Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood or Mister Rogers is an American icon. It was the longest running children’s television show on PBS. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was characterized by the song…that song…you know the song. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Was Mr. Rogers a real estate agent? 

Each of his shows were at some time during the segment visited and interrupted by a puppet segment chronicling occurrences in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. There were many characters in the Neighborhood of Make Believe. Rogers deliberately made clear the distinction between the “real world” and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe to both the children viewers and their parents by showing a transition between the two worlds via a makeshift tunnel.

The Neighborhood of Make-Believe was ruled by King Friday XIII. He was an affable chap, relatively egocentric, irrational, resistant to change, and temperamental, although seemingly open-minded enough to listen when told he is wrong. Sort of like Lawrence Yun, or maybe his predecessor David Lereah.

Are you running your real estate business in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe? The mantra, “real estate is local” which is now the NAR response to projections gone wrong is truly being taken as law by the inhabitants of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

A mantra is defined by webster’s dictionary as “a sacred verbal formula repeated in prayer, meditation, or incantation, such as an invocation of a god, a magic spell, or a syllable or portion of scripture containing mystical potentialities”.

Wow! Do you know that Lawrence Yun actually said “real estate is local” is the mantra for the NAR?

By the way, the only people who believe this statement are indeed the people who live in this mythical village of ignorance, the real estate agent.

You see, in a land far, far away called Realityville, The NAR used to tout real estate as global. It was not too long ago that they espoused the virtue of actually going out beyond the boundaries of the fantasy neighborhood. Japan, Great Britain, Germany, South America…these were the markets that they advised that you should seek to divide and conquer. Great efforts were made to obtain commissionable investment from foreign investors.

However, they did not count on a Witch from the West arriving in the form of a bubble crashing the party and devaluing properties far and wide. So the horn was blown and the bells tolled and a retreat back to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe was in full force and effect.

Now, it seems that it has been repeated so much it is actually believed. Fantasy has become reality for many, many, real estate agents. Especially those trying to avoid the lure of a better life at Walmart.

With a median age of 51 years, you would think that the real estate agent masses would stop playing make believe but now with Mr. Rogers gone they have found a new enclave of Active Rain and other safe havens for like-minded refugees from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

This is a recent phenomenon and was cultivated to combat the media onslaught on the NAR for completely useless issuance of false forecasts and erroneous data. The NAR must not remember what it prints or says in public.

Ten years ago, at the NAR convention in New Orleans, they shouted that real estate became national, even global. Realtors fell over one another signing cooperative agreements with budding real estate organizations in the former Soviet republics, among other countries.

In an effort to save face, last year former chief economist David Lereah, who had been pushing the wider view, narrowed it local again. He then was ousted and a new lamb, Lawrence Yun, was brought in and offered up as a sacrifice.

Let’s inject a bit of reality into this situation. With a bit of analysis of the world we now live in today.

1. If real estate is local, why do you have a blog or a website?
Why worry about RSS feeds, SEO, downtime, opt-in forms…why bother? If real estate is local, get out and go knock on the doors in the neighborhood you farm. see how many of them respond. Here’s a hint. These people already live there. They know the neighborhood and may even have been in the house you are trying to sell. They know the crime statistics, they know about the school districts, they know the tax situation. Who are you trying to reach by saying real estate is local?

On a popular real estate related blog called Real Estate Tomato (love the originality of the name), the blogger states:

“I can safely say that the traffic one generates from successful blogging cannot be limited to a local range. In fact, I’d be willing to entertain the idea that most of the traffic one generates from business blogging is not local. If this is the case then I feel we need to look at this foreign majority and find the silver lining. Otherwise, approaching blogging, knowing that you are reaching a diluted audience may discourage the commitment needed to be successful…And finally, you never know where your next client is coming from. Don’t limit yourself to only taking aim at the local audience.”

Here we go again. Real estate agents finding it easier, to follow the party line than to actually do what industry leaders like those at Real Estate Tomato advise.

Your office is the world. Your lunch room is your local area.

