Property Point

In the fast-moving, cyber-driven, social media-controlled world of influencers, hackers and gurus of all types, there are plenty of experts to tell you what to do, what not to do, why you’re a failure and how you can be better.

Whether it’s to do with your career, your looks, your relationships or your health, there is an expert for every scenario and advice for every occasion.

A lot of the advice is conflicting: eat meat/don’t eat meat, set the alarm for 4am and get cracking/allow your body the sleep it needs and avoid alarms …it’s a world where anyone with a phone camera and a social media account can suddenly be an expert in whatever they choose.

So take what you see and hear with a grain of salt.

However, full disclosure, I can’t help absorbing some of the noise. I watch and listen to podcasts and videos in the worlds of politics (check out Robert F Kennedy Jr), motivation (Dave Goggins tells it how it is pretty brutally) and health and fitness.

The health and fitness arena is packed with “experts” fighting for attention, producing short grabs that promise to deliver “the five most important things to prevent cancer” or “the 10 foods to avoid if you want to lose weight”.

I’m not here to promote or validate anyone but, in my view, some have more cred than others.

I quite like a bloke called Gary Brecka, described as a human biologist and functional medicine expert. Apparently he’s also a “bio-hacker” but I’ve got no idea what that is and he nearly lost me when I heard that.

Anyway, I stuck with him and one of the things he says is that “ageing is the aggressive pursuit of comfort”. He says that as we get older we should not be putting our feet up, taking it easy while we sit in front of the TV indulging in some tasty treats like pastries or cake washed down with a can of coke.

Rather, he says, we should be experiencing some discomfort … exercising, denying ourselves the pleasure of a belly full of food from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to bed, having cold baths and showers (that’s the tough one).

His point is that we should not sit back and relax and “aggressively pursue comfort” if we want to stay healthy and be at our best as the years pass.

I feel that what he says can equally be applied to business and definitely the business of selling real estate.

Once you sit back and relax in business and in real estate sales, your days are numbered. You start going backwards. You start to look old-fashioned and behind the times.

The pursuit of comfort means you are not pushing the boundaries and actively looking for the best way to present a property, not working the phones to re-connect with buyers you have come across who might be interested, not taking the time to brief the photographer about the key shots to present the property, not finding something different to set the property apart from the crowd.

If you are relaxed and comfortable you are complacent and you’re not finding innovative ways to be better and that’s not good for sellers.

‍