Brandon Nelson
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Real Estate = People (oh, and property, sort of!)
My dad was a salesman throughout most of my childhood. He sold mechanical packing and seals to factories, nuclear power plants, paper mills and the like. He sold products designed to prevent leakage, basically.
The packing and seals were an instrument — a widget, if you will — and my dad’s success wasn’t because his widgets were shinier or stronger or cheaper than the competitors’. Those are just widget features, and EVERY widget has its features.
What my dad really “sold” to the plant managers and heads of maintenance was “up-time” because everything could keep running, because they weren’t leaking.
He sold increased profit for the companies, because they could spend more time pumping product instead of fixing leaks.
He sold job security to the people responsible for keeping things running, and that meant those people could live worry-free about their jobs, and send their kids to colleges without fear of losing their paycheck… because their machines didn’t leak.
Dad didn’t sell packing and seals. He sold reassurance, confidence, uptime, profit and security. Oh, and because his widgets worked and backed up his claims, his customers believed in him and bought from him again.
Properties, that is buildings and land, are widgets. I hope that doesn’t sound disrespectful, because I don’t mean it to be. The finest real estate in the world, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Roman Colosseum… widgets, one and all.
The Taj Mahal wasn’t built to keep the rain off anyone’s head. It was a gesture of love and admiration from a man to his (favorite) wife.
The Eiffel Tower wasn’t built because the French needed a use for some extra steel, or as a giant lightning rod to keep the Parisians from getting zapped. It was built as a statement for the 1889 World Exhibition that technology and design in France was second to none.
These icons of real estate — just like that bungalow on the south side you’re thinking about buying — are about PEOPLE and their dreams, their love, the power and potential of the human spirit. You can find shelter from the cold and rain in a cave with a campfire. But it’s not about shelter.
When you begin working with a truly great real estate agent to buy your dream home or investment property, that agent is not going to merely “sell you a house” any more than my dad merely sold shiny widgets.
What a truly great real estate agent sells is confidence — YOUR OWN self-confidence — through genuine understanding — YOUR OWN understanding (read: competence)– that the agent will guide you towards and help create for you.
A great agent listens — really listens — to your story, identifies the holes, gaps, and/or missing bits that separate where you are right now from where you need to be emotionally, intellectually, skillfully, financially, chronologically, sequentially, and materially to be able to buy the property — read: realize YOUR goal — with confidence that you know what you’re doing, that you’re in good company doing it, and that you’re as far from “flying by the seat of your pants” as you can be.
With a great agent by your side you’re grounded in your actions and decisions, because you’ve arrived at that place in the process where you can make those decisions organically and naturally.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go make a widget-payment, then go see about adding another bedroom to our Craftsman-style widget!
