What tips can you give other leaders to better know what their customers are looking for?
We are fortunate to have a lot of buyers coming in on a regular basis, so we have a lot of contact with our customers. I don’t know if that’s always the case, but if you have the opportunity to get in front of your customers, that is the best possible source of information. If you don’t, I don’t know for all businesses how they get in touch with their customers, but for us, we are in front of the customer every single day.
We are dealing with people who are looking for a home. There was a time when the market was super heated and people were looking for real estate to invest in, not so much as a home. As the market turned, that sort of changed almost overnight. You started to see people who were just looking for a place to live and they were looking for a home. They weren’t looking for an investment that was going to be worth 5 percent the following year.
What else did you do to get through?
We have a lot of people working with us who are hardworking agents. A lot of brokerages rely on what they call a 90/10 rule, where basically they have 10 percent of agents supplying 90 percent of their income. We kind of go the opposite way. Most of the people that work for us are producers, so we haven’t had to waste a lot of time dealing with agents that are new and really don’t know what they are doing and need a lot of direction. We have had a selective quality. The benefit to our company is we have quality agents, and as we’ve evolved, they have continued to do business.
It’s knowing how business operates and how I can work harder and apply myself within my industry to make money. That’s been my advantage. I don’t know if I would have any specific advice unless it was speaking about a specific industry other than to say if you know your industry and you know how it works, just working harder at it and being diligent as you can be, ultimately, you will be successful. We actually thrived in one of the worst economic downturns in recent economic history by just kind of buckling down and working very hard. It’s just the nuts and bolts of and business, I suppose.
How to reach: DOMA Properties, (562) 481-3800 or http://www.domaproperties.com/
