I believe that the best attitude for a small business to fail is trying to all things for all people. As a independent small business man that has been struggling with success and failures I believe that I have learned a great lesson. That is “If your try to serve all people all of the time you will fail most everyone most of the time”.If there is one lesson or one phrase that my 35 years of being “in business” has taught me is that a good businessman must “not go to every battle that you are invited to”. I believe that every businessman has a niche somewhere and that a person will only be relatively successful until they find that niche.

The field is getting full of folks getting into the Real Estate Business.  I guess I noticed it when the “Invest in Real Estate Movement” started a few years ago. But what I miss the most are people that have a passion and vision for helping families make their Real Estate decisions. It seems to me that the concept of “service” has been replaced with a panic to make a profit or a subtle disregard of the “real issues” that face most families with the current real estate economy.

The infusion of “foreign” money in the mortgage business thru Wall Street while ignoring the tested guidelines of the experienced mortgage industry has created the current “Sub-Prime” problems. That economic correction mixed with 2008 being an election year has a “perfect storm” feel about it.

 It seems similar to me to the day one of my lawyer friends stating, “I can invest in a restaurant, gosh I eat lunch out everyday so I know how they are supposed to work”. He lost over five figures in less than two years.

There is a big difference in managing a business on a day to day basis and being a visionary or planner of a healthy real estate deliver service.

In Charlotte I have heard that 50-65% of the clients would not use the same realtor for their next transaction. That doesn’t say much for the industry.

“The Times are A Changin” and the way people choose an agent to help them make real estate decisions will not be recognizable in the near future. The Real Estate Industry has not realistically kept up with the Information Age. Home owners and Buyers used to be dependant on the only information available and that was from the realtor organizations.

Today, information and availability of houses for sale or for rent can be accessed many ways. With the public information of deeds ownership and transaction information being digitally accessed from any search engine, the trip to the County Recorder is not necessary any more. We used to depend on databases created by and for realtors so that decisions could be made with relatively limited access.

But the main missing ingredient is the evaluation of this information. That needs to be done by an experienced person in order to see where values realistically are trending. Like they say, “Wisdom is the combination of knowledge and experience”. If either one if missing the evaluations should be suspect.

The assumption that values track a predictable pattern and that the past three months dictate the next few months is not valid. If you buy into that then everything should be predictable and we all know that is not true.

- Tim Leadbetter