I am on a long awaited vacation out of the country and thinking was not part of the plan, but Andrea Swiedler posted Are you just talking the talk? Or do you walk the long, hard walk too? and leaving a comment for her I could not avoid thinking and now I can blame her for ruined vacation (LOL).
I thought about all these things that we often say, which are there to impress. We can say that we would put the ad into real estate magazines, but would not tell the Seller that they do not work. We do not do it just to fool the seller, but we know that others will say that, and it would look like they do something very valuable, and you don’t.
Usually it is not what you do; it is how what you do affects the sale of the property. But it is much easier to give people a list of what you do for the clients and make them believe that you would be running like a bee and the phones would turn red, and offers start coming…
Many years ago I was reading a lot about social research (they called it sociological research), I ran into a book by a German scientist, who worked for The Institute for Demoscopy in Allensbach, then West Germany, “one of Europe’s leading market-research and public-opinion firms, with 100 or more studies completed annually”.
They were predicting the results of elections with exceptional precision. I learned a lot from this book. I learned that it was not that simply asking questions and getting answers, not even asking smart questions and getting good answers. It is way more than that. The way it was built, was so that no matter how skilled you were, even if you were a researcher, you could not figure out what the goal of the poll was.
One question stunned me.
“What is your favorite color?”
How on earth this question could help them figure out the chances of a political candidate? Well, it couldn’t. But what it did was helping to gauge and cross gauge the interviewed.
So, what if you favorite color is red? Actually the color did not matter. It simply was an indication that you were not really critical, you were content. Because if you were not, then your answer would actually be a counter question:
“Color of what? A tie, a dress, a car?” See, if you were critical, then you would have shown it. And if not here, there were a lot of other smart questions which were designed to do just this.
So, this and tons of other clever questions strategically positioned in the interview helped the scientists not only get the answer, but know how actually people felt about the questions, and about the interview. We are peculiar creatures and lie for convenience. Last time I checked we all looked gorgeous…
I think we ask for a favorite color a lot of it in our business. We may not know the science behind it, but when an agent is telling people about the fact that 87% of people search for houses on the Internet, and we do not have a site (check Andrea’s blog post) and they bite, then we know that they are accepting us, they have good feeling about us.
Because if not, then they should have asked tough questions.
Oh, you put it on the Internet… So what? Who will find it there among billions of other records?
Oh, you will put an ad in local Pennysaver, so what happens next? Will it turn into a DollarLost?
What is your favorite color?
Comments(29)