I have come to realize there is a divide, a great divide among real estate agent personas. One side sees real estate as a hand numbers game, one filled with scripts and charts and hard sales. The movie Glengarry Glen Ross takes the persona of that hard sales agent with a close for every season and puts it him/her on a coke binge. It’s almost painful to watch.
On the other side of the divide is the real estate version of Elle Woods, from Legally Blonde. The social butterfly who’s chatty with everyone and who knows everyone’s birthday and everyone’s kids’ names. The queen of social interaction.
Ricky Roma of Glenngarry would say “no consumer wants to be your friend, they just want to buy a house” (he might add “and you don’t want to be their friend either”). Elle would banter that “no one wants to be sold real estate by a smarmy used car salesman pushing a pen in their hand”.
Of course these two characters are as gimmicky and extreme when applied to real life agents as they are with the movie characters, but you see my point. You have one side who wouldn’t get caught reading a script, even knowing what a hard angle close was or seeing each lead as a number. And you’d find just as many agents thinking those who spend their time being social (on or off line) and not focusing on numbers, closes and scripts are destined for mediocre survival at best.
But can you be an Elle Woods who hits it out of the ball park? Can you be a Ricky Roma who remembers the kids birthdays and has a Facebook Page (where he himself, not a VA, posts)? Can they both thrive? Ricky and Elle might think not, but I’m not so sure, what do you think?
image courtesy of Marco Bellucci
