Real Estate is a people business – not a lead business.  If you can find people who need to buy or sell homes and you can connect and gain their trust, you will have a successful business that is very enjoyable to work at.

This connect and gain trust bit is important and often challenging. People don’t trust REALTORS® very much.  In fact, in the CREA 2017 Great Expectations Survey, we rated third last under Trust in Professionals – only beating out Members of the Federal Parliament and Used-car Salespeople.  This comes as no surprise to me, as most real estate training is focussed on techniques to coerce sellers and buyers into working with you so that you can make more money.  Let’s change all of that!

Human connection and trust are precious, especially when two or more human beings communicate and collaborate on a deeper and more authentic level than our typical human interactions.  When it comes to something as important as our home and our financial security, this depth allows for more sharing of information, ideas and emotions and this will lead to significantly better outcomes.  This is doing what matters and what a computer can’t do. The REALTORS® who excel at this skill will be the REALTORS® who thrive during the current technology revolution in real estate.

But how do we get to this deeper connection with people?  I’m going to write a series of blog posts over the next few weeks with some different tools to help you learn this important skill.

Let’s start with Metaphor. It’s defined as:

“A thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract”. 

When people use metaphor, they are usually trying to communicate something abstract.  They are thinking and feeling something that is difficult to communicate so they substitute in a different object or action.  If you hear the metaphor and speak to that metaphor, you have just entered their world of thought.  For example;  imagine you are in a listing presentation and the sellers mention another agent that they spoke to and say “He wasn’t up to snuff”.  You could make an assumption about what that means, or you could ask the sellers:

“What does up to snuff look like for you?”

They will likely give you a very real and clear idea of what is important to them in a REALTOR® and gain a huge amount of trust in you for asking them, and asking her in their language.

I’ve seen this work, like magic.   Try it and let me know what happens.