To Be Or Not To Be? That is the Question

With all the new subscribers come lots of great questions and comments, which is definitely my favorite part of doing the podcast, right next to developing the content. I love having quality conversations with intelligent people and to see the questions and comments that come in each week from all of you is really inspiring. I had a question come up a couple weeks ago from a listener and we had a nice discussion back and forth via email. I had the question come up again a couple times over the last couple weeks so I figured I’d talk about it on the show. The original question came from Janelle, who said, ‘Hey Blaine, just wanted to say I love the podcast and the topics you’ve been talking about lately. I was wondering what your thoughts were on Appraisers also being realtors, or vice versa. I am an appraiser who is thinking about becoming a realtor as well and I’m not sure if I’d be doing myself more harm than good by doing so. Would love your thoughts on this topic since I know you said your used to be a realtor as well”.  ​

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First off, thanks a million Janelle for asking the question and trusting that I may have something valuable to say on the topic. And thanks to the others who asked the same question. I certainly do have an opinion on it and that opinion has developed and evolved over many years so I’m going to try to do my best to express it from a couple angles. In answering Janelle’s question, I’m going to also offer some strategies for building your business that I know only a small minority will take advantage of. To do that, I have to delve into the topic of real estate agents a little bit deeper than just saying whether or not I think it’s a good or bad idea. I’ll definitely answer Janelle’s question but it will be the last part of the episode so stay tuned. 
  
Unlike many appraisers out there, I am not one of those who sees Realtors as ‘the enemy’, as I’ve seen it posted on several occasions on the internet. I honestly don’t even know what that means. The term ‘enemy’ is a very strong term and to be applying it to a group that is a valuable partner in the whole value chain of real estate is, as far as I am concerned, the absolute wrong attitude to have in this business and actually speaks to one of the big problems in this business. I don’t say that necessarily because I was a realtor, although I have no doubt that having been a realtor has formed part of my belief system about real estate agents and their role in our businesses. I say it because its just simple business 101!  
 
Identify the valuable strategic partners in your industry, make connections, become a resource,  and then help educate them and lift them up. If anybody out there wants a strategy for how to survive the next decade in this business, its that! Unfortunately, for many of you, your attitude, language, belief systems, and embedded paradigms in this regard will all but ensure your demise. The hatred for realtors runs deep in this business and I get it. There is a belief among many of you that sales people are all liars and cheats and would sell their mother down the river for a few shekels. Many of you also believe that realtors are the ones screwing up the markets by over selling and over pricing homes, lying on listings, not doing their due diligence and getting good info on the homes they list, and a host of other issues, all of which may have some truth. I have encountered the same issues as all of you have in this regard and we talk about it in our office all the time. The difference between the way we talk about it and the way many of you talk about it is that we talk about solutions and many of you just bitch about it on forums and facebook groups. We discuss ways to educate realtors about the issues we run into and how the quality of their information can be a real asset to our business.  
 
Can there be some difficult ones out there? Yep! Can there be newbies who don’t know what they’re doing? Yep! Can there be ones who over price, over sell, and under work?, Yep! Can there be some downright assholes who you simply hate to see pop up on the listing you have to call? Yep! They’re in every market in every city around the world. And as we have this conversation, in a parallel universe there is a real estate brokers meeting or realtor podcast going on where the word ‘realtor or agent’ in our podcast is replaced with the word ‘Appraiser’ in their meeting or podcast. They have similar issues with appraisers and I know it because I hear it in every single talk, meeting, workshop, or con ed that I lead. The asshole appraisers they’ve had to deal with who have no personality, who wont take any of their info, don’t care what they have to say, send nasty emails to them when they try to communicate, shoot them down on the phone, call them stupid, and on and on the list goes.  
 
