My Nan used to tell me of the personal service at a local greengrocers shop in Grantham, even if she was only buying two carrots for the soup she was planning to make for lunch. A real conversation followed and best carrots were chosen for the soup. By the time the pounds shillings and pence changed hands the greengrocer knew who the soup was for, all the ingredients, how she was going to make it and what she was going to do with the leftovers
In the old days, most companies collected information because they were interested in helping, so they could serve us better. Today we always seem to ask for the punter’s email address. We collect their email address, not out of interest, but often just to get something from it, to enable us to sell them something.
Have we as an industry (and a world?) permitted productivity to kill the joy from our work as an estate agent?
Our preoccupation with optimising and wringing every last drop out of every vendor / tenant / buyer / landlord contact has guided us down the road of knowing the facts, without caring about the people behind them.
However, as we race towards the 2020’s, I believe we are start to understand our mistakes.
Do me a favour today, ask someone how their day is going, and give a genuine f**k about the answer, because trust me, you will learn so much that when we express a genuine interest in people, magically things happen, because no work was ever degraded because it was carried out with empathy.