What’s New Pussycat?
Well, there’s a whole lot of new going on these days. The frustrating thing, for me, is that ‘whatever’s old is new again’ seems to be in full swing.
Over the last week or so, I’ve invested some 45 hours updating the information for a couple of hundred agents. All of their information was current 3 years, or less, ago, so I was thinking it would not be a huge task to verify things. Silly me!
You see, the longer I spent looking for agents, the more I realized that, even 15 years after people were able to buy their own name domains, more than half of this sampling of Realtors choose to promote their MLS, or Yahoo or Hotmail in their email address. So instead of having, for example, chris@chrisnewell.com, they might have chrisnewell1257@yahoo.com. So many opportunities lost!
Less than half these agents have their office address on their web site. Forget the problem that is, according to the regulators, and think of the public for a moment. I’m looking for an agent and I want to know where your office is. Why on earth do you not tell me something that simple? I know, I know, perhaps because your brokerage doesn’t have their address on their web site? Yes, that’s right, approximately 25% of the brokerage web sites I looked at do not have their physical address anywhere on their
site. What gives with that? Are these agents and companies, who are in the belly-to-belly, face-to-face business hiding from the purchasers of their goods and services?
Want to guess what the next biggest omission is? Yep, you guessed it – Cell Phone Numbers! Come on folks, do you really believe that the more difficult you make it for people to do business with you, the harder they will try? So, why not put your cell number on your site? Please don’t tell me it’s because you’re worried about the cost of the calls you’ll receive! And don’t tell me it’s to stop all the spam calls – you can easily avoid them.
The last comment I have is more to do with what is told to me on these web sites. Do you have any idea how many individuals ‘specialize in residential sales, commercial and business sales and leasing’? And there’s plenty who specialize across an entire region with a population of 5,000,000!
You might wonder why I share this with you. It’s simple, really. Have you ever gone back and acted like a potential client trying to do business with you? DON’T DO IT!!! Ask a friend to do it for you, and report back to you on their experience. Don’t ask a friend in the same business you are in.
Try it – you may be horrified at how hard you are to find!
