Does a seller (or buyer) really care how many properties a real estate agent has sold this year, or what the value of the properties they sold is. In fact, even the best real estate agent spending thousands of dollars on advertising and marketing to sell a property will not guarantee its sale. So a lot of the time picking an agent comes down to price, luck or more often these days it comes down to community; word of mouth.

A real estate agent is someone who acts as an intermediary between buyers and sellers of property, trying to find sellers who wish to sell and buyers who wish to buy. Estate agents typically provide marketing services for sellers to assist them sell for the highest possible price, and assist buyers by helping them purchase property for the lowest possible price under the best terms.

While the act of selling a property or buying a property may be the most important steps in moving house, there are a significant number of steps that need to occur to ensure a move is successful. A customer must find a solicitor to deal with the contracts, ensure they have finance available, ensure they have a removalist organised, make sure insurance is organised, organise any number of trades and service people to clean, wash, paint, fix and mend.

So the question is, who is actually delivering the service that the customer really needs? Whose responsibility is it to ensure that a customer is getting what they need? Well, estate agents may be selling a house, helping to buy another house for a customer but does this alone make the process a successful one? What about the steps in the middle. I’d say the answer right now is nobody provides what customers really need. So if a real estate agent was looking do differentiate themselves from their competition, perhaps the best way is to make one customers life easier, simpler and more successful by delivering the all services they really need, taking an outside in approach, seeking opportunity in the customer value chain. Then when one of their friends asks which real estate to use, they will have no hesitation in recommending the services of the real estate that delivers the full service.