A Cutting Edge Approach to Real Estate and Energy in New York City - It's about Using New Strategies and Technologies to gain a Competitive Advantage NOW!
They form opinions about you and your project before you ever see them.
In this digital world they judge your project by the website alone. Prospects will make multi million dollar decisions on what buildings to go see and what to miss based on your digital presence alone NOT on the how good the actual building is.
Sure not all of the time but do you want to gamble on what the percentage is by trying to save on the place/website where they form their first impression? - and where they have their first contact with you?
Do you realize that the paradigm has shifted? The consumer gets to make an opinion before he ever sets foot in your project, before he ever meets your sales person.
So what is your digital presence saying about you? about your projects?
And who is helping you get that piece of your business not only right but head and shoulders better than your competition?
What's their strategy to navigate this brave new 2.0 world?
This Ad for Visa by TWBA/Chiat/Day really got me thinking about innovation and in particular how Paradigm Shattering Dick Fosbury was and in my opinion still is. Watch this if you haven't seen it already.
“The problem with something revolutionary like that was that most of the top athletes had invested so much time in their technique and approach was that they didn’t want to give it up, so they stuck with what they knew,” Fosbury said.
Sounds a lot like how most Real Estate Sales and Marketing Programs are currently conducted.
He said it took a full decade before the flop began to dominate the sport.
I’m hoping we can shift our industry faster than that.
You would have thought that all the other high jumpers and their coaches would have copied him because after all he did win the '68 Gold Medal and break the World Record.
They didn’t - the elite high jumpers and their coaches were too invested in the straddle. They could not and would not undo all of the years of repetition and the results that they use to get with going with their old style, the Straddle.
Does that look or sound similar to our industry?
It certainly does to me as I see all of these new tools/skills/techniques that so few are using and I keep wondering why.
So what happened next in the High Jump World? The establishment "attacked" him and his Flop - they were not going to have their paradigm shattered.
Check out this quote:
“Kids imitate champions,” said U.S. Olympic coach Payton Jordan at the time. “If they try to imitate Fosbury, he will wipe out an entire generation of high jumpers because they will all have broken necks.”
Fosbury laughed long and hard when reminded of that quote and then said:
"There were some doctors who felt I was threatening kids’ lives".
His stunning, and almost comical, break with the conventional straddle high jump sparked a revolution in the sport.
Today, the “Fosbury Flop” is the standard technique for high jumpers from high school to the Olympics.
But Fosbury still recalls the debate that raged in the press over his radical approach to the bar.
So what are you doing to shatter the paradigms in your industry, are you trying new approaches or are you happy to continue to do the “Straddle”
And yes I’m quoted heavily in the article and I don’t paint a pretty picture - but we do need to look at the current “landscape” objectively and realistically.
We need to make decisions on how things actually are right now. Not how we want or need them to be based on what happened previously or where we were hoping the market was going to go.
Looking way back to Zeno and Socrates for a more stoic approach to the market and one that helps me is that “we should try and maintain an attitude of equanimity in the face of life's highs and lows - getting carried away by neither”.
Easier said than done but it is the goal - because according to Zeno " man conquers the world by conquering himself " and we can do that by conquering how we react to all external factors.
(both the good ones as well as the bad)
Focus on what we can control, work hard on those items and leave the rest in the hands of the gods.
The "Stockdale Paradox" - was named by Jim Collins in his book "Good to Great" - and he sums it up this way: "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end - which you can never afford to lose - with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be." This quote is attributed to the famed POW Jim Stockdale.
I thought of this quote in response to the following article by my friend Michael Stoler in today’s New York Sun. He is absolutely right about what he is saying about the current market and trust me he isn’t the kind of person to mince words.
My experience shows me that most people do not value what they learn for free and make no mistake some people are paying a heavy price and it isn't just the mom's and pop's, the big boys are feeling the pain too.
Right now a lot of us in the Real Estate Industry are getting some pretty expensive “tuition” from this market and the “lessons” are far from over. (The picture BTW is the Tibetan Circle of Punishment - which sums up my view of what the market is doing to some of us)
Hearing the true state of the market is exactly what consumers need to hear from real estate agents and brokers.
Real estate markets go up and they go down. The scope and size of this financial crisis does bring a new dimension to this particular cycle, but we will get through it and the smart ones will learn from it and the really smart ones will do even better because they were already a head of the curve in the first place.
You’ve heard the term but what does it really mean?
It comes from a social experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 70’s and it’s objective was to see how many people would need to “touch” a letter to get it from one person in the mid west to a complete stranger in Boston.
The rules were you couldn’t call them direct and you had to send it a person who you personally knew who might be able to move the process forward. On average it took around six contacts to achieve that. Most people who are very social and especially salespeople think that they are only a few contacts away from making “it” all happen.
But it is a myth
Because only 29% actually got the letter through to their intended target – the rest failed.
The best ones in the survey who achieved it did it in 2-3 attempts and the weaker 8-10 connections.
With the average path length being 5.5 which got rounded up to 6, hence the term “six degrees of separation”.
Interesting story but what does that mean to you?
Think for a moment about your connections and what you need to grow your business. How well connected are you? And what about your Sales Team?
Can they get you in front of the customers who want and need your product?
Are you/they in the 29% who can connect to whoever they need to in order to get the job done? Or are they in the 71% who couldn’t deliver?
What is your Social Networking strategy and what are you now doing differently to improve your “network” and your projects results?
As a Real Estate Development Guru (I like the sound of that better than professional) my main focus for the past 20 years has been on Deal Analysis/Structure for both local and international developers,and implementing World Class Sales and Marketing Programs.I have done this for small firms and Industry Leaders and was recently reporting to the Senior Management and CEO of NYC's largest real estate brokerage.
