How to Avoid Being Disrupted in Real Estate- Part 2: Lessons from the Travel Industry.

“Will real estate agents be the next travel agents?” That question often gets tossed around when industry disruption comes up.

Although it’s a good question, we have to consider that similar to lessons we learned in looking deeper at the retail industry in which we discovered that not all purchases are equal. Not all travel is equal.

Sure, booking a flight to San Jose shouldn’t require a travel agent, however, are there other trips where a travel agent would be wanted and needed?

What can we learn from that when it comes to being a well-paid professional in real estate, mortgage lending, insurance, or wealth management?

Tune in to hear the patterns and principles that we uncover and specifics of what you can do about it today to make sure you stay well-paid and at the center of the transaction.

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What’s up everybody? Justin Stoddart here and today we’re going to be talking about part two of our series on positioning ourselves above and beyond that of our competitors and we’re going to answer the age old question:

“Are real estate agents, the next travel agents?”

We’re actually going to do that by specifically extracting patterns and principles from another industry that is further down the disruptive curve than ours. And that is, in fact, the travel industry.

So we often get asked: “Are real estate agents, are they indeed the next travel agent?”

But before I address that, I want to remind you that this show right here is going to be releasing some really exciting things to help you grow yourself and your business. Trust me, you’re not gonna want to miss out on any of this.

So be sure to like this video, subscribe to the channel and hit the little bell notification. So you receive notifications. Anytime we drop something.

I want to start off by telling a story about my friend James, who was actually planning a trip to Europe. Now, James, he shared the following. Okay, so he said, my wife and I are planning a trip to Europe, realizing the number of tools and resources that the internet provides, I went to work studied, where to visit, where to eat, where to stay, and so forth.

This experience caused me to become quickly and completely overwhelmed by the number of reviews and information available, a lack of information was not the problem. See, the problem was actually how much of an abundance there was this information, he said, I couldn’t possibly know what to trust or how to process all of it.

In the end, I decided to hire a travel agent, I needed someone who had done this for others before to then help interpret it for me, customize it for me, meet my wife’s wishes and requests and make decisions that would meet our goals for the trip. Isn’t that interesting?

Being the trip of a lifetime, the risk of getting it wrong had profound implications, even though he could have booked it all online through like a Travelocity, right, he chose actually to pay to have a professional well paid professional, somebody come in who could guide them through the process, because there were so against so many options, so much information. And because the risk of not getting it right was so high, he needed to have someone interpret the data to help him make decisions. Based on what his specific goals entail.

Let me be clear, many technologies have come into the real estate, industry and others, making our lives and the lives of our clients easier and better. We should not hate on those things, we should not necessarily try and say that Travelocity doesn’t have its place. It absolutely does. But we should however, recognize that there is a difference between booking a flight to San Jose, and booking the trip of a lifetime to Europe.

Now you have likely identified several patterns and principles from the couple of examples above. And keep in mind, that’s a very critical skill to look at patterns and other industries, and extract the principles and apply them to our own. So here’s a few that I’m going to help you get started with when it comes to this particular example of travel in our industry.

Okay, so the first principle is:

-Businesses and professionals that thrive are those that are able to lower costs and reduce complexity.

-Another one is for the clients, the higher the risk of getting it wrong themselves, the more they are willing to pay professionals.

-Another one is every transaction at which a client can do just as well or better using an all or mostly technology based offering will eventually unload the added cost of a well paid professional people will will choose to not use the professional.

-Another one is that not all buying experiences are easy to replace with an all or mostly technology base replacement.

-Another principle is that your profession impacts people’s net worth in significant ways, making you valuable and necessary to keep at the center of the transaction.

-Another important principle is that value is defined as the difference between what you are offering as a professional, what you give versus what you charge. So the greater your value, the more likely you are to be invited to remain at the center of the transaction.

These are all key principles that you can be applying to your business right now. Now as we look deeper at the disruption and innovation happening in other industries, our minds will undoubtedly become better trained at identifying the useful patterns and the principles that emerge.

This practice builds a more solid foundation on which we will apply our understanding of the principles that are continually taught in The Upstream Model, which is the book that I recently released.

This then moves our respective value propositions our margins, our businesses and ourselves beyond the reach of industry disruption.

And if you don’t yet have your copy of the Upstream Model, I would have to ask you like what are you waiting for?

Seriously, I’m giving it to you for less than it costs me to print it, handle it and ship it to you. So the link is below be sure to get your hands on that.

And also if you’re looking for additional ways to get help apply in the upstream model, there’s also links to the digital course that is also available to you.

So with that being said, said my final request to you are these three simple words and they are Go Think Bigger!!