The Most Important thing we’ve learned in Real Estate!

February 9th, 2007 categories: Better Real Estate Practice, For Agents, For Buyers, For Sellers, Lake Tahoe Real Estate

Being helpful is the Muse.

Starting a blog should provoke the thought, “what do I have to say?” We’ve certainly considered that, sometimes laughably, sometimes obsessively, and then, of course, as with anything my brother and I have written or created before, out of the beginning excitement and flurry of an idea comes a time of calm and patience. It is almost always out of that settlement that comes the real thought, the one idea that gives a project it’s meaning, it’s muse. It’s not what we have to say that’s relevant; it’s do we have anything to share that you might find important or helpful? That’s the better thought that came to us in considering this blog, it’s you that matters.

We came out of Los Angeles via Austin, both years ago. Our background was music, and movies, and marketing, and writing, both in song and in prose. We had something in mind of course when we moved from LA to Lake Tahoe, and whatever that was, it was not getting into the real estate business. That came out of 911 and the stock market crash thereunto. Ours was mostly in tech holdings, but that’s another story. I was lucky enough to found a public company in LA in the late ’80′s, though I went there to write screenplays, which is another story too. I became it’s Sr. VP Marketing for a decade, and after we moved to paradise on the Lake to “retire” (relax is a better word), I found that I really enjoyed the process of buying our home. When the stock market pummeled, we thought we’d see if we could sell a few houses.

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Both of us went to a college real estate school. We did exceptionally well, and I had lots of ideas about how the business should be done, about how we could set the world on fire with all of our good marketing plans, and how my corporate background would give us an advantage. But with our first sale came a stunning surprise. I had completely missed the most relevant aspect, that singularly most important element of what we were really in business for. And all it took was our first client to teach us.

What I missed in all our well intentioned, meticulous real estate business planning was how fundamentally happy our first client became when we found them what was their dream. I never considered in my plans their smile, that joy, their electric appreciation. That’s what’s important, and it supersedes everything else and all of my other self assessed great ideas by a stratospheric mile. That was almost six years ago, and nothing has changed or altered that one, omniscient moment. Our thoughts, and our business model have expanded around it, of course; and time after time we learn something new out of helping others.

Often we’re flabbergasted at what client service really means, and each time that we are, we evolve from it. And that’s the point of our blog, and the point of that thought that cleared the way for us to find our point-of-view muse for it. We are not so much evolving in the real estate business… as the real estate business is evolving us.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Better Real Estate Practice, For Agents, For Buyers, For Sellers, Lake Tahoe Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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