In 2020 we’ve had to EVOLVE and fast.
Pivoting became the new ‘trending’ word and we’ve upgraded the way we operate businesses.
But…
Historically real estate has been an industry of late adaption.
Rolling out upgraded ways of operating has been hard and difficult to encourage people to take up.
Change of any kind has been slow and difficult to implement.
New tech to improve the way business is done is often faced with scepticism.
There had been resistance to changing the way things are being done – It’s the ‘it works just fine the way we are doing it now’ mentality.
We like the concept of better, faster but actioning it is often another story.
But if there is anything that 2020 has taught us is that change is DOABLE.
And under the pressure of COVID, change has happened FAST.
Overnight we literally changed the way we operated businesses.
Only 6 months ago, conducting inspections via video and purchasing property sight unsee was rare.
As for online auctions? The technology has been there, but the execution was unheard of.
Conferences, training and awards nights have all bee virtual and meetings are now often via zoom, rather than in real life.
Change has become the ‘new normal’ so why stop improving where we are right there now?
If we’ve managed to implement all these changes and make them the new normal in such a short period of time, how else can we improve, upgrade and up-level our businesses?
COVID has nudged us but we are still behind the times on many things in the real estate industry.
I often talked about how some elements of our industry were stuck in the 80s.
Authoritarian leadership burn and churning clients, prospect before people and working until burn out. It was all about power and money.
How can we look at our businesses now at the end of 2020 knowing how much we have changed and make them even better?
I think we have a huge opportunity here to really change the way we do business.
We need to continue to meet consumers where they are at in life.
Let’s look at building relationships with our buyers and sellers and not just for the length of the sales process. Let’s really work towards becoming agents for life.
Let’s look at educating and informing our consumers about how real estate works instead of being gatekeepers of information.
Let’s look at different ways of connecting with them – like social media and through community involvement.
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We have some incredible leaders such as John Cunningham and Leanne Pilkington who are paving the way to regulate our industry and make it a profession.
But we as individual representatives of the industry also need to step up and pave a new, positive and professional way of doing business that has stepped out of the ’80s.
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