How to Mold Your Real Estate Prospects Into Ideal Future Clients
There’s nothing better than working with a client who listens to every piece of advice you give along the way. It makes for a smooth
Real Estate Agents Are Hard to Shock, but Here Are 7 Ways You Might Be Able to Pull It Off
In real estate, surprises are few and far between. After a while, nothing fazes an agent—not the 3 a.m. texts, bizarre home decor, or even buyers backing out because Mercury is in retrograde.
It’s probably not even possible to shock an agent…
If you just read that and thought, “Game on!” and want some creative ways to test that theory, here are ten ways you can shock (and delight!) an agent the next time you need to hire one:
1) “I saw your info on my grandmother’s fridge!”
The next time you need to hire an agent, go to your grandmother’s house (or the house of any other older relative) and take a peek at the side of their fridge. There you will find a calendar magnet from 2018 with a real estate agent’s face and contact info on it. Call that agent and say, “I saw your info on my grandma’s fridge and need you to sell my house.”
2) An Office Walk-In? Is This the 1990s?
The internet and cell phones have made it almost pointless for an agent to take a shift sitting at the front desk in case a potential client walks in, yet some agents still do it to this day despite the fact that no agent has probably gotten a client that way since 1999. So the next time you’re in the market to buy a house, walk into your local real estate office unannounced, ask the agent sitting at the front desk to work with you, and watch them party like it’s 1999.
3) The Open House Job Interview
Agents certainly meet people at open houses who end up becoming clients. But the client usually came to see the house, not the agent, and they just ended up hitting it off.
So if you want to really shock an agent, walk into a random open house and wait for them to say, “Welcome. Feel free to take a look around, and if you have any questions about the house, feel free to ask.”
As soon as they get those words out, tell them you didn’t come to see the house, you came to hire whatever agent happened to be hosting the open house and ask them to prepare an exclusive buyer’s agency agreement. If they don’t faint on the spot, tell them they passed the test and hire them, because that’s a sign that the agent can handle even the most shocking turn of events.
4) Winning Facebook’s Hunger Games
Make a post in your local Facebook group asking for real estate recommendations. Within minutes, dozens of comments will flood in from people raving about their favorite agent, and plenty of agents promoting themselves. Don’t focus on any agent who receives tons of reactions or recommendations. Find one who gets lost in the sea of all the other 82 agent names on the thread and call them—one who basically said, “Hey, I’m an agent in the area and I could use some business.”
Reply to their comment saying “I’d like to hire you, please DM me to set up a time to meet…” and immediately turn the commenting off on the post. Not only will that particular agent be flabbergasted, but so will every single one of the other 82 agents. (Especially the ones who got tons of love from the locals in the comment section!)
5) Door Knocking Pays Off (For Once)
If you wait long enough, one day an agent will knock on your door trying to drum up some business. The agent will likely be braced for you to either pretend you’re not home; answer the door and yell at them; or (at best) politely tell them you’re not thinking of buying a home in the near future, but you’ll keep them in mind when you do.
Unbeknownst to them, you have put off your plans to buy or sell a house until the moment an agent had the gumption to show up at your door and knock! Swing the door open and say, “Oh thank goodness, I’ve been waiting for you to show up to list my house! Come on in! I hope you brought the paperwork…”
6) Found on Google—Without Paying for It
The next time you need an agent, go to Google and type in “real estate agent near me” into the search bar. Then scroll way down to the bottom and click to the next page. Do this until you reach the 6th or 7th page of search results. Call whatever agent appears that many pages in and when they ask how you found them, tell them “I Googled ‘best agents near me,’ and you came up.” They will be flattered, but floored that they came up at all, since they probably haven’t spent a dime on SEO or building a web presence to show up that many pages deep in search results.
7) A Mind-Changing Meme
Let’s face it, you’re either friends with, or related to a real estate agent. Deep down the hope, pray, and kind of expect you to work with them. But that doesn’t always happen… Agents often get upset when they find out a friend or family member worked with another agent to buy or sell a house. But by then, it’s too late and there’s not much they can do, other than post self-therapeutic memes about it.
So the next time you’re in the market to buy or sell a house, reach out to the one you’re closest to and say that you were going to hire another agent, but you saw a real estate meme that made you realize the error of your ways before it was too late!
