A Day in the Life of a REALTOR® Geek

Guest contributor Nobu Hata of NAR's The Member's Edge blog says:

For my first NAR blog post, I was asked to nerd out on you guys a little bit, so I decided to take the "Day in the life of..." route.  It's a glimpse into one of my final days as a practicing agent – just a couple months ago – with all the tools and practices I used in my business, plus a couple other bonus links to cool things agents across the country are implementing. I hope you enjoy it!

Tuesday, 7:30 am: A new day! Meeting day. Broker open house day. Buyer and seller decision day. Large coffee day, because I'll need it.

8:00 am: It's time to prepare for the all-office meeting. It's the first Tuesday of the month, so pouring over the previous month's MLS stats – absorption rate change, sales by neighborhood and zipcode, month-over-month and year-over-year change – is the name of the game. I dump the stats into a Powerpoint presentation which is then deployed to agents via the company shared Dropbox folder.

9:00 am: (Okay, more like 9:05ish-am.) The meeting begins! Agents, already prepped, come ready for conversation. Agents unable to attend in person are looped into the morning meeting via join.me. Heading into the fall, it's time to prepare for the winter lull and prepare for the following year's marketing with the stats at hand. Best tips for new marketing techniques are shared, best buys for technology are presented (iPad, Dell laptop/tablet hybrid, wifi, writeoffs baby!), emerging trends like collaborative client technology like Relay and Ziplogix are discussed, donuts are eaten.

10:00 am: A new listing taken the weekend before means a broker open house; typical for Tuesdays. Blog post on neighborhood points of interests is written and added to my website, fliers printed with URL to mobile video tour, ensure information of the home is up-to-date on all third party home search portals, and pick up 50 sandwiches (free food means high agent attendance).

11:00 am to 1:00 pm: It's at this point where I thank the Lord for mobile technology at a broker open house. Open Home Pro is launched on my iPad and all attending agents sign-in to the app for my sellers' benefit. I stream the Youtube home and neighborhood tour videos on my client's Lenovo laptop direct to their flat panel TV. Agents who think they have clients who'd be interested in the home are sent the neighborhood report and the home's website, complete with video and surrounding points of interest, in real-time via email.

2:00 pm to 3:30 pm: Towards the latter part of the day and into the night, it's game-time for my "right now" clients and time to prep for my new seller referral and buyer clients ready to pull the trigger. For my new sellers, it's about "getting to know them" with the info that I know: social media presence and Google search returns of them and their home. I've got to tell these guys to tone it down a bit on the social media end of things. For my buyers, we're seeing two "final contender" homes so I print out neighborhood reports on the homes they like, along with the REALTORS Property Resource® reports that bore down home information to specific facts with flood maps and US Census demographic data – the husband's an engineer and will love this info.

4:00 pm to 5:00 pm: I meet my new seller clients in their home and the pep talk begins. Agency and a seller rep contract is talked about and signed – they "know" all about me from my Google search returns, website content, conversations with their friends who used me in a transaction the previous year and a website called socialcheck.me. Trust, rapport, all there. I, in turn, ask them what their online and mobile search habits are; where they go, what apps they used, what they do online once they get there, their perspective on the experience so far (they've been researching online for the last six months) and re-educate them. They aren't the most technologically inclined, but I quickly "gift" them the DocuSign Ink app for their iPads and give them a 10 minute crash-course on how to use it, preparing them for what will be a multiple offer situation to come, where time is of the essence. I'll be back this coming weekend to follow-up on their homework and to sign the listing paperwork to put the home on the market the following week.

6:00 pm to 8:00 pm: I meet my buyer clients and show them the two houses they're interested in, each for the second time. We share a sync'd Evernote notebook where all our notes and thoughts from the initial home showings are referenced for the second time, with the only additions being the neighborhood and RPR reports (uploaded earlier in the day) augmenting their thoughts and feelings for the home. I urge my clients to light up the Yelp iPhone app to check out reviews of the local points of interest and they hit up a local burger joint because of it. Best. Burger. Ever.

9:00 pm to 10:00 pm: The buyers – as young as they are – are pretty old school and refuse to use DocuSign to help speed up the process. Instead, we have a Skype conversation and go through the Purchase Agreement page by page, signing manually as we go while I answer questions in real time, in person (so to speak). Engineer hubby scans and emails me the contract.

10:15ish: The listing agent is still awake, and we chat – his clients will probably not reply to our offer until the morning. I send him the contract via HelloFax (which I scribble down to research later).

11:00 pm: Go to sleep. Ready to repeat tomorrow.

To view the original article, visit The Member's Edge blog.