So What is it You Do for a Living?

As we head toward the holidays and look forward to all the gatherings and parties, seeing old friends and making some new acquaintances, invariably that age old question will come up: “So, what do you do for a living?”  If your answer is a simple “I’m in real estate” or “I sell houses,” you may have just closed the door on your best opportunity to develop a genuine relationship and include that new acquaintance in your sphere of influence.   While you may have been dressed to the nines and your personality may be sparkling, most folks have a preconceived notion of what a real estate agent does—and what kind of person they are.  Unfortunately, based on some surveys, that perception may not be as beneficial as we’d like.  And even if that’s not the case, your “I’m in this slot” answer has done nothing to differentiate you from the thousands of others in that same pigeonhole, and you’ll have to dig yourself out of it if you want to create a genuine relationship with that new acquaintance.

Michael Port, in his excellent work, Book Yourself Solid, talks about creating an informal dialogue for this situation, one that gets to the heart of what you really do, why you do it, and how it’s important to your clients.  He lists several elements in this process, but the most crucial one is for each of us, in our own unique way, to determine the most significant results you help your clients achieve, and especially the benefits and the deeper value they create.

Those results can be best be found, of course, as we dig into our statistics for the prior year by Mastering Our Stats, one of those Five Keys to a Strong Real Estate Career.  Recently, we worked with one of our agents digging into their stats and found the average Days On the Market for their nineteen sold listings last year was an incredibly brisk 38 days.  Now there’s a solid result—with clear benefits—that creates excellent value for the agent’s clients.  That agent now has the key to a new or updated informal dialogue and/or tag line that takes them out of that pigeonhole and opens the door to a genuine relationship.

So, tell me now, what do you do for a living?