The Experience Economy: Real Estate Edition

We live in a universe today where the experience often matters more than the actual product or service. Hey, my name is Chance Brown. I'm the broker owner of CB&A Realtors and I make video content for real estate agents because I'm passionate about helping them build great businesses. And I want to talk about the experience economy. I am fully bought in to the cult of Steve Jobs. I am an iPhone user. I have MacBooks. I have an iMac. I've got Apple TV. But the truth of the matter is almost every Android is a better phone than the iPhone. Like an actual better piece of machinery. But I don't want to be a green bubble person. I want to be a blue bubble person because those are my people. I will sacrifice having a more powerful, more useful piece of machinery for how I feel about having an iPhone or being part of that. I'd rather go to a restaurant that the food is okay but the experience is awesome than go to a Michelin star restaurant where the food is awesome but the experience sucked. If you read the book Unreasonable hospitality or setting the table or the experience economy like these are all things that resonate throughout those books is how we make people feel is often more important than what we do or what we sell. So my question for you is when people walk away from an experience with you, how do they feel? At our brokerage, we use a term, it's do for not to, are we doing for somebody or are we doing to somebody? Because they're both very different experiences. And they're both very different experiences that people will talk about. And so our goal, and we're not perfect, but our goal is always to do four, not to do two. How do people feel when they walk away from an interaction with you? Do they feel like they've been done for or do they feel like they've been done to?

As you look at systems, as you look at things, as you're building out your business, as you are planning for the new year, maybe one of the things you look at is what is that experience? Where are the friction points in doing a transaction with you or even getting in touch with you? And can you make that easier? Can you make it smoother? Can you take any place that would be a stop for somebody out of the equation so that they're all they're always getting to you or they're always getting to the place where they need to feel good about having chosen you as their Realtor. I think if you look at it from that standpoint and I will tell you I think that most of it is not a huge change. It's a huge change in verbiage. It's how you say what you say, not what you say that matters. I think if you look at your messaging, you look at it from the point of view of your client. like put yourself in their shoes and say, "Man, I wouldn't want that to happen to me. How do I change that so that I do want that to happen to me?" Because it's going to build up till we get to the closing table and they're going to have been thrilled at the work you've done.

They're going to realize how much work you've done and they're going to want to go out and tell everybody they know about this experience that they just had with their awesome Realtor. Not, "Hey, yeah, we used them to sell our home. It was pretty good. But hey, let me tell you about how cool it was when we used you to sell our home. That's what the difference is. We need to be looking at how we make this better for our clients. And I think that if you don't, you're going to get left behind by the people that do. The people that do create awesome experiences, the people that do go out of their way to analyze their customer experience journey to reduce friction in it to create satisfaction and happiness. I think that what you'll see is those people are going to necessarily win more business. So, think about the experience, think about how people feel, and if you need to change anything, just make some simple tweaks, measure how that works, and then do more if you need to. But I would look at your client experience journey and every point that there's friction, every point that there's a place where friction could occur, and try your best to resolve that. So, from the minute somebody raises their hand and says, "I want to buy and sell real estate."