Change is difficult. It doesn’t matter whether it involves rolling out a new corporate initiative in a large company or trying to eat healthier for a New Year’s resolution. It’s not that the change itself is complicated. Oftentimes, it’s very simple. What’s hard is breaking out of habitual behavior.
There’s a scientific reason for that, as it turns out. As well-known business authors and academics Chip and Dan Heath point out in their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by (Broadway Books, 2010), making conscious judgments about what to do and how to do it requires using a mental resource — the part of your brain that makes executive decisions — that is very easily depleted.
Let’s say you’ve been smoking for 20 years and want to quit. The main problem is not the fact that you enjoy smoking or the addictive properties of nicotine, according to the Heath brothers, although those could play a role. The issue is that every “touch point” you have with cigarettes is ingrained in your consciousness so that you can do it automatically and practically without effort. You pick up a pack when you go to the drugstore or supermarket. You carry it around in your pocket. You take periodic breaks from working to smoke. You light one up after meals. And all of this is done without your brain actively telling you to do it.
Conversely, giving all of that up requires the kind of mental fortitude and focus you might associate with solving quadratic equations. You may stay strong in your resistance to smoking for a few days, but there’s a very good chance you’ll backslide at some point. And it’s not because you’re weak or a bad person, a common sentiment among people who beat themselves up for falling short of goals. It’s because human beings are wired to be creatures of habit. Being completely cognizant of what you’re doing, or thinking deeply and creatively about something new, is the equivalent of running an automobile engine at high RPMs. It’s fine for quick acceleration, but you’re going to burn out your brain if you keep it in that state over an extended period of time. Continue reading »
When I was a kid, I loved comic books. Reading about the exploits of the Uncanny X-Men, the Amazing Spider Man, and the Incredible Hulk filled many of the evenings and weekends of my childhood. (Oh, who am I kidding? It filled a lot of the time I spent in my elementary school classes too.)
The comic-book version of How to Master the Art of Selling (2011) put out by SmarterComics was not, admittedly, as exciting as my pre-adolescent journeys to the Marvel Universe. But what it does offer is a very user-friendly explanation of the basics of sales that can be digested in a single sitting.
In panel after panel, a caricature of author Tom Hopkins walks the reader through animated descriptions of selling concepts like motivation and presentation. If you consider yourself a master or if you’re looking for complex, arcane tips on how to sell, there may not be a lot here for you besides an entertaining, breezy read. But if you’re new to the business, or need a reaffirmation of the fundamentals, it’s worth checking out.
FROM THE BOOK: 5 LESSONS FOR REAL ESTATE PROS
▪ Learn to look at the bright side of rejection: Even the best salespeople will face a great deal of rejection throughout their careers. Bouncing back quickly from rejection requires taking certain views of those situations. Take lessons from these situations, or find the humor in them, in order to move on and up.
▪ Emotion first, logic second: People’s first impressions upon being introduced to a new product or service are grounded in feelings. A more analytical evaluation comes later, sometimes as to justify a purchase after it’s happened. As Hopkins points out, “You prequalify people by finding out whether the emotion that’s necessary to carry the sale to completion exists or can be created.”
▪ Don’t spend too much time face-to-face with clients and customers: Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
Whether it’s McMansions or manufactured homes, chances are you’ve dealt with at least one property that was influenced in some way by William Levitt. What’s that? You’ve never heard of William Levitt? Well, that’s not too surprising. Even though he was the closest thing the housing industry had to Henry Ford, the vast majority of Americans probably have no idea who he is.
But most of them are almost certainly familiar with his handiwork. That’s because he was responsible for turning a potato field in western Long Island into Levittown, N.Y., the first post-World War II suburb, and a town widely considered to be the progenitor of “Suburbia” as an American cultural institution.
Real estate writer Steve Bergsman explores Levitt’s legacy in his new book, Growing Up Levittown: In a Time of Conformity, Controversy and Cultural Crisis (Dancing Traveller Media, 2011). Bergsman is more intimately familiar with that legacy than most: His family moved to Levittown in 1954.
Despite that familiarity — or perhaps because of it — there were some surprises for Bergsman as he was doing research for the book.
“When I moved there, I was a young child and didn’t know the history,” he explains. “I had a happy childhood and enjoyed living in Levittown. But as I researched Levittown, I realized it had a bad name in the 1950s and 1960s.”
