Welcome to Searchable ACRE
Six Years of Exchange Collaboration
The "ACRE Exchange" was the private discussion forum offered to ACRE graduates under the legacy program created by Mollie Wasserman. Over the years (up until April 2012), the Exchange was home to dozens of fascinating (and occasionally heated!) conversations on a wide variety of real estate consulting-related topics. However, as is the case with many discussion forums, as the volume of content increased it got a bit unwieldy and unorganized, and became difficult to navigate.
Searchable ACRE to the rescue! It's taken some time, but the ACRE 2.0 Team has created a much more user-friendly archive of the more than 350 posts and discussions, including all the original comments.
How to Seach
Searchable ACRE offers several tools for your searching enjoyment. You can search by Category, Tag, Author or Month (see the widgets on the right) or just enter your own search term in the Search box (upper right). You can also just start from the beginning and read them all (click the "All Entries" tab above).
So, for example, let's say you're curious what's been discussed about Consulting with For Sale by Owners (FSBOs). You could just type the word "FSBO" into the Search box, or click the FSBO tag under the Tag Search tab. If you'd like to see all the discussions started by, let's say, Mollie Wasserman, you can click the "By Author" tab and then select Mollie's name. If you're needing inspiration, try clicking on the Success Stories category under the Category tab.
This is a brand new product here at The Consulting Professional, so please feel free to share your feedback with us and of course, let us know if you run into any problems.
We hope you enjoy Searchable ACRE!
I thought a little break from the industry specific debate was in order. Dan Kennedy, for those of you who are not fimilar with him is a GAINT when it comes to marketing.
How are you attracting customers? What tools are you using to fill your pipeline?
This link should take you to his introductory video. www.renegademillionaire.com/video/1
This free video is filled with alot of good information.
Last week I felt I had the perfect opportunity to use the consulting model. A gentleman contacted me and had some questions about a property that is for sale about 30 miles from here. (We are a very large county, but with only 25,000 people so 30 miles is not out of the area for me.)
Anyway, he told me that he had already seen the interior of the property and was interested in writing an offer if my answers were satisfactory to him. I took that brief pause to explain that the property had a pending contract, so that any offer would be a backup contract. I answered his questions and he still wanted to write a backup.
Everything about TheRedPin.com’s Bloor St. office feels more like a tech startup than a real estate brokerage, which is fitting because this relatively new company is a hybrid of both.
Its mission is simple and shouts in chalk from a wall that’s been converted to a giant blackboard: Making House Hunting Easy.
TheRedPin.com is among the first of a new breed of realtors in Toronto — tech-savvy data crunchers who are determined to give homebuyers the tools they need to find their dream home from the comfort of their own computer.
This so-called Virtual Office Website (VOW) is far from alone, and a far cry from the Realtor.ca site that has provided consumers with just the most basic of MLS information for years.
Over the next few weeks a host of other VOWs — from information-rich realtysellersrealestate.com and realosophy.com to the far more basic searchrealty.ca — will be rolled out across the GTA. Some, like TheRedPin.com, will offer significant discounts in realty fees to house hunters who do most of the legwork themselves.
“Ninety-five percent of Canadian homebuyers start their search online, but this isn’t like the travel industry where you can ahead and just buy your own ticket.
“We’re not a discount broker — we’re still a full-service brokerage offering analysis, property valuation, negotiations and a network of professionals who provide mortgages,” says Rokham Fard, one of four co-founders of TheRedPin.com which claims to be an even bigger database of listings than MLS.
First introduced by psychologist Anders Ericsson and later featured in Malcolm Gladwell's popular book, "Outliers: The Story of Success," was this idea that you could become a genuine expert in a field with approximately 10,000 hours of practice — roughly 3 hours a day, every day for a consecutive decade.
But is that really what it takes? And what's the real difference between being a "natural" and a prodigious practicer?
In a study published in Harvard Business Review, researchers say that you must pass three tests to know if you've reached a level of expertise:
1. Your performance must be consistently "superior to that of your expert's peers." You can't really be an expert if you are on the same level of expertise as everyone else.
2. Your expertise must produce consistent, concrete, successful results. For example, if you're an expert at building a car, you must be able to achieve a superior end result in a consistent manner.
3. Your performance "can be replicated and measured in the lab." If you can't do it again, it isn't consistent, and you won't be able to measure it. So how can you prove your expertise?
In order to get to this level, it's obvious that you're going to have to practice and put in a lot of sweat, but not all practice is useful practice. The Harvard Business Review says:
When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.
According to Gary Marcus in Psychology Today, if you keep practicing what you know you are already good at, you will never be able to reach an uncomfortable level that will force you to push harder. This means you'll never improve or reach your greatest limits.
"Getting better isn't just a matter of logging hours," Marcus says. "It's a matter of developing a focused program of targeting your weaknesses and broadening your skill set."
So far, nearly 100% of you (of those who have responded) agree that some sort of ongoing confirmation that ACREs are actually practicing consulting would be a good thing... at least in order to appear on the ACRE Locator map and in the search.
I agree.
I sent out this question to my Advisory Committee yesterday, but decided to post it here as well...
I am your customer
I am someone that you should appreciate and hope to develop a relationship with
I don’t want to be ‘sold’, I want information
I am not an annoyance, I am someone you should be happy to educate on your business and the things you offer
I am not someone for you to match wits with
I am not someone to lie to, deceive, bait-and-switch, or otherwise treat differently than your own mother
I am your customer
I am six to seven times more expensive to acquire than to retain
I have rights – that should not be the thing that keeps you following the law
I expect to get what I pay for
I don’t forget things as easily as I used to
I am your customer
You be the judge, but I think we can sometimes poach ideas, be motivated and otherwise benefit from what happens in the corporate world. After all, where did the idea of consulting come from? Hardly from within our own industry! This piece from today's Globe & Mail Report on Business about innovation is an example. Have a peek and see what you think. Here's the link...
My purpose to introduce this video to you ..... is to suggest that the best method
* to recruit brokers to be an ACRE and also
*to recruit agents to consult for brokers
Is to know what motivation will produce the best results
Ten minute video that will surprise you about what motivates us.