inman event more than a week before the Trulia deal was announced, Zillow chief revenue officer Greg Schwartz admitted that the interest his company has attracted from investors “provides a lot of financial flexibility” as Zillow grows. And with the announcement of the Trulia deal, it looks like he was right.

Love it or hate it, Zillow’s success illustrates the “give the consumer what they want, when they want it” ethos of like-minded virtual companies who deliver real-world results. And REALTORS^® who can learn from this model might be able to get a leg up on the competition.

Michael Fenner is the editor of The Residential Specialist.

Check out the CRS eLearning course, Putting Technology to Work for Your Clients.