Behold the Unrepentant Convert

The R Word

There was a time when I didn’t want to hear the “r” word. In fact, the mere mention of the “r” word would launch me onto a soap box where I’d spent considerable time and effort preaching the purity of the real estate search and the evils of requiring registration before people could see what they came to see.

Step one of the conversion took place the first week of August when I asked several friends to look over my web sites and see what was missing. Where was the disconnect between the traffic I recorded and the number of leads I was generating through the Internet. Because, after all, having a website truly is a form of lead generation if done correctly. (When done incorrectly, it’s a waste of server space.)

One of the answers that came back quickly was the need to add registration to the searches. I hemmed. I hawed. I equivocated. And then I told @mizzle, “Okay, I’ll try it.”

You Have to Be There

Five minutes later, registration was a reality on my six websites. And within the hour, the first registrations started to roll in. Until Jay Thompson jumped in, no one registered as Donald Duck. There have been a few interesting ones since, but those contacts are easy to delete.

Despite what I believed to be the case, there was little objection to the requirement. Those who didn’t want to provide real information didn’t and they still gained their access. But more importantly, at least to me, there were dozens of people willing to share their information with me. And this a new line of business was born.

Two weeks ago, I closed escrow on a house purchased in Westbrook Village by someone who had been browsing the site. Where was the added value to justify my request for information? It was in the design of the site itself, a one-stop shop for information on the community. Not a blog, mind you. But a blogsite that provided just about all anyone looking in the area would need, with the IDX feed as the hook.

Today I opened escrow with a second client who came through one of my neighborhood blogsites and registered.

What do these cases have in common? Both were looking with purpose. Both were ready to buy. And both would have pulled a real estate agent’s name out of a hat if I hadn’t proactively called them. As David Knox says, you don’t always have to be good. You have to be there. I was there – only because I turned on the registration for the website.

Basic Business Reality

There will be those who will criticize me for turning to registration. And that’s fine. Until the last couple of months, I would have joined their side of the conversation. But then I realized, I’m not providing listings and other information to attain some theoretical level of moral perfection. There’s no grade in real estate for artistic impression. This is a business. And as such, the bottom line is the bottom line.

No one is required to use my services, though depending on the community in which you’re looking I’m a bit difficult to avoid. (And that’s intentional.) But if you are going to use the information that I pay for and that I provide to my clients, then I believe it’s fair to ask who’s doing the looking. A simple quid pro quo.

Maybe hearing the confession of an unrepentant convert will not convert those who see registration and other such tricks of the trade as some sort of evil. But for those who may be on the fence, I urge you to give it a try and see what happens. (Unless you’re in Phoenix. Then you’re welcome to leave registration off.)

Once can be a fluke. Twice is the beginning of a trend. And frankly, if I’d been smarter about this earlier in the year, this year’s 18 escrows (and counting) would be far closer to 30 for this one-dog show.