What To Do Until The Rebound Comes

I can't trace the source of the following quote, which I encountered in the earliest stages of my real estate career (yes kiddies, when the earth was still cooling), and have used often ever since: "Find a need and fill it and you can make a living, but find a problem and solve it and you can make a fortune!" Like all good formulas for success, it rings true in good times or bad and, like the best of them, it requires some modification.

For example, practice does, indeed, make perfect, but only if one practices perfect habits: otherwise, practice merely makes consistent. Thus it is that doing things right is only effective if one is doing the right things. In today's market, you're either meeting your goals or you're not. If you're doing so, you need to read on only to make a good situation better. If you're not, however, hitting your marks and moving ahead, the following thoughts may lead you down a more progressive path.

Be fore warned though, that you will probably learn nothing new. Chances are that, at Column's end, you'll mutter, "heck (or something stronger). I knew all that!" But only if you can also say that you do all that should you have stopped reading a few lines ago.

BOLD STEPS NEEDED

Encountering needs in today's real estate market is slightly less difficult than falling out of bed, so merely finding them is not necessarily a bold first step
toward success. To be useful to you, those needs must be presently unmet. Aside: No human need is more critical than breathable air, but because it is generally free and abundant, you can only make a buck by selling it to specialty users, such as scuba divers.

Even if an identified need is unmet in your business environment, the reasons why must be known and you must provide workable solutions in order to pursue that fortune. Truth to tell, many of the unmet needs in today's real estate world are simply not "meetable" and therefore, do not figure into your formula for success. Most prominent in this category are so-called buyers and sellers who are unable to act by reason of the insurmountable obstacles they confront.

While the hopelessness of their situations is obvious, their desperate hopes consume far too much of the time and talent of real estate professionals, as well as souring the statistical scene in the marketplace. Those whose needs simply can't be met and whose problems can't be solved deserve nothing more than your sympathy and an absolute minimum of your attention until their circumstances change and/or the market rebounds (i.e. returns to normalcy) which it will do, as it always has in the past.

THE "COULD-HE'S" LURK

Just as damaging to your time management are those who are able to buy or sell, but are either unready or unwilling to do so. Only those prospects who really want to buy and who are both willing and able to pay what they have to pay to get what they want are really buyers: only they are deserving of your services. This automatically excludes bottom feeders who see a bottomless market, regardless of the upside potential of the bargains at hand.

They see opportunities as being merely gateways to even bigger "steals" and have an abiding fear of not milking each downtum to its historical limit. Evidence is mounting that for them, these trying limes will prove to be the "good old days" of the future, but they have no place in your present. Similarly, only would-be sellers who could be sellers belong in your work plan.

Those "could-be's" must be both willing and able to accept the best price obtainable from the best buyer available in the current market, however shy that prospect might be of the owner's ideal. Eliminating from the market those "pseudo-sellers" who don't fit that narrow definition would almost instantly convert today's surplus of listings to a near shortage. (Suggestion: Check www.joeklock.com for in-depth information on "The Facts Of Life For Home Sellers.")

ANOTHER PITHY PRINCIPLE

I'm at a loss to remember the author of yet another pithy principle: "The difference between success and failure in business is often an inability to distinguish between the difficult and the unattainable." Never has this been a more useful guideline for real estate professionals than right now. Finding those with "meetable" needs and solvable problems is difficult, as is getting them to acknowledge their status and bite the necessary bullets.

However, distinguishing between the difficult and unattainable solutions that swirl around you daily is, in fact, the difference between success and failure - and between making a living or making a fortune. You knew all that, of course ... but will you do all that as well?