The reason? Public intellectuals across the political spectrum saw Levittown as an abomination, Bergsman says. Left-leaning thinkers viewed it as artificial and conformist, while many on the right attacked it out of something like snobbery for its apparent lack of style and quality. Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
Of all the books I’ve read that attempt to get at the central causes of the economic downturn, Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia (Spiegel & Grau, 2010) is the definitely the most vitriolic. It’s also the funniest, and the author’s humor and flair for language help push the reader through complicated, often depressing subject matter.
Interestingly, Taibbi draws many of the same conclusions about the financial meltdown of 2007-08 that Michael Lewis did in his book The Big Short — chiefly, that the system wasn’t brought to the brink by a few bad apples, but rather by extensive rot in the tree itself.
The main difference between his book and Lewis’ is that Taibbi covers a lot more ground. Whereas Lewis offers corresponding narratives of a handful of investors to explain why the financial system collapsed a few years ago, Taibbi focuses much more on the big picture, exploring complex business, political, and regulatory problems that have affected the U.S. economy for decades.
Taken together, these books can give anyone a comprehensible explanation of not just the recent financial crisis, but also how economic bubbles get inflated, then popped.
FROM THE BOOK: 5 LESSONS FOR REAL ESTATE
▪ Predatory lending is real: Although he generally doesn’t get into the impact of these macroeconomic issues on individuals, Taibbi does recount the interesting story of Eljon Williams. An African-American sheriff’s deputy from Dorchester, Mass., Williams owned a three-flat and rented out two stories. One day, he heard a “mortgage expert” on the radio talking about scams that targeted minority home buyers. Williams contacted this man, who then reviewed his mortgage and actually did find some irregular fees. Naturally, when Williams later sought to move up to a two-bedroom single-family home, he sought this individual’s help. However, despite Williams’ insistence on getting a fixed-rate loan, the man put him in an adjustable-rate mortgage. When Williams demanded an explanation after receiving a notice that his monthly payments were going up, the guy initially dodged inquiries, then disappeared. The reason Williams and so many other home buyers were put into ARMs, sometimes against their explicit wishes, was the fact that loan officers collected bigger fees on these loans than the standard, 30-year fixed mortgages. Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
We need to talk.
Those aren’t my words. It’s from Catherine Blyth’s recent book, The Art of Conversation: A Guided Tour of a Neglected Pleasure (Gotham Books, 2009). In fact, she starts it off with that sentence.
According to Blyth, an English writer, the decline of this “art form” is more than just a mere cultural problem; it represents a nearly existential challenge to civilization itself. If a society doesn’t emphasize skill in conversation, it can result in social fragmentation, personal isolation, and a general loss of humanity.
Fortunately, the book is not all about making a case for conversation as a source of civilizational salvation. That would probably make for a heavy, tedious tome. Instead, most of it covers — in a light and humorous way — practical methods for improving one’s ability to verbally connect with others, from “Hello” to “Goodbye” and practically everything in between.
There are plenty of interesting suggestions here, but Blyth’s overall point can be summed up as follows: Great conversation does not equal great talking; it’s not a scripted performance, but rather a spontaneous, open give-and-take between two or more enthusiastic participants.
For real estate pros, who are ultimately in the relationship business, conversation can be a powerful tool for achieving success. Below are some of the key ideas they can take away from reading this book.
FROM THE BOOK: 5 LESSONS FOR THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY
1. Silence is (or can be) golden: Silence gets a bad rap, mainly because an overly long break in a conversation can create immediate discomfort among the participants. But disciplined, confident speakers know silence can be used to their advantage. Pauses can be a great way to emphasize a point, and an effective method for putting pressure on another party in a negotiation. Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
QUICK SKIM
Following the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2007 and subsequent housing crisis, the line from most commentators was that no one saw it coming. The near-collapse of finance and credit in this country was like a bolt from the blue. Who could have possibly predicted it?
Another bit of post-meltdown conventional wisdom was that all the parties involved — Fannie and Freddie, government regulators and policy makers, Wall Street’s biggest banks, investment ratings agencies, mortgage brokers, borrowers, and even real estate practitioners — played some part in the collapse. The overall system was more or less healthy, but the selfish and shortsighted decisions of some “bad actors” from all of these groups led to market failure.
Michael Lewis, acclaimed author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side, offers a contrarian perspective on both of these phenomena in his most recent book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2010). Regarding the first point, there were at least a few people who figured out what was going on in the financial markets. For them, it was never a matter of whether there would be a day of reckoning or not — it was just a question of when. They invested accordingly, and their bets paid off big as the economic edifice came crashing down.
