“If you love this business so much,” the office manager responded with a puzzled look, “wouldn’t you like to actually sell some real estate?”
Shirley looked around for other ears and leaned forward. “The truth is,” she softly answered, “when you sell a house, it’s really a hassle. There’s so much paperwork to fill out and so many things that can go wrong. I hear the stories all the time – it really scares me. I like real estate a whole lot better if I don’t have to sell anything.”
At this point it was clear that our manager had gotten to the bottom of Shirley’s little problem with sales success. As I thought about it, however, I realized that this story carried more significance. Here’s someone who is professionally trained and presumably “in the business,” and yet she finds the real estate transaction terrifying. And she’s not alone. The reality is that many potential homebuyers find the process even more terrifying than Shirley does. In the case of buying a new home, we face the normal home-buying fears and then throw in the additional fears of dealing with a builder, construction delays and the myriad of choices and decisions to make. My point is that every day there are millions of people who would love to buy a new home or live in another neighborhood or community, but they’re simply afraid of what they’ll have to go through to get there. There clearly is an abundance of market opportunity.
Based on this reality, one of the most important messages I share in my Certified New Home Specialist™ training is that to really succeed in this business, we’ve got to find the ways to make it easier for our customers to buy. Anything we can do to make the real estate transaction less intimidating will work to bring buyers into the market who are held back by fear. As obvious as this may seem, relatively few in real estate fully appreciate the significance of this idea.
