Hey, I’m Jeff Bernheisel from M Realty…

Fairly often the response I get to this greeting from other local Portland Real Estate agents is something along the lines of “oh yeah, you guys are that “high tech” company doing all that “internet stuff”, right?”

It’s funny how that works I guess. I don’t necessarily consider a lot of what we do to be “high tech”.

I mean, yeah, we’re fairly active in social media on Facebook and Twitter… We interact with our clients largely via online media, and we’re starting to rely heavily on digital vs traditional when it comes to documents and forms (we’re currently knee deep in integrating DocuSign directly into our custom online form management system). But, if you really stop and look at the heart of our agent’s businesses… you may be surprised at what you find.

In the past, the foundation of most successful Real Estate careers was built upon being able to get out and talk to people. No amount of technology has or is going to change that. We know this. We also know that the social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and your Real Estate website can provide another layer of new business on top of your already successful career, if applied correctly. Plus, we know that sometimes even the most successful agents can use a little help when it comes to execution and being held accountable to a consistent plan. This is where we REALLY shine at M Realty, and there is NOTHING high tech about that.

Most of our agents have consistently closed anywhere from 10-20 transactions per year over the span of their careers. They know how to sell homes. In other words, they know how to talk to people and have Real Estate conversations. They know the answer to “How’s the Market?” They join M Realty because they’re looking to take their business to the next level by layering on the technologies we make available to them (websites, IDX, etc). You know, all that “internet stuff”. But, when we accept agents into the ranks of M, we don’t just instantly start throwing these technologies at them and hope something sticks. We have a process. We create a plan.

This process generally revolves around an initial strengths assessment, where we work with the agent on figuring out where their past successes have come from, if we can build upon them, and how to avoid cannibalizing them while we begin working on the new plan to layer the “appropriate technologies” on top. By “appropriate technologies” I mean it wouldn’t make sense to tell an agent to start reaching out to his/her Facebook friends, if they are not active on Facebook. In fact, a lot of time can be wasted doing such activities, but we usually uncover things of that nature in the weekly accountability meetings.

Weekly accountability meetings? Yes you read correctly… We have weekly accountability meetings with most of our agents. Again, nothing high tech there. Combined with the fact that we create a custom marketing and business management plan for each agent, we think it’s a winning combination and a huge value add over other brokerages in the area. So far, every agent that volunteered to be part of this process would agree and we’ve seen nothing but positive results.

So what does all this mean for YOU? Well, it means if you’re an agent that can demonstrate past successes and you’re looking to take your business to that “next level”, you now know who to contact…