From the annual Harris Interactive Poll on prestigious occupations comes this shocker:
Image may be NSFW.
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Lookee who is sitting firmly at the bottom of the list.
And this is nothing new. Harris added real estate agent / broker to their poll in 2003 and we’ve been at the bottom every year with the exception of 2005 when we were just (barely) above stock brokers.
Oy.
Why might this be? Why does John Q. Public have such a lowly opinion of the real estate agent?
Could it be the absurdly low entry “barrier”? Let’s face it, all it takes is some butt-time in “real estate school” and an ample checking account balance to get a real estate sales license. If you are 18 and take 90 hours of “education” you can have a real estate license in as little as nine days. Heck, in Arizona, you don’t even need to complete any high school to get a real estate license. Contrast this to getting certified as a nail technologist. For that you need almost 6 times as much education and 2 years of high school.
Or maybe it just boils down to the silly things some real estate agents do.
Things like setting up email auto-responders that say, “For Monday, August 10th I will be checking emails from 9-10 am and 2-3 pm”. Or worse, follow the advice of some real estate sales guru’s who will instruct you to only answer email for 30 minutes in the afternoon. This is done so you “appear busy” to some nameless “lead”.
What a crock of poo.
Or maybe it’s blog post titles like, “Suck Highly Targeted Leads In Like A Shop Vac”. This article contains such nuggets as:
Watch this video it’s got all the gory details on how you can use it to get a ton of new leads in your sales funnel. You’ll need a towel to mop up the drool you’re going to have all over your keyboard when you get a load of this Image may be NSFW.
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Doesn’t this make us sound oh-so-intelligent?
To be fair, this didn’t come from a real estate agent. It’s from a “real estate internet marketing strategist” that I suspect is wildly successful because agents tend to throw money at anything that has a glimmer of hope for landing the ever-elusive sales commission.
I just finished spending a week in San Francisco at three separate real estate conference-like events. It was full of some brilliant people. I’m talking very intelligent, thinking WAY outside the box, leading edge thinker type folks. I know our industry is full of this kind of person.
Problem is, it’s often full of something else.
Hat tip to the ever brilliant Jonathan Miller for the Harris poll chart/link.
Originally posted on Phoenix Real Estate Guy. If you are reading this anywhere but inside your RSS feed reader or your email client, the site you are on is guilty of stealing content.
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