Boise Real Estate Blog

It was my first day in residential real estate, back in 1974.

I had been in real estate a couple of years, having begun my career selling recreational lots at a beautiful subdivision in the Sierras called Pine Mountain Lake.

When we finished selling out Pine Mountain Lake, I decided to learn the residential side of real estate and joined California Realty in Santa Clara.

On my first day in the office, I attended the weekly sales meeting, which included a motivational pep talk, a review of new listings/haves/wants, and then we headed out on the weekly “office tour”.

Office tours are a relic of the past now, but back then it was a way to impress sellers by parading our agents through new listings and telling sellers “you have a lovely home”.   It didn’t accomplish much, but it made our sellers feel good.

We toured a couple of typical subdivision tract homes before coming to a property that had an abundance of, shall we say, a “character”, off Capitol Expressway.

The home was down a muddy, potholed dirt road beneath a couple of scraggly old oak trees at the base of a hill. 

It was mostly noteworthy because a private pilot had bored his V-tailed Bonanza into the ground nearby on a foggy night while on approach to San Jose airport a couple of weeks earlier.

Some would have said that the property had some “deferred maintenance”, but the blunt truth was that the place was a pit!

Since I was the new kid in the office, I got to lead the other agents through the house, starting with the kitchen, then down the hall to the back of the house.

As I opened the door to a hall bath, I was stunned to see a duck floating in a bathtub full of brackish, black water, cheerfully quacking at his new visitor.

Taken aback, I made my way through the rest of the house and out the back door to check out the back yard.

Our office manager, Jim Ridgeway, was trailing me as we walked out onto a rickety wooden walkway behind the house.

As we rounded the corner, I heard a screeching sound that drew my gaze toward the tree limb above me.

To my amazement, there was a monkey hanging upside down, by his tail, in one of the old oak trees.

And, he was gleefully masturbating.

I must say, the little guy had a big grin on his upside-down face and seemed to be having the time of his life.

I turned to Jim, speechless.

Without showing any emotion, Jim simply smiled and said “Welcome to real estate, Phil!”.

I’ve had many interesting experiences during my real estate career, but none as memorable as that one.

Can any of you top that one?

The internet has forever changed how real estate is done.

But, some agents don’t realize that it has changed again ~ just when they thought they had it all figured out.

For many Realtors^®, it’s a matter of putting up a templated website, forcing visitors to register in order to get their contact information, then hoping they respond and buy a home.

In other words, they have an internet business card that is totally ineffective.

Perhaps a little harsh, but unfortunately true.

Believe it or not, that actually (somewhat) worked a couple of years ago.

But, these days, savvy website visitors have learned how to game the system and get the information they want without revealing themselves and risking (gasp!) talking to an agent.

For example, my website (www.BoiseReal.com) has had an astounding number of visitors with the same name.

How is it that so many people are named Ben Dover, M. Mouse, and I. M.  Mee these days ??

And, there have been many visitors with incredible phone numbers like (000)000-0000 and (111)111-1111.

I don’t know about you, but I have never been able to talk the phone company into giving me a rock star phone number like that!

Seriously, the days of attracting naïve, compliant website visitors who will willingly give up their contact information are pretty much behind us.

The average real estate consumer these days is 35, web-savvy, and probably knows more about computers than the average Realtor^®, (which doesn’t take much).

That consumer wants information without having to deal directly with an agent, and most wait until late in the homebuying process to personally communicate with an agent.

I used to require registration to search MLS, but I recently removed that requirement in an effort to establish a more honest, open relationship with my website visitors.

There was no reason to continue requiring registration when most of the registrations were false and useless.

The reality is that we have moved beyond the days when a website was a direct sales tool; it is now a way to build a bridge to prospective clients ~ a way to establish a trust relationship.

Real estate websites are, more and more, becoming educational tools for consumers and a way to demonstrate how we do business to prospective clients.

The old ways no longer work as they once did.

Those who embrace the new way the consumer wishes to do business will prosper; those who don’t will wish they had.