I’m currently in the process of creating a database of contacts that I’ve been working on for the last two months as time permits. The first thing I’m realizing is I had no idea how many people I know. Just by going through my phone, piles of business cards in rubber band stacks, social media contacts, email lists and old emails I don’t use anymore, I’m still pulling up data. It was good advice from my new firm to put all the people I know into what they call your “sphere of influence”. At the same time, it’s a bit of a tedious task to catalog that much information, when in reality, I’ll probably only do business with 10-20% of the names I have saved, and it will be repeat business.
But as soon as your tempted to skip over a contact, my past experience is that the one person that you thought wouldn’t produce anything but casual conversation sends you business when you least expect it. I tend to be a little impatient with organizing when I already know how I want to approach the business. My strengths are most likely going to lie in private projects limited to a small circle of people, and possibly learning how to monetize advice I have to share from my past experiences.
It’s a bit frustrating because it seems like I might be wasting time, as this database assignment is structured for a beginning realtor open for business to the general public, when I’m already experienced in private investors that want me to create a profitable project, and I’ll get repeat business from them on my reputation. As I put my name out, I’m finding a lot of people don’t really understand all the phases of real estate, and that I don’t plan on being the typical picture of a realtor. If there’s a silver lining, what I think I can do with knowing so many people is create a second database of realtors that I can refer customers to, and simply get the referral fee. Doing a little research has revealed that good, refined databases of solid customer contacts can be bought and sold. Just thinking out loud...
