Industry Processes To Demystify

Processes that may be second nature to you could be extremely confusing or opaque to your clients. They may only know about foreclosures from movies like The Big Short or commercials or neighbors’ plights from a decade ago. Their only inkling of what a closing table actually looks like might come from stock images they saw on the front page of a website like this.

Of course, many of your clients will be fairly, if not very, informed, and you should never talk down to them. However, it is always useful to have tidbits in your back pocket that you can offer if the moment is right, and based on how they respond, you can gauge whether they may benefit from learning more about a process pertinent to the current situation.

Benefits to background knowledge

Your clients can profit a lot from background knowledge. The knowledge you provide may be extremely relevant, or it may be nonessential information that improves your professional-client relationship or offers them knowledge for the future. In other words, the way clients profit from shared information can be direct or indirect.

In addition to different levels of benefit, clients can get a lot out of the information you share in fundamentally different ways. If you tell them how a foreclosure works behind the scenes, for example, one thing they may gain is how to avoid undergoing that process themselves. On a completely different note, they may see it as an opportunity for further real estate investment and look out more closely for foreclosure sale advertisements in the local newspaper.

In the last example, the information you shared could lead to a more prolonged business relationship if they become more interested in real estate through talking with you. Not everyone will be looking to invest in real estate, but more and more people are – or simply do not yet know what a lucrative investment it can be.

Types of illuminations

Of course, some conversations can do more harm than good. You don’t want to scare them away with horror stories from the housing bubble burst in 2008. But you can gauge where each client is at and decide whether they would benefit either from lessons from the past or suggestions for the future.

There are a lot of areas of expertise that real estate professionals may take for granted, and that they can instead take the opportunity to share with interested clients. Foreclosure is one example, as we have seen; and it offers many things to both buyers and sellers.

Buyers may become interested in the dynamics of a foreclosure sale for the purpose of future properties, and being so close the the process may also cause them to re-examine their credit and their mortgage. On the seller’s side, these individuals may have similar concerns, but coming from a different place; now that they have sold or are in the process of selling a property, what, realistically, do they want to do next?

The aim in educating your clients on topics they may not be familiar with is to increase their utility as participants in the local and ultimately the global real estate marketplace. Every little decision adds up to the big picture, and every nugget of information adds up to each decision.