I listen, like a good therapist would, and simply nod my head in agreement. When they’re all done venting I simply say, “I’m sorry folks. I’m sorry you’ve had such a horrible experience with some members of our industry. I cant promise you that it will never happen again because I don’t speak for any other appraisers in our market, I can only speak for me and my company. What I can assure you is that you wont have that experience with us. We wont always make you happy, we wont always be in agreement on value, we wont always make all of your deals sail through to the closing table and that’s not our job. Our job is to be an objective set of eyes and ears in the market for our client, the bank loaning the money for that asset, and to let them know what the market data says about the risk associated with this particular deal. Our job is not to hit a number, its not to make people happy, and its not to hold back or propel markets in a particular direction (a popular myth amongst agents). Understand that I am the only person in the whole transaction that is not motivated by a commission that is dependent on the deal closing and that is by design. It is the mechanism that allows us to remain a disinterested party in the transaction, to remain unbiased, and to remain objective.” 
 
I then go on discussing the topics at hand and we address some more of these issues at the end when we do Q&A. As I’ve said in past episodes, I’ve never, in 18 years of doing this, had a group leave a talk and not comment on all of the stuff they learned that they didn’t know about what we do. So many of them have no idea the standards and regulations we’re held to. They have no idea about Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, FHA, VA, and lender specific overlays and underwriting guidelines. They have no idea about revision requests and some of the often crazy requirements placed upon us by lenders, AMCs, and other users of our reports. They have no idea about state investigation boards and how much liability we have with every report.  
 
Is that there fault? Who cares whose fault it is! Blame is for the other guy to place. Blame is for the weak and losing side of an argument. We’re problem solvers so we don’t waste one minute of time trying to assign blame. We see a problem, we transmute the problem into an opportunity, we create dialogue that gets put into our talks and workshops, we express our point of view to them in the form of instruction on how they can be better agents for us, and we win, win, win! That’s called taking control of a situation and leveraging it in your favor and to your benefit. Where we see a problem with real estate agents, we design a solution and then we sell them on our solution to the problem. And our solution to almost every one of those problems is to have them use us in every possible scenario they can!  
 
Let me explain briefly what this is called so that you’re familiar with it when it pops up in other episodes and courses that we intend to put out in the future. This is called the push/pull method of business development. What I just expressed in that scenario and we employ in our market is what’s called the ‘pull’ side of a very sophisticated strategy for building a business. In almost every scenario one would encounter in life there are options in how it can be dealt with. Every problem has a spectrum of solutions. If you think of it like a small ruler, on the left side of the ruler (from 1-5 inches) moving toward the center are solutions we might call terrible to sub optimal. From the middle of the ruler to the far right (6-12 inches) the solutions get better. Presumably, at the far end of the ruler is the absolute best solution to the problem. Sometimes the absolute best option isn’t available to you in that moment but the idea is to remember that every problem has a multitude of solutions and your job as an intelligent thinking being is to get better and better at quickly analyzing the problem and then picking the best 2 or 3 solutions. You quickly eliminate the ones that may make the problem worse, you narrow down to the most optimal ones, and then you choose the best solution for the problem.  
 
With that being said, when it comes to building a business, there are a multitude of challenges in doing so. One of the challenges that almost every business faces is the challenge of getting business, selling their product or service, or getting the word out to the world about their solution to a particular problem. Appraisers and appraisal companies are no different in that regard. We have a few options available to us to get immediate business like signing up with an AMC, but I wouldn’t recommend building your business on that type of work. So, you set out to get a better mix of business. In doing so, you have a few options available to you, two of which are that you can push your product or service on to your customers and clients, and/or you can pull business from the market. Pushing your business onto the market is doing mailers, cold calling, telling the world how good you are, commercials, walking into banks and asking for their business, etc. Pulling business from the market is the more stealthy option whereby you become the recognized authority, resource, and ultimate provider of whatever product or service you offer. When you succeed in this way, the people in your market (your clients) become your defacto sales force, thus pulling the business to you. In essence, they refer clients to you, they tell the world about you, and they literally and figuratively ‘pull’ clients by the hand to your door. Both methods work and most businesses need to use both to be successful.  
 
