I used to be a blogger here in the Rain on a pretty active basis.
I would write daily and I loved meeting all kinds of new friends here.
It was new.
It was cool.
It was awesome marketing.
And I thought ActiveRain was probably the future of Real Estate marketing.
But then two things happened:
1)I burned myself out from over blogging (Yep, you can do that)
2)We had this little Real Estate market crash problem across the country
So I kept selling Real Estate, but I couldn't blog.
The words wouldn't come.
They used to come.
But they wouldn't come any longer.
Call it writer's block. Call it burn out. Call it whatever you want.
Whatever it was, it was frustrating.
In the meantime, I did what I could to survive in the weird world of Real Estate and made it through to the other side (you should be hearing The Doors in your head right about now).
Today, I find myself working with my son and leading a team of seven other agents.
That's pretty cool. And challenging. And terrifying. And awesome.
But I also find that I am reminded that what goes around comes around.
With the return of Real Estate, comes the return of the money grubbing trolls who want to sell you crap leads or a host of other "must have" services.
For example, yesterday I looked into a couple of CRM programs online for my new team. And wouldn't you know it, to see the demo, you have to put in your contact information.
I knew what was going to happen.
And it did.
Not an hour later...no wait...not 2 minutes later, my phone started blowing up.
I couldn't talk right then as I had Real Estate business to attend to, so I let the call go to voicemail.
Anybody wanna guess how many times they called yesterday? Yeah, try 5 times!
And then this morning, I'm sitting in my kitchen, working on the computer, and the phone rings. It's a local number so I answer it. Guess who is on the line? Yep, the troll who must speak to me about my inquiry.
Uh, at 8:25 a.m.? I don't think so.
Tommy left me a message indicating he needed to talk to me to get a better understanding of my needs, blah, blah, blah - fading off to obscurity here....
The only problem was he called me at 8:15 a.m. Unprofessional. I don't care if he's in a different time zone or if he's on a beach drinking a drink with a little umbrella in it. He'd better know my time zone if he wants my business.
And he ought to know better than to call that early. Somebody's momma didn't teach her boy common sense.
And the fact that he used a fake local number on caller ID to hide the identity of the company goes all through me. I do not work with ANY company that will disguise their out of town number as a local number. It's dishonest and pretty crappy.
Tommy just lost a sale due to those two factors.
Real shame too. His program looked kind of interesting.
If you're new to Real Estate, listen up.
Be careful what you spend your money on.
Be careful of promised leads and "impressions." It can be a big ruse to get way down deep in your pocket.
And be remember this. People who live in and work in the Rain are people you can typically trust and look to for good advice and answers.
Thank goodness Lenn Harley never experienced burnout!
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