Oh. My. God. My business partner sent me a link to this video the other day and thought I could have some fun with it. It appears to be a takeoff on a famous speech that Paul Harvey gave at a Future Farmers Of America convention in 1978: So God Made A Farmer, which was the basis of a Ram truck Superbowl ad last year. Of course it’s called So God Made A Realtor and it appears to have been produced by a real estate brokerage called Intero Real Estate Services.
Wow! Is this for real? Someone sure suffers from a false sense of importance in order to justify their high real estate commissions. I will give them credit though for finding a darn good Paul Harvey impersonator.
Where should I begin? Well, at the beginning they claim that realtors are God’s caretakers. Hmmm. By what stretch of the imagination? Then they go on to talk about realtors waking up before dawn but based upon the number of email responses I get from realtors before dawn I’d say that doesn’t happen a lot.
The biggest issue is that if you listen carefully most of what they talk about in this video has nothing to do with serving the home buyer or seller but everything to do with building a real estate business and how difficult it is to work on a commission. This is the dirty little secret of real estate. About half the time and cost is in generating business and that is what drives up commissions – without adding any value for the client. For instance, those presentations they reference are about convincing the buyer or seller to work with you and that’s when the real estate agent is trying to “sell like Carnegie” and having to “deal with rejections” and “knocking on doors and being ignored”. The same is true for direct mail efforts and “delivering note pads” or whatever. And the reason that realtors go to school board meetings and church events and volunteer organizations is to meet people and establish relationships that they hope will generate business down the road. So are we supposed to pity realtors because it’s so hard for them to get clients?
Boy, it sure does seem as though this video is trying to depict realtors as some kind of gift from God and real estate as a noble profession. Judging from the YouTube comments below the video I’d say that that message only got to a bunch of realtors. In fact, realtors loved this video so much that many have created their own versions of it. If you’d like to see them just Google God Made A Realtor.
And if realtors are a gift from God then what are cosmetologists? Because a cosmetologist has to have 1500 hours of education before they can be licensed in Illinois while a real estate agent only has to sit through 90 hours of education and pass a test.
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