If we take Apple as an example, they have some of the best marketing campaigns on the planet. Do they have the best products on the planet? No, in some cases not by a long shot. I have macbook pros, MacBook airs, iPads, iphones, and and Apple TV. I also have Lenovo laptops, Galaxy tablets, galaxy phones, and a variety of non apple products. In many cases, the pure specs on the non apple products blow away the specs on the apple products. Nevertheless, we bought into the cult of apple and have become evangelists for their products over the years overpaying and over selling their benefits to others thinking of buying them. We’ve become the defacto sales force for apple. They’ve effectively utilized the push pull method of putting their products and services into homes around the world. They push their products onto people through their marketing efforts and they pull the business to them via their more than typically motivated fan base of evangelists.  
 
The problem that many of you identify with regard to real estate agents is a real one, albeit one made even worse by the attitudes and personalities of a good many appraisers out there. However, as I say and teach in almost every episode, the language one uses to identify their surroundings will determine what they see and how they see it. If you call a real estate agent the enemy, you have an obligation to your subconscious mind to make sure they are the enemy lest you contradict yourself. Where there is a contradiction between what you consciously say and what you unconsciously believe and reinforce on a daily basis with your words,  the unconscious will always win. You cant simultaneously hold a conscious belief that real estate agents are a good source of potential business and also subconsciously believe they are the enemy. The subconscious belief will make all of your words, mannerisms, and actions congruent with that deeply held belief. They’ll smell it and never call or send business your way. To which many of you might say, “good, don’t want it!”. To which I would say…silly, grow up! Private work is some of the best work out there for appraisers and when its delivered to you with an endorsement from a respected real estate agent, price is rarely an issue and the people are pre-sold on your reputation. Those are clients that stay, say, and pay more! 
 
Another thing I believe is that every problem has within it the seeds of a solution. The problem has to simply be identified properly for the best solution on the spectrum to then be identified and deployed. This particular problem, or challenge, with regard to real estate agents, at least in my assessment of it, has been to get in front of it, become the voice and resource for them in my market, and by default then becoming the recognized authority on the topic, which in turn inspires many of them to become my defacto sales force sending us business in the way of pre-listing appraisals, divorce and legal work, estate appraisals, their own personal deals, and a variety of other services that we provide for them.  
 
The very first thing I would tell anyone and everyone listening is to remove the word enemy from your vocabulary when it comes to your business. Don’t call Realtors the enemy, don’t call lenders the enemy, don’t call AMCs the enemy, Fannie, Freddie, HUD…whoever! Remove the word from your lexicon, at least when it comes to your business. The word enemy has a negative charge and there’s only one way to deal with an enemy and that’s to defeat it. When you use that word, you’re constantly telling your subconscious mind that somebody is out to get you and they must be defeated. An inordinate amount of mental and emotional energy is spent dealing with this inside of you that would be much better utilized in your business, your home, the community, and for your own health and well being.  
 
Ok, now on to Janelle’s question. She asked about being both a realtor and an appraiser simultaneously and my hope in talking about the first part is that it partially answered Janelle’s question and also possibly inspired her to see huge opportunity in both businesses.  
  
Although I am not a fan of anybody splitting their efforts and energy in life and business, I understand how and why this happens in our business. So before I go further, I want to expand slightly on this idea of splitting your time and energy because I think there’s value in it. We all only have so much energy, creativity, time, and resources to be spread over our day and the activities that we choose to invest our time in. Anybody with children knows exactly what I’m talking about! You have no choice but to spread out your time, energy, and resources in a variety of different directions to make sure your children have all the love and experiences they need to become healthy productive young men and women and eventually adults who do the same. Often, what is left over after we give to our children, or even our significant others, is less than optimal for what we’d like to do or have for ourselves. Now apply this idea to your business. Especially If you’re already working off of limited time and energy because you’ve given to your family or others first, then trying to split up your time, energy and efforts between two related, but very different businesses, it can be a stretch and often what happens is one of the businesses gets the short end of the energy stick.  
  
