Where Are All The Agents?

Hi, my name is Buddy Blake and I am the owner of Waypost Realty located here in Wilmington, NC. I have been in the real estate business since 1998. I was with a number of other firms, I actually owned some franchises for about 10 years and we went independent a couple of years ago, the month right before COVID I might add.  We thought the world would and then the world went nuts.

All right, here's the deal. We in the real industry, the market is shifting and we are starting to see the same problems and challenges that other industries are seeing with trying to get people to come in and do the stuff. What has happened in our industry is we have been so busy answering the calls that have been coming in from all the buyers that have been trying to move and everything else, and now things have slowed down. Now does that mean its dead, no it's still better than normal, it's just not the way it was the past few years. But what is happening is that there are a lot of agents that got into the business in the last two years and they never learned the full sales and service process of what it normally takes to work through a seller or a buyer.

For instance, usually in a normal world like the last twenty years that I have been doing it, you list a house with some folks, you work through it and come up with a plan and it takes months and months to sale sometimes. You have to make price adjustments and do different marketing techniques. Well we just came out of a world where if someone said something was coming for sale a line of traffic is coming out there. If they post it on Facebook it sells for whatever over asking. Well we are not in that world anymore. Now does that mean if you live in our area and have a house priced $200,000 in certain areas that you aren't going to get multiple offers, no it doesn't mean that. You are still going to get a lot of activity. You are just not going to get 30 offers. And it's probably going to be way over asking and things like that like it was.

So most real estate agents that got into the business the last couple of years never learned that process. Like I am going to list it, and as soon as I put the sign up in the yard, the next day it sells.Well from the buyer side we have gone from a world where we had an abudance of buyers that were ringing our phone like crazy cause they are trying to find a place to live and there was no inventory. Well inventory is coming back. I don't know if you have noticed but a lot of builders, they have been building during all of this and now they have got inventory coming. Like we have some in Windsor Park coming online and we have our first house out there that we are going to be debueing in two and a half years. We now have something we can show somebody. So we are super excited about that. Other builders are doing that too, there are incentives coming out.

But what I am looking for, we are looking for some real estate agents. We great agents that are coming in, some of our best are coming in and doing the work, calling their prospects, calling the people who have inquired, and that is what sales is. It's called calling people, following up with people, giving them service, providing service, helping them work through issues so that when the time is right, you will be the person top of mind that they will look to to help them. Well a lot of those habits we have lost, me included, and we have had to refocus. Well it's time to get back to work. The real estate business is a sales business. Selling does not mean talking someone into something that don't want to do, but talking to people and that either have a need or a want, and answering questions and helping them with any issues. And wait for them on their time and when they are ready to do something.

So if you are in real estate school, we have an opportunity, we call it an intern program where we will actually pay you to come in. Now you can't sell things, you can't show property and all that, but we can definitely teach you the different systems that we use., We can have you shadow agents. We can have you go through and spend time with what it is really like to be in the business. Beacuse in real estate school they are going to teach you how to use the forms, and all that, which you do need, but that is not going to teach you how to do business. Our job here at Waypost is turn the training around backward. A lot of places you are going to get another 12 weeks or how to do forms and how to do this. What we do here is teach you how to build relationships, how to interact with prospects, how to show houses. Because it we don't get you to the point where you are actually services clients, you don't need to learn the forms or any of the other stuff because you will never get to that point.

If you are interested you can reach out to me. You can call me on my cell at (910) 262-7006 or email me at buddy@buddyblake.com and I'll be glad to have a conversation with you. If you would like to check out some interviews with real agents who have gone through this process, check out waypostjobs.com.