![]() ![]() Did Greg the attorney mention that he was going to Florida for a month? Ask him if he had a good time. Keep notes on everyone as much as possible. Getting too personal about yourself or about them too early in the game is just going to feel uncomfortable for everyone. Second, keep it professional but friendly. Relationships happen over time, so don’t rush it. Here is a couple of pointers about networking properly though. Every person you meet in life is a potential referral source – or even a client. Mortgage brokers that call and chat with, and contractors that I make sure I talk with whenever possible.Įvery person you network with will eventually know someone who is buying a home and then will refer you. There are attorneys I will go and have coffee with. Some weeks I will look at the calendars for any one of my inspection companies and I will get almost as many inspections from other referral sources as I did from agents and the internet. We have also mentioned the fact that you don’t want to put all your eggs into one basket, and networking helps you to do that. If I found a major problem in a home and the sellers tried to contest it, many times the contractors and attorneys would back me up because they knew I was a good inspector – which added to my company’s reputation and credibility. On top of that though, it made transactions easier. If an agent never used me before and asked anyone about me, everyone knew me and had a good opinion of me – so it helped with my relationships with agents. So when someone even mentioned a home inspector, guess who they recommended. I built a relationship with a respected mold remediation company and with a water treatment company many years ago. In fact, I would spend almost as much time networking with the vendors at those mixers as I would with the agents. An important part of that story was the woman who I built a professional relationship with was not an agent. In fact, it may be a long time before you see results – but they do eventually come. The moral of the story is that networking does not usually yield immediate results. Now all 400 of their agents know my face and my company. What did that do for me? It gave me “street cred” so-to-speak. When they came out with their own real estate TV show, I was the one who was asked to be on it. ![]() Eventually, I became the companies “premier inspection vendor” as she put it. Eventually, the woman who ran the program and I got to trust each other and build a great relationship. I kept going, year after year and stuck with it. Most inspectors I know stopped going to it because they said “I don’t get any work out of it” – which is very short sited in my opinion. One of the big brokerages had these mix-and-mingle events every year. Knowing those people and having them as a network are key to success. ![]() The mortgage broker, the insurance salesman, the appraiser, the attorneys, the contractors who come in to do work, etc. One of the best ways to network is to think about everyone else in a transaction. So how does networking happen and with whom does it happen? The answer is all the time and with everyone. It is not always about the real estate agent either. Networking takes in a wider net and is not necessarily direct marketing. Keep in mind, we are not talking about advertising to agents like we did before. It all comes down to relationship building and being known. ![]() That just shows the unfortunate truth of our industry though: If you are good but don’t network, you will not do nearly as well as a terrible inspector who does network. But he refused to network – but the terrible inspector, that’s all he did was network. He was awesome, professional, polite, and knew more about a building than most people could dream of – and he was struggling. In that same room was a home inspector who was one of the best home inspectors I know. In fact, he was one of the busiest home inspectors I have ever met. His reports were terrible (in my opinion) and he had a reputation as being one of the worst home inspectors out there – but he was ridiculously busy. In fact, I don’t know if I knew of anyone that had been sued more than this particular inspector. I watched a home inspector that had a terrible reputation. We are home inspectors – not politicians.īut there is a sad truth that I learned many years ago. Most home inspectors don’t like networking. If there is any aspect of the home inspection industry that I think I hear the most complaints about – it’s this one. ![]()
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