Let’s say you focus on being a good realtor and farming your area for business, building your name and brand, and doing all of the important stuff needed to be successful in the real estate business, it becomes very difficult to then focus on what it takes to be a good appraiser. Not impossible by any means, just difficult. I know several in my market who do this and I would say they are always better at one than the other. Most of the ones I know who do it are better realtors than they are appraisers. I say this with some working knowledge of their work in both arenas. Not that they are bad at either one, they’re just not great at either. They may disagree with me, but having been in this market as a realtor, lender, and appraiser for almost 25 years, I know all of them and I know their work. All good people with the best of intentions, they’ll just never be great at either because of the split energy. I also know a good many lenders who will not work with them as appraisers because of their dual role as realtor and appraiser. Lenders are looking to work strategically with realtors AND appraisers, but they prospecting to realtors so that the realtor will send their buyer and seller business to the lender. Some of them see the dual role as a conflict of interest. I don’t necessarily see it that way but I understand the sentiment.

My point is more the energy requirements involved with trying to build two different businesses. Now, with that being said, and thinking of my own experience in all of those roles, as well as my knowledge of the local market and what it takes to be successful in all of those varied roles, I believe if I reactivated my real estate license and focused on that for the next couple years, while also being an appraiser, I’d tear up the market and quickly become a top producer based on what I know it takes. It sounds very egotistical, I know, but I’m expressing that in both the real estate sales side, as well as the appraisal business, the bar is fairly low for becoming really good in either business if you just do a few things really well.  
  
I’d focus on real estate sales, creating a team, marketing with video and podcasts, networking my ass off, build strategic partnerships, do speaking gigs, develop con-ed courses for realtors, do homebuyer workshops, build partnerships with attorneys, relocation departments of the big corporations in my area, and on and on it goes. All the while, I’d take the appraisal work that comes in to supplement my business building efforts in the real estate side. And that’s basically what happens with the dual real estate agent and appraiser. They are primarily real estate agents who also do appraisals occasionally. You have to focus on one over the other, just like you have to focus on your kids over some of your hobbies if you want to have respectful, happy, healthy children. I’m not saying not to do it Janelle, I’m just giving you some things to think about as you look at your options. My advice to anybody in any industry is to ‘burn your boat’, so to speak, and focus all your efforts in one area. I learned that lesson well while studying Zen and the martial arts. The power of directed focus is one of the most powerful forces in the universe! Where a mind is directed and focused, the resources and energy follow. 
  
Where the focus is split, the energy splits too and it’s never 50/50. It’s dispersed and lost in sometimes competing areas. Set your mind and your focus in one area and do it 100%. You’ll see the effort and results pay off in spades. Door will open for you and resources will flow to you in ways that you’d not recognize if you split your efforts and energy between two different areas. You can do it, for sure. That’s not a question. The question is which will suffer more by your split focus. If you’re thinking of building a real estate business, your real estate business will suffer or lag in ways you wont be able to identify if you’re doing both. If you’re looking to build your appraisal business, then that’s the one that suffers since your efforts to build up that business, at least to build it the right way, will conflict in some ways with your real estate business.  
  
I’ll end my advice on this topic by simply saying, you can do whatever you set your mind to and the fact that you asked the question means you are intelligent and aware and will do what’s right for you. I know there are others listening that operate this way and probably have some insights in this regard as well, and some that may conflict with or disagree with what I believe on this topic. I’d love to hear what some of you have to say on the topic if you do have some experience doing both real estate sales and appraising. Let’s discuss it over at the Real Value Podcast page. It’s brand spanking new and the place that I’d love to have some of you start gathering to have good quality discussions about the topics we discuss on the show. I’ll leave link in the show notes for the facebook page and also in the email that goes out to the Value Syndicate members.  
 
What’s a value syndicate member you ask? Great question! The value syndicate Is the new name for the former Real Value Tribe. To be a member is absolutely free, all you have to do is head over to real value cast or real value group.com and put in your best email address where you’d like me to deliver the podcast to you each week. It may be free, but its not without value! It’s the only way to receive the bonus content that I put out sometimes. I don’t record bonus content with every episode, but when I do make bonus content I only deliver it to the Value Syndicate members so as not to overload the regular listeners with too much stuff. The Value Syndicate subscription is our way of permission marketing, as Gary Vaynerchuk calls it. You give is permission to occasionally email you with some valuable content when we have it and we promise to add some value to your day, your week, your month, and hopefully your business as well. You also get the podcast delivered right to your email address each week so you never have to go searching for it. 
  