That part of the book is interesting, but the more important issue for readers is the second one. Lewis, who once worked on Wall Street, says the origins of the collapse were not in the rapacious greed of a few scoundrels from various groups, but rather in systemic problems — some of which have been in place for several decades — that create reckless investments and obfuscate risk. To that end, Lewis discusses the following details to make a very compelling case.
FROM THE BOOK: 5 LESSONS FOR THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
If you’ve gotten past the title of this post, you may be thinking: This guy wrote about a basketball book for a real estate blog? How self-indulgent is that? The answer: very self-indulgent. I admit it. But let me say two things in my defense. First, I didn’t start this book with the intention of covering it in The Weekly Book Scan. It’s something I’m reading in my free time, just for fun.
Second, although he didn’t intend to do it in The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons inadvertently delineates the conditions for a cohesive, high-performing real estate brokerage. He does this in the course of his discussion of the characteristics of great basketball players and teams, which are, as it turns out, very transferable to brokerages and the associates who work for them.
According to Simmons, professional basketball is today afflicted by an obsession with numbers. Too many team managers, coaches, journalists, and players have an unhealthy fixation on individual statistics, and don’t pay enough attention to the most important stats of all: team wins and championships. For instance, Allen Iverson led the NBA in scoring four times, while Tim Duncan led the San Antonio Spurs to four NBA championships. So who’s the better player? Iverson, on paper. On the court, where the game is actually played, it’s Duncan.
Similarly, in a brokerage, several associates may have good individual numbers, but if you don’t have the right mix of personalities, experience, drive, and specialization, any success you have may be short-lived. Effective broker-owners — and basketball managers and coaches — should aim to build a great team, not just a haphazard assemblage of talent. Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
Famed investor Sam Zell, who made his fortune in commercial real estate, is part of the same billionaire genus as Rupert Murdoch and Bill Gates. Most people tend to view him as either a hero or a tyrant, with very little middle ground in between. This controversial figure has been in the headlines quite a bit over the past couple of years after he bought the Tribune Co. (which owns the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times) and sold the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field (which were owned by the Tribune Co.).
(Disclosure: My wife worked at the Zell-owned Equity Residential for about a year, and even met the guy once at an office Christmas party. He also has an office in the Tribune Tower, which I’m looking at through the window of NAR headquarters as I’m typing this. Sometimes we wave to each other from across the street. OK, I made that last part up.)
Anyway, there’s little doubt as to whether Ben Johnson, author of Money Talks, Bullsh*t Walks: Inside the Contrarian Mind of Billionaire Mogul Sam Zell, falls into the superstar or villain camp. His book about Zell’s rise to power and navigation of complex business deals frequently borders on hero worship (though, to be fair, this is toned down somewhat as Johnson recounts the Tribune deal).
Is Zell a wildly successful businessman because of his inimitable, analytical mind, or because of his doggedness and determination? That’s the kind of conundrum that Johnson seems to present to the reader throughout the book — rather than, for instance, how can someone who is such a fierce competitor hate actual competition so much? (Zell is quoted as saying, “The best thing to have in the world is a monopoly … I’m more than willing to leave all the rest of the highly competitive world to everyone else.” It would be like Tom Brady saying, “I love winning Super Bowls, but I hate playing football.”) Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
QUICK SKIM
As Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” In his book Bailout Nation, author Barry Ritholtz lays out the causes and effects of the recent economic downturn in a voluminous feast for the market-minded reader. In a clear and entertaining fashion, he explains how the evolution of big business and big government led us to our current state, and offers important lessons about the interrelationship of money, credit, and value along the way. He also discusses problems that led to a meltdown in real estate, and provides a few suggestions on how to avoid these difficulties in the future.
In sum, if you’ve ever wondered why the Federal Reserve exists, why Bear Stearns was bailed out but Lehman Brothers wasn’t, and why your local classic rock radio station seems to play the same 20 songs over and over again, this book is for you. Continue reading »
By Shane Singh, Editorial Intern, REALTOR® Magazine
In The Whuffie Factor (Crown Business, 2009), author Tara Hunt explains how businesses can harness the power of social capital to their benefit, whether it is in the form of Facebook profiles, wikis, or tweets.
Hunt says businesses should use the Web to connect with their customers and create consumer loyalty. That’s just a preview of the advice she’ll dispense during her presentation, “Whuffie for Real Estate Professionals: How Social Capital Sells,” at the 2009 REALTORS Conference & Expo in November. Until then, here are some of her tips on how to capitalize on Twitter’s growing popularity by turning 140-characters into a business tool: Continue reading »
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