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The reality is that lead generation is a career necessity, but it is not a complex science, and often it’s as simple as seeing opportunities that are right in front of you each and every day.
Don’t lose sight of the basics
Recently, I met with an agent and the talk turned to the good old topic of lead generation, which prompted the obvious question: “What prospecting activities do you undertake?”
It was evident from their reply that they were searching for “a magic bullet” and hadn’t found it yet. In the process, they had totally lost sight of the basics.
And let’s be honest, those basics are simple.
They involve staying in regular contact with people in your area who are likely to have a need to sell or buy in the immediate term or in the future.
And of course, there are a whole range of real estate activities that relate to this, including maintaining your database, providing people with market updates, touching base regularly regarding their intentions, offering to appraise their property, sending regular emails to let them know what’s sold recently and for how much, and more.
But in addition to these standard activities, there are other simple strategies you can engage in that too often agents overlook as part of an interesting phenomenon known as “inattention blindness”.
Do you suffer from inattention blindness?
First coined as a phrase in the early 1990s, “inattention blindness” is a phenomenon where you don’t see something that is in plain sight simply because your attention is directed elsewhere.
In other words, we’re focused so intently on a task at hand that we don’t notice the weird thing or opportunity that’s right there in plain view.
If you’re looking for a good example of how this plays out in daily life, there’s a video of an experiment that’s well worth watching here.
However, in real estate, “inattention blindness” occurs when opportunity literally stares agents in the face, but they “can’t” or “choose not” to see those opportunities.
Some simple and obvious scenarios
In real estate, there’s a good chance we’ve all been guilty of inattention blindness at some point and have missed opportunities that were staring us right in the face.
So let’s walk through a couple of examples of how it might look in practice.
Scenario 1: You’re at an open home or on the phone speaking with a prospective buyer, but don’t ask the question, “Mr or Mrs Buyer, with your current residence, do you plan on holding onto it or… (pause and let them finish the question)?”
Scenario 2: You’ve just sold a property but didn’t prospect the immediate homes around it. Then, much to your annoyance, one of the neighbours list with another agent without even calling you.
“Didn’t they see my 8x6 sign board that needed its own postcode?” I hear you asking. Maybe they did, but the question you should really be asking is, “Did your inattention blindness see you overlook an obvious opportunity to personally introduce yourself, and how will you remedy this in the future?”
We pass and meet potential sellers every single day
The reality is, in real estate, we pass and meet potential sellers every single day.
We meet hundreds of buyers who will be future sellers throughout our careers.
Every home you drive by or walk past has an owner attached to it. They are a potential future seller. We just need to introduce ourselves.
The opportunities are literally staring every agent in the face.
So, I challenge you to consider those opportunities and reflect on the times when you’ve been guilty of inattention blindness.
Then, commit to the basics. Commit to the follow-up. Commit to the process. When you seize the opportunities that are right in front of you, I guarantee it will change your career.
Manos Findikakis is the CEO of Agents’Agency
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