I have sold hotels for many years. Selling a commercial investment is not like selling personal and household items that can be duplicated at many stores or purchased on-line at amazon. I am talking about commercial investment sales. Over the past 27 years, I have seen innovations like email, internet, blogs, apps, text, tweets, likes and just about every imaginable way to communicate. The thing in investment sales that will never change is the human factor. Basically, people hire and work with people they like and trust. It is not based on the school you went to or how expensive your suit is. It is based on if they like you and trust you.

In a hotel sales organization and as with most companies, 20% of the people do 80% of the work and sales volume. For me the objective is to help teach the 80% how to better themselves and better their sales volume. Recently, I started asking older hotel brokers to think back to the very first hotel they listed and sold on their own. Then I ask them to explain the process they went through to make that sale. Invariably, the common denominator is that they met with the seller and buyer personally. Face to face. That is where the magic happens most often. Not always, but most often. There are brokers I know who are very successful without the face to face element but I would venture that 9 out of 10 brokers need face to face to consistently succeed.

So, what am I saying? It is that sometimes what is old is still new and what seem antiquated is still current. Being old school does not necessarily mean it is a bad school. It just means that sometimes the best way is really the old way. KT