Editorial
Front Page - Friday, June 26, 2009
Assist2Sell Realtor finally finding career satisfaction
David Laprad
George Patten recently ran for city council on the slogan, “I sell Chattanooga every day.” Although he didn’t win the election, there was truth in what he said. As a real estate agent with Assist2Sell on Brainerd Road, he spends his days, nights and weekends trying to sell prospective buyers on a house or piece of
property. About once a week,
someone says yes.
Patten says one of the keys to his success as a Realtor is his experience. “Since getting into real estate in 2001, I’ve sold about 50 homes a year, which is quite a few. And like an attorney who practices law or a doctor who practices medicine, every time I do a deal, I get better. If you’re going to have heart surgery, are you going to go to a doctor who operates every week or every few months?”
Good point. But Patten says you won’t get the experience you need to be successful in any endeavor unless you have the necessary skills. When it comes to real estate, these include working well with people or, as Patten says, “Accommodating people, appreciating their needs and wants and, to some degree, putting up with them.” Patten says working well with people is his primary attribute.
When it comes to real estate, experience and people skills work hand in hand to help a Realtor connect with his client, says Patten. “There’s a process to selling a house. When you go out for a listing appointment, you have to convince somebody pretty quickly that you’re the person for the job. And when you’re a buyer’s agent, your client has to have confidence in you. So Realtors need to have experience and be able to express themselves well.”
Patten entered the real estate profession after having developed his salesmanship at a variety of jobs over the years. His longest stint was with a small fabrication company in Chattanooga. Patten began working with the business in the ‘70s, and by the late ‘90s was managing its manufacturing arm. When profits shrank as competition increased, Patten decided to do something different.
“I did various things after that. I ran a crew that installed fiber optic cable on railroad lines, but that took me away from home too much, so I got into the equipment contracting business for a while. I wasn’t happy there, either, so in 2001, I decided to try real estate,” he says.
Patten says house sales appealed to him because he believed it would be fulfilling on a personal level. He was right. “I liked it immediately. It’s an incredible thing to help clients find their homes. You learn about their desires, their hatreds, their reasons and all manner of things. You become a psychiatrist.”
Enough people knew the budding agent that he started getting listings right away. Patten started out at Professional Group under broker Mitch Everhart, and was so successful, Everhart made him the broker at the company’s Cleveland, Tenn., branch. Things didn’t go as well there, partly because Patten was in unfamiliar territory, so he returned to Chattanooga to work at Remax. He took a brief break from real estate to work with a builder, but that job also failed to meet his expectations.
Patten recently returned to real estate, setting up shop at another Everhart firm, Assist2Sell. The full service agency takes a fundamentally different approach to marketing than other outfits. Instead of encouraging agents to promote themselves and their listings, Assist2Sell advertises the cost of selling a house. Patten says this attracts customers because the company typically has the lowest commission rate on a listing.
He says the proliferation of the Internet was the biggest factor in making this approach possible. “When I first got into real estate, we had a book that contained all of the listings. Realtors essentially owned the business. Now, every listing can be found on the Internet. That led to a tremendous change in the industry and brought about the ability to have companies like Assist2Sell.”
As effective as Patten says the Assist2Sell approach is, it doesn’t excuse him from using old-fashioned ingenuity to earn a living. In fact, he’s constantly looking ahead to see what’s on the horizon and thinking about how to take advantage of innate opportunities.
When Patten foresaw the relocation of German Volkswagen workers to Chattanooga, for example, he asked Karen Claypool, a destination counselor with IOR Global Services, to lunch. IOR helps companies improve the effectiveness of their global workforce, and Patten saw the potential in a real estate agent joining forces with a business that would be helping foreigners set up housekeeping in the area.
The idea clicked, and Patten has spent the last nine months leasing homes to temporary VW employees.
“They’re wonderful people. This is one of the biggest corporations in the world, and it’s putting its best people right here,” Patten says. “They love Chattanooga because they’ve developed a rapport with the local population. One German told me that hasn’t happened anywhere else in the world.”
Patten doesn’t share a lot of personal details except to say he works closely with his daughter, also an agent at Assist2Sell. Although not officially a team, they help each other with the busy work related to new listings, show houses for each other from time to time and even encourage one another when business is slow. “We’ll tell each other, ‘Today is a new day. Let’s make the best of it.’”
Patten is certainly making the best of what he hopes will be a long and fruitful career in real estate. With his experience selling houses and his knack for finding unique niches in which to work, his current job should more than meet his expectations.
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