Apr. 26, 2007 - Unoriginal Sin

One of the basic truths of practicing real estate as a business is that you have to differentiate yourself from the pack.  There are plenty of people in this industry.  There are Brokers, sales agents, listing agents, buyers agents, franchise companies, independent companies, boutique companies, full service, flat fee, fee for service and whatever else is soon to be invented.  When it comes to the mortgage end of things you have mortgage brokers, mortgage bankers, credit unions, banks and loan sharks.  Then you have all kinds of inspectors, home inspectors, mold inspectors, plumbing inspectors, electrical inspectors, termite inspectors, structural engineers and Inspector Gadget.  Recent developements include home stagers, virtual tour photographers, virtual assistants, web designers, home warranty sellers and lets not forget the we know how to do it, but we would rather make our money teaching you how to do because it really is kind of hard to make a living doing it ourselves gurus of real estate.

As you can see there are a lot of people all trying to do the same thing and so originality counts.  Do you have any idea how many "Spouses Selling Houses" there are out there.  Go ahead and GOOGLE® that phrase.  There have got to be thousands of people in this land "Selling" it "One Yard At Time".  These are all cute tag lines and I guess they would be pretty relevent if we where doing cute circus tricks or something.

Then there are the folks who obviously must think that they are the only ones who get post card catalogs from Color For Real Estate.  "My Priorities Are Simple. They're Yours" and "You Don't Sort Of Want To Sell Your Home, And I'm Not About To Kind Of Market It" are both blatant rip offs that I see in peoples newspaper ads and on websites all of the time.  Come on people, have an original thought.

Did you ever notice how when one of the gurus goes on tour and comes to your area, very soon the area is flooded with a bunch of the same marketing material?  Yup, the names and the faces may be different but the gist of the pieces are identical.  

This is what I call The Unoriginal Sin.   

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