Real estate agents hoping to capture an additional customer or real estate transaction often must rely simply on being in the right place at the right time.
Over my thirty-year real estate career, this has been true, and I am sure that other real estate professionals can attest to it. Once, simply because I arrived in the office early, a real estate investor walked in desperate to find an investment property to complete an IRS 1031 exchange. Because I happened to be there to assist him, along with the fact that I understood commercial real estate, the result was a $1.5 million dollar transaction and a substantial commission.
Likewise, I once lost a prime $3 million dollar listing consisting of ten four-plexes because I stepped out of my office for an hour and missed an up-call from a rental property owner that was in turn redirected to a colleague.
Another colleague once got a listing on an 80-unit apartment complex because he happened to inadvertently meet the apartment owner the night before in a bar (of all places), and after several rounds of martinis was able to convince the owner that he was the right agent to sell that complex.
On the other hand, (this is where I am going), I have known scores of real estate agents who were in the right place at the right time but lost the opportunity because they were not prepared to work with income-producing property. Regardless of their Armani suits and luxury sedans, real estate investors tend to lose confidence quickly in an agent who cannot produce an APOD nor understands what cap rate is.
Of course, because I am the developer of real estate investment software, you might expect me to blame it on the fact that the agent did not own some type of real estate investing software. In part, though, this is true. I cannot tell you how many times residential real estate agents, just after their chance encounter with a real estate investor, hurriedly approached me to explain cap rate and APOD, only to discover later that the investor had since begun to work with a competitor agent.
Would it have helped them had they owned a real estate investment software solution? Absolutely it would have helped. Not only would they have had a working knowledge of income property nuances like rates of return, they would have been prepared to run off some reports for the investor instantly.
For better or worse, we are all subject to timing. That we missed an opportunity the night before because (like my colleague) we were not in a bar, we must not bemoan. When we miss an opportunity because we are not prepared is inexcusable.
Most real estate investment software is not expensive. Whereas, just one missed opportunity to work with rental income property can cost dearly.
