Real Estate Stairways

Fri, May 3, 2013

"If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem.  Everything else is inconvenience.” -- Robert Fulghum

"Kites rise highest against the wind—not with it." -- Winston Churchill

I divide my time between Florida, where my wife and I have a beach home on the Gulf Coast, and my home town of Newmarket (a suburb north of Toronto). I spent the winter and spring in Newmarket this year … where the good weather has finally found us. It was a long, dismal winter. But at least it’s better than last year. Last year we wintered in Nokomis (about 20 miles south of Sarasota), only landing back in Newmarket the third week of June … just before Tropical Storm Debby pummeled the Gulf Coast. I don’t know if you remember Debby. This slow-moving storm was downgraded to a tropical depression as it continued to pound Florida with drenching rain and strong winds, hammering more than 300 miles of Florida, and dumping up to 15 inches of rain in the panhandle in just over 24 hours. Just after we landed back in Ontario, 20 counties were declared disaster areas and the governor called up the National Guard to help. 50-mile-per-hour gusts knocked out power to more than 35,000 residents and forced the evacuation of 600 inmates from the jail in Pensacola. The only silver lining to Tropical Storm Debby, said one YouTuber, was the impact on the drought that had been ongoing in Florida for several months. Sounds a little like our industry, doesn’t it? Depression and drought, slow-movement, forced evacuation … any of these terms could easily apply to the roller coaster market that crashed to record lows but is now enjoying an upturn. I felt a little helpless watching Debby wreak havoc on our Florida home, having to rely only on third-party accounts of how much trouble we were in. And it turns out we were pretty lucky. My home office wasn’t, as I’d feared, set adrift on the high waters of the Gulf. In fact, we didn’t suffer any flooding. The beach I’d walked each morning for the few months previous had disappeared underwater, but apart from that, the only other thing Debby confiscated was our stairway to the beach. Stairways actually – it’s always good to have a backup plan. The property manager who watches our house when we’re not there happened to be out of town at the time, but a neighbour emailed me a photo which seemed to show, sure enough, that Debby had picked up both of our stairways and fed them to the fishes. Except that Debby didn’t quite get me on that one. Remember that I had a backup plan (i.e. two stairways), and later reports revealed that one of the stairways was simply buried … not gone. I could certainly make that work. So what about you? The last few years took their toll on many in the business. Did you have a backup plan to insulate yourself from the storm? You did if you’ve been using the systems we teach you … but note that I mean really “using” them. There are always those who prefer to whine and complain rather than really get down to work. Those are the agents who wouldn’t have bothered to look beneath the surface of the flooding to discover that the stairway was actually still there because it was far easier to sit on shore and rhyme off all the reasons for their failure. The agents who do best with my system are the ones who refuse to abdicate responsibility and who jump in with both feet. The sought me out as their real estate coach and are holding both me and themselves accountable. These agents continued to make great money throughout the last five years even while others around them were falling like flies. At some point in your career, you have to decide which kind of agent you are. Why are you in this business and what do you want to get out of the time and money you’re investing? If you don’t have clear, quantifiable answers to these questions, you should probably seriously reconsider your choice of vocation. Are you running my ads? Are you tracking the results so you know which ads work best in which vehicle? Have you harnessed our hotline and website robots? Do you know the Universal Call Back script by heart? Are you using it? If you can’t answer yes to every one of those questions, you’re cheating yourself. These are the stairways to your success that no tropical storm or hurricane or bad market or tough competitor can take away from you. If you consistently and aggressively utilize these simple tools, your success will be unavoidable, and I’ll tell you what … it’s really fun to be successful. P.S. You can test drive my ideas and systems absolutely free by signing up for Free Weekly Training which includes live weekly webinars, a monthly newsletter and priority invitations to free half day training events. This Free Weekly training will expose you to inexpensive and highly effective methods of lead generation (with no cold calling) -- what I call “Reverse Prospecting”, where qualified prospects actually hunt you down rather than the other way around, and then how to follow these leads through to maximum GCI via proprietary lead conversion and prospect presentation systems. This is the easiest way for you to find out with no risk or obligation what my system is all about and how it can help you profitably grow your real estate business and vastly improve your quality of life. JOIN MY FREE WEEKLY TRAINING PROGRAM HERE  

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