Last, but certainly not least, I’d like to give another shout out and unasked for, un-sponsored plug for the upcoming AppraiserFest coming on November 1st through the 3rd. Mark Skapinetz, Phil Crawford-Voice of Appraisal, Lori Noble, and some others, have undertaken to build something unlike our industry has ever seen. These kinds of events are not easy to put together either my friends! I have put together many a large conference in the defensive tactics business and they are a ton of work, usually a loss financially, but, of course, can be quite rewarding for the participants. The fact that the people putting AppraiserFest together have committed their time, their energy, and their personal resources to pull something like this off is good news for our industry! I say this for a few different reasons. One, from a leadership standpoint, It’s good to see leadership in our industry rise up and take the lead on some of the issues facing our industry. It may start small at first, but with a clear goal and vision, could very well grow into something very big in the future with some real positive effects for the participants, as well as a more unified voice at the upper levels of decision making in the industry.  
  
Second, its good news for our industry because, quite honestly, the weekend seminars that are common in our business can be, quite honestly, snooze fests! I’m all for learning and growing whenever and wherever one can. However, with the advent of the internet, we can sit in the comfort of our living rooms and learn new tactics and strategies for becoming better appraisers. If you’re going to take your hard earned resources and time to go spend a weekend with a bunch of appraisers, they’d better be the best and most motivated in the business so that you can come away with new energy, new ideas, and new motivation for being the best in your market. I, personally, have little interest in listening to Fannie Mae speak at a conference. I have little interest in listening to AlaMode, Bradford Technologies, Anow, Spark, or any other company speak at a weekend conference. They all have an online presence, they all have training videos, and they all have customer service departments that will walk you through their technology. That’s not the reason to go to a conference.  And I have little interest in traveling far away for a weekend to learn a new method of performing some kind of market analysis or a market extraction method of developing adjustments. Now, that’s just me and I know that’s the struggle for Phil, Mark, and Lori in getting appraisers to Appraiserfest because appraisers can be a tad introverted and like to sit at home. So, of course, they have to offer it as con-ed, which is awesome to have that as an additional benefit and what a great way to get some con-ed hours.  
  
With that being said, my hope for the AppraiserFest is that it becomes the place to be for Appraisers to learn more of the valuable skills they’re currently missing and in need of, and less of the stuff that may not matter as much in the bigger picture. That’s not to say that appraiser training doesn’t matter. We have an episode coming up that is preliminarily called, “thank you, but your services are not needed any more”, where we’ll talk about how all of the technical skills of the valuation business don’t mean a hill of beans in light of some of the other deficiencies exhibited by lots of appraisers and lots of appraisal offices. Just as we discussed splitting your energies in two or more areas on this episode, my hope for AppraiserFest is that they stay focused on the important areas they say that they will lest they simply become yet another industry trade show highlighting software, hardware, and technical training, along with some boring speeches about the market and statistics. We can get all of that stuff online and on the news every day and much of it doesn’t help our businesses in any appreciable way. It may help us be better informed in some way, but unless you turn that into a way to get more business, produce better reports, market to the public why you’re the best, become more efficient in your business, make more money, live better lives, help more people, and build a better mousetrap, its all more useless noise in an extremely noisy world.  ​

The vital skills that so very many appraisers are in need of are marketing, communication, sales, leadership, meditation, health and wellness, goal setting and business planning, setting up a killer appraisal office, how to properly mentor other appraisers, creating efficiencies and optimization in an appraisal business, going mobile, website development, SEO, branding, speaking, creating content, investing and saving, best accounting practices for an appraisal business, using technology better, social media best practices, social media marketing, and a few other things that I sincerely hope we’ll start to see in some of the expos and fests in our industry.
And to Janelle, go kick some ass in whatever you choose to do. If its in both the real estate and appraising world, I’m confident after today you will figure out the absolute best way to make that happen for you. Surround yourself with positive uplifting people in both industries and you’ll make a difference in the world! 

That’s it my friends, Thanks again for listening and I look forward to chatting with you again soon, I’m out!