It almost feels old fashioned to use the words “one-stop shopping”.  Heck, it was very common many years ago for real estate firms to own both insurance agencies and mortgage brokerages (even my great grandfather owned a real estate and insurance company back in the early 1900’s in Hackettstown, NJ.)  In today’s world, however, we are seeing its execution begin to slide across many real estate firms at a time when service is as important as ever for our customers, sales associates and broker owners.

We have all heard or read the statistics from various reliable sources sharing the value of one-stop-shopping (93%+ of future home buyers would prefer and select sales associates who offer one-stop-shopping over those that do not and that buyers who are provided these services are more likely to be satisfied than other customers.)  For me, what I find intriguing is that various surveys still say that nearly 70% of consumers are still only somewhat familiar with the concept of getting everything they need to buy and sell a home from their realtor.

One-stop-shopping is not new.  One-stop-shopping has a lot of benefits for all parties.  One-stop -shopping is available for nearly everyone nearly everywhere.  So, why haven’t the numbers and customers comments improved?

My thought:…….Because one-stop -shopping is hard……sometimes very hard!

Ask anyone who has implemented a true one-stop-shopping strategy and you’ll find folks who realize that proper implementation takes a lot of time, effort and energy- three things that aren’t easy to come by these days.

So, while we at BH&G RE can’t change the effort required, what we can do is help with proven best practices to make the time and effort spent more immediately effective for all our franchisees.

The first step of how we can help is by taking a more active role in assimilating our personal experiences and successes with those lessons learned from relevant industry practioners who are committed to the virtues of one-stop-shopping for all parties (customers, sales associates and broker owners.)   We are therefore attending this year’s Real Estate Services Providers Council (RESPRO) annual conference as a new member of RESPRO.

The Real Estate Services Providers Council, Inc. (RESPRO^®) is a national non-profit trade association that unites providers from across the home buying and financing industry towards one common goal: A business and regulatory environment that better enables all of our members to efficiently offer affiliated services through subsidiaries, joint ventures, and strategic partnerships (www.respro.org).

RESPRO’s members include Real estate broker-owners, Real estate franchisors, Mortgage lenders/brokers, Title insurers/agents, Home builders, Home warranty companies and other settlement service providers throughout North America.

In the weeks and months to come, we will be providing the information gathered at this year’s event to our franchisees so that we all can continue providing all of the products and services customers want in the manner that they want them.

Stay tuned to this blog space and other communications.  In the mean time, if there is anything you would like for us to learn or validate while at the RESPRO conference this March, please write me.  Thank you.

By the way, below are some more interesting stats for one-stop-shopping from a Harris Interactive Survey done slightly over a year ago:

The biggest perceived advantages of using one-stop shopping, according to consumers, are:

• Saving money because of discounted prices (77%)
• Increased efficiency and manageability (73%)
• Convenience (73%)
• Things not falling through the cracks (73%)