FYI, Real Estate Tomato is in California and I am in Florida so I guess that local bunk is just that!

2. Follow the money.
When was the last time your local community bank provided a mortgage to someone in your local area? Money is global. Where do you think the money comes from for the mortgages on primary residences and for investments both foreign and domestic?

3. The Search Begins Globally
If 80% of prospective property buyers begin their search online, do you think they are searching the neighborhood they already live in? Of course not. Buyers are able to obtain data from a multitude of sources online. Some more accurate than others.

Now for the good news. The mantra is skewed because most agents think that the real estate is local statement means… I don’t have to do anything because they will find their way to me… how wrong they are. They think because they have a MLS search embedded in their site, that the prospect will actually travel to their site to use the search feature when EVERY agent alive is doing the same thing.

The “real estate is local agent” thinks the online searcher will find their way to “suesellssaginaw.com”. Well I am not sure if Sue does sell Saginaw but unless she gives people a reason to call her, the localness she seeks will be her demise.

Real estate is ONLY localized AFTER the search has been globalized and is underway. It seems that too many agents are nothing more than mantra-speaking order takers. Trust me, that’s not worth 6%. Make yourself needed. More and more agents are becoming wholly irrelevant and unnecessary and all of their rhetoric is just that.

Re-integrate yourself into the transactional process and become tantamount to it’ssuccess. Try something novel, EARN your commission. Do something! A commission was supposed to be earned because of the agent’s facilitation of the transaction. Buyer’s are conducting their own searches, they are obtaining all of the relevant information necessary, they can, in many instances, find their own financing, and can arrange for their own inspections.

Is today’s real estate agent really thinking that the informed and educated consumer will continue to fork over 4-6% or more of their gross revenue to someone who is at best a form filling administrator? Some agents really need to take inventory and look realistically at their over-inflated sense of self-worth.

We heard Bettina the Broker on our show yesterday speak of taking new agents without any capital and teaching them how to obtain listings. We also heard how these agents would have absolutely no realistic way of marketing themselves, let alone their clients. If that was  not bad enough, it is obvious they would not even tell their clients that they had not an iota of capital to market their listing. 4-6% eh???

To me, and it’s just my humble opinion, unless you openly tell a client that you have little if any ability to market their property beyond a MLS listing and a yard sign, you are perpetrating a fraud upon the consumer.

Maybe that’s what the new King Friday expects but I guarantee you that’s not what the client even remotely expects.

Here’s a plan we are teaching our clinets. Be Starbucks. Be Fedex-Kinkos. Be Subway. Market globally, service locally. I have absolutely scoured the NAR website for explanations on the mantra as stated on how it should be implemented for profitability and you can plainly see that it’s nothing more than a feeble attempt to combat the media.

There is no real substance as to how to indeed make it local. How can you spout localism when you do nothing to promote it?

Localism defined is a “neutral term expressing focus on what takes place on a local community level. Localism refers to concern for and appreciation of the value of community including innovation, character development, needs, and accomplishment in a specific setting”.

There’s that word again…innovation. Innovation equals change, it’s about being creative. What’s creative about speaking a mantra to the masses and then having the masses puke it back all over everyone?

Yesterday we spoke to David Weiss who is a Prudential agent in Chicago along with his wife Risa. We featured their video and it was wonderful. It was a 4 minute piece featuring a local neighborhood exposed to a global marketplace. How profound. Here is an agent who embraces his global reach without sacrificing his local business and integrates the methodology of globalism and localism from a marketing standpoint simultaneously.

What are you doing to implement your mantra? If you rely on real estate being local, what are you doing to market the local flavor of your area globally?

Unless you intend on staying in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe and serving King Friday, you had better step it up.

Fred Rogers was a classic. He changed and adapted along the way. He was on the air for decades, he helped us raise our children, he was able to reach our children and speak to them in ways that we could not. He wrote and sang all of the songs on the show.

But he knew the difference between the Neighborhood of Make-Believe and the neighborhood he lived in. Do you?