Outdoor School, a land trust, then luxury residential

The Grand Union build, part 6 of 8. Season 1: The Diagnosis.

TL;DR

A background is not a credential. Nobody chooses a realtor because of where he worked before real estate.

A background is a lens, and that distinction is most of what real estate branding gets wrong. The question is never what have you done, it is what does that make you notice that your competitors walk past.

Outdoor School, a community land trust working on permanently affordable housing, and then luxury residential. Held separately, those are three unrelated jobs. Held by one person, they produce somebody who understands a house as both an asset and a place a family actually has to live in, and who does not find that combination uncomfortable.

Read next: Part 5: The differentiator was in his background · Rebuilding Together PNW, repositioned around what the work actually was · Part 7: Right-Fit Real Estate

The mistake is treating it as a credential

The instinct, once you find an unusual history, is to display it.

Put it in the bio. Mention the land trust. Let people be impressed by the range. This does almost nothing, because a buyer choosing between two agents is not running a background check, and "interesting past" is not a reason to trust somebody with the largest transaction of their life.

Displayed, it is trivia. It has to do work.

What the combination actually produces

Take the three in order and ask what each one leaves behind.

Outdoor School is a job about place. Not property, place. What a landscape is, why a particular valley feels like that, how people relate to where they are.

A community land trust working on permanently affordable housing is a job about housing as an obligation. Who can afford to stay somewhere. What happens to a neighborhood when they cannot. Housing as a system with consequences.

Luxury residential is a job about the transaction at its most commercial. Price, positioning, negotiation, discretion.

Most people in the industry have the third. Some have the first. Very few have the second, and almost nobody holds all three without one of them being a phase they grew out of.

The lens it produces

He understands a house as an asset and as a place somebody has to live, at the same time, without either idea embarrassing him.

That sounds soft. It is not. It changes what he notices in a showing, what he asks a buyer before he starts sending listings, and which deals he thinks are bad ideas even when they would close.

An agent who thinks only in assets optimises the transaction. An agent who thinks only in places sells the romance and does the client financial harm. The combination is genuinely rarer than either.

The test for whether a background is positioning

One question. Does it change what he does on a Tuesday?

If the history is real positioning, you can point at behaviour. Different questions asked, different advice given, different clients turned away.

If you cannot point at behaviour, it is decoration, and it belongs in the about page where decoration lives. Most real estate branding never gets past decoration.

His changed the behaviour. It had been changing it the whole time, silently, without anybody naming it.

Naming it is what turns it into a business

So we named it.

That is part seven, and the name mattered a great deal less than what it let him say no to.