Where the work actually happens
At Inman Connect San Diego, Phil Hawkins, CEO of the California Association of REALTORS®, made a point about where an agent's day is actually spent.
"All of you have your phones on you right now. All of you are probably looking at your phones right now. REALTORS® are out in the field a lot."
That's the whole argument, and it's worth sitting with rather than nodding past. An agent's working day happens between appointments. In a car. Standing in a kitchen with a client. Waiting somewhere with fifteen minutes to spare. The desk is where the day gets reconciled, not where it gets lived.
Then Hawkins gave the example that makes it concrete, and it's a small one on purpose.
He's in front of a client. They tell him they want the wine fridge included. He goes back to the office to write it up. And in his words, there's a good chance that by the time he gets back, he's forgotten it.
That's not a story about being disorganised. It's a story about how memory works. The detail was captured perfectly at the moment it was said, and then it had to survive a drive, a parking lot, a few phone calls and whatever else the afternoon held. Some details survive that trip. Some don't.
So the question isn't whether an agent can remember the wine fridge. It's why the wine fridge has to make the trip at all.
If the work gets recorded where it happens, in the car, right then, the detail never has to survive anything. Hawkins put the odds plainly: fill it out in the car and there's a better chance you don't miss it.
That's a lower bar than most technology sets for itself, and it's a more honest one.
The full conversation with Judd Hoffman is on the blog.
