Are you crippling your real estate investing future by focusing on the wrong customer?
If you are focused on the wrong goals in your real estate investing business you could be setting yourself up for a big failure just when you think you’ve made it.
We aren’t just talking about specific groups of home buyers or sellers here either; there are actually a number of different “customers” a real estate investors deals with at any one time.
This includes:
- Prospective home buyers or sellers
- Private mortgage lenders
- Existing and past customers
- Employees
- Shareholders
- Regulators
Clearly you need buyers and sellers but ignoring needs of employees and their job satisfaction can be devastating later. Attracting private lenders is great but without a focus on serving them and actually producing the returns promised it is a short term strategy. Without treating existing clients well referrals will be limited and of course ignoring regulations means the only customers in your future may be inmates you are selling teaspoons of coffee to behind bars.
You could say Facebook focused on the user but forgot who paid the bills and got burned. Zillow focused on marketing to new customers and even though they have a terrible product have done well, Asia is well known for its 100 year businesses and they often focus on the employee and creating jobs as their product. Bernie Madoff of course made himself the customer and we know how that went and then there is Apple who may have gone from focusing on existing customer experience to, well feeding its own ego with Apple Maps and no investor wants to repeat that huge mistake.
Balance is good but makes it hard to shine at any single angle as is needed to stand out. There may or may not be wrong answers as to which ‘customers’ your real estate investing business should focus on but know which is most important to your success and don’t flip-flop.
Whichever customer you decide to make your prime focus should be intertwined with your real estate investing company’s core values and should act as a guide to all decision making.
