Last December, I was contacted by the F. C. Tucker Realtor's training department and was asked if I would do an educational seminar with some of their agents. They explained that they wanted to offer this session to any agents that were interested in learning about Home Staging and how to discuss Staging with their clients. As a side note, the F. C. Tucker Company is the largest Real Estate Company here in Indianapolis with over 650 agents. Anyhow, because I am a very big advocate of educating agents and home sellers on the value of home staging, I jumped at the chance.
The session was scheduled for March, 2008 so I had plenty of time to prepare for this upcoming 2-hour program. So, December through early March I worked along with Patty Terrell, my lead design consultant and we built a presentation, prepared handouts, etc. As the training program got closer, I would call and inquire about interest in the program so I would know how much material I would need to have ready. When I called, this was the response, "Well we don't know the exact number but you can generally count on around 30 people for this type of session." So 30 it was, we put the finishing touches on the program and got all of the material prepared.
Now, fast forward to a few days before the presentation.; I called my contact for the training session just to make sure that a projector was there ready for my power point presentation and in passing I asked again "Any idea how many agents will be there?" She said again that she "wasn't sure but would check with registration and let me know" When she called me back several hours later I could just tell from her voice that something wasn't right. I asked something like "I guess no one signed up?" And to my shock she said "No, in fact I need to ask you to hold a second session in the afternoon; is that possible? We have had over 80 agents and brokers register and the room will only hold 50. She went on to say that besides adding another session for that afternoon, we need to schedule this again later in the year because the requests went well over what we could do in two sessions."
The only thing that kept me from just setting down and having a good old fashion cry for joy was the fact that I now needed to get 50 more presentation packets prepared in one day. Our team went into overdrive and the program went very well. The group was very tentative and asked terrific questions. Because of the number of attendees, I asked all of my consultants to attend the sessions and be part of the presentation and to help answer questions. I was so proud of my whole team. It was the first time I had seen them in action doing the PR stuff and I have to tell you they represented our industry very well.
But, the day was not over, I had been asked several weeks before to attend a Tucker Awards dinner, held annually for their vendor support program. The dinner was held the evening of the same day of my training sessions. Well, another big surprise. Our company was nominated for a service award for "Best in Class" or classification for 2007. OMG, It wasn't until several days later that I sat and thought about what had happened? A year ago I couldn't get an appointment with some of the very Realtors that sat in my home staging training session.
Since that time I have talked to agents I work with about why they are interested now and most of them agree that it is simply because in education there is knowledge and with knowledge there becomes understanding and with understanding becomes acceptance.
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