Today’s post is an excerpt from our newest eGuide, Real Estate’s New Market Reality, which explains how the role of the real estate professional has changed and what you can do to successfully help more buyers and sellers. You can download the entire eGuide at www.NewMarketReality.com. – The KCM Crew
Not that long ago, real estate agents were in the business of providing information. In fact, you can probably remember a time when all that real estate professionals did—the only value we thought we had—was giving information.
What’s for sale, what’s on the market, what’s the pricing of similar homes, etc.
Back then, to protect our value, we locked away this information in a fortress called the MLS. If any person outside of the real estate business tried to reach into our fortress and grab a slice of that data, we were trained, like guardians outside the gates, to chop off that person’s arm. (Okay, so not really chop it off, but you get the idea.)
And, if you’ve been in the business long enough, you may even remember the blue book of MLS listings we used to have at the office. But, if we saw an agent hand that blue book to a buyer to go home with at night, we would begin erecting a guillotine in the office parking lot to execute that agent the next day (or, at the very least, we’d give them some real nasty looks). Why?
Because we thought our true value was just that—the information itself.
This was how real estate had been done for over a hundred years.
But this is not how real estate is done now … and we guarantee it won’t be done like that ever again.
The information itself is no longer what people come to you to receive. They now come to you to receive an analysis of that information.
And that’s a big change!
