With John Gillam, Assoc. Broker – EXIT Realty Home & Ranch, CO
With so much chatter surrounding recent changes to industry standards in real estate, it’s hard to make sense of all the noise these days. Many look for guidance but few step up on the soap box like Associate Broker, John Gillam out of EXIT Realty Home & Ranch in New Mexico and Colorado.
As a third-generation real estate professional with a background in social services, he’s actively engaged with the National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), he’s in the arena, and he makes it his business to be in the know. His is a refreshing and authentic voice of reason and experience that both NAR and EXIT recognized when they aligned with him for his recent NAR NXT Up session and EXIT’s free ABR sessions earlier in 2024. Because of this he was also presented with EXIT Realty Corp. International’s Trusted Advisor award at their recent 2024 convention in Florida.
He sees things from a refreshingly positive, but realistic perspective of letting go of old ways in order to make room for several models and compensation structures that he believes will not only benefit the entire industry, but consumers as well, by being made available to everyone. He also believes it’s vital to take this time to identify where the industry wants to head in the future, but that decision cannot be based on any one type of market just because we’re experiencing it.
Known as the trainer of trainers, John holds both the Distinguished Real Estate Instructor (DREI) as well as the Gold Standard Leader (GSL) designations from the Real Estate Educators Association (REEA), which sets the standard for excellence in real estate classroom instruction. Two decades of training later, and seeing first-hand how different many states operate, even he knows there’s no one clear cut answer to the many questions out there right now, but he has seen a few things and knows these to be universally true:
COMPETENCY CREATES CONFIDENCE IN COMMUNICATION
Customers not only demand competency, John explains, but it’s part of NAR’s Code of Ethics to provide knowledgeable service that best represents the interests of the client. This means clear, transparent communication channels every step of the way so clients can see the job REALTORS® do.
“If our clients really understood what it is that we do and what we bring to the table, we wouldn’t have to worry about justifying our value. The second you feel like you have to justify or defend your value, you’ve already lost the conversation,” he said in his NAR session Shift Happens – Changing Gears in a Changing Market.
PUT CLIENTS BACK IN THE TRANSACTION
Ironically, many real estate professionals have been taught for years to make the process as easy as possible for their clients, only to have inadvertently skimmed over the hard parts he explained, saying, “When you make it seem easy to your clients, they don’t fully understand what it took to get to the closing table. We’ve systematically removed the consumer from their transaction, from their contract, and from their process. We’ve been allowing the public to drive what they think our job is when they don’t even really fully understand what it is that we do.”
INFORMED CONSENT
By putting the above two points into action, it ultimately creates a more informed customer and proper informed consent, something John said has been lacking. Poor habits can lead to clients being set up to fail when they’re not given explanations to better understand what something is and how it impacts them.
“A lot of us have gotten in this habit of sending stuff to our clients and saying, ‘Do you have any questions on this?’ And of course they don’t, because they don’t understand what it is. They don’t know what’s in front of them, and don’t know the questions to ask,” he shared.
Read the rest of John’s tips in the latest issue of The EXIT Achiever magazine today!
