I have talked recently with a number of financial planners, Realtors, mortgage brokers and loan officers and all I hear is the same thing: business is slow. Well, I’m not very surprised given the state of the market. The stock market is all over the map, the housing boom is bust, and lending is tighter than 1980s clothing styles.

So…. what to do with your time? For some, board up the windows and go home. But for most of us, it is a perfect time to prepare for when the markets are good again.

Some suggestions:

• Go buy yourself a new piece of hardware or software that will let you communicate faster and better with your clients than ever before and work with it until it actually does what you want. If that’s a BlackBerry that lets you see and respond to email instantly, than go learn how to work the device and keyboard.
• Spend some time thinking about your biggest bottlenecks — the things that take the most time — and figure out how to speed it up. Is it processing paperwork? Look for automated systems that help do this faster. Is it waiting on someone else? Figure out how to get them involved sooner or figure out what you can do during the downtime to keep the deals moving along.
• Unhappy with a business relationship? Now’s the perfect time to make a change. A lot of people are leaving the industry and those remaining are stronger for it. If you are a Realtor, go talk to a bunch of loan officers or mortgage brokers to see how others compare.
• Bone up on something you should know but don’t. Realtors, you better learn the ins and outs of mortgages and make sure you are reviewing paperwork coming from the lenders.
• Go interview your customers to understand what you can do better and be more attractive to others like them. People love it when you ask for input and help.
• Read a book. I find inspiration in all kinds of places, even if they are not directly related to my business. A couple of interesting ones I have read recently include Diary of a Real Estate Rookie by Alison Rogers and Wikinomics by Tapscott and Williams.

Now’s the time to get yourself ready for the next wave. It won’t be long — it will come. And then you won’t have time to do the little things that makes business better.

What I can never get over is the hubris of markets.

I remember people talking during the tech boom about how all old economic knowledge was dead and that a new economic business model with no downturns was the new norm. What a bunch of baloney.

The same is true now. Mortgage lenders talking just months ago about how the industry was self-propogating, how house flipping and exotic mortgages were the new era and as long as people could refinance there would never be a downturn again. The loan options people were being offered and taking were bizarre: interest only loans, negative amortizations, and (my personal favorite) the “pick your own payment” loans.

You can read other people’s lements on the state of the market. I’m here to place blame on the one group of people that no one else has the guts to blame: the consumers.

All I hear is how the mortgage industry misled people, the government let it happen, builders were pushing for it. All is true. But the bottom line in this entire fiasco is that consumers took these ridiculous loans without batting an eye. I was taught that when a deal seems too good to be true, it is. Companies offered this absurdity and consumers ignored this wizened proverb and grabbed for gold.

Of course, none of this matters. And you know why? Because we — the banks and brokers, the planners and agents — are going to get the blame for this mess. And the only way to get out of it is to educate, educate, and educate some more.

It is our responsibility to make sure the consumer understands the financial ramifications of the deals they are taking. That’s why products like powerOne exist, because it helps you educate your clients, making them better and smarter buyers.

The market will rebound — it always does — and it will most likely be a stronger market when it returns. The question is what are we going to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

I was reviewing my notes from Real Estate Connect and noticed a couple of quotes I wrote down that I thought was interesting.

“We are focused on real-time real estate.” – Lennox Scott, CEO, John L Scott Real Estate

I said in my last post that I think real-time is interesting. That’s what people buy mobile computers for anyway, right? Piece of data from a report done by the WAV Group says that “78% of the time, consumers will work with the first agent that gets back to them.” It goes on to say that the typical realtor responds in 2 to 52 hours while the average consumer expects a response within 30 minutes. Oops.

I have to wonder, by the way. Wouldn’t it be nice if business was really that easy? Generate a lead, respond immediately and the deal is mine 4 out of 5 times. Me thinks there is something missing in the translation!

“The web is about people connecting. The difference between today and 20 years ago is the speed.” – Alex Perriello, CEO, Reology

A presenter at the show (not Alex) commented that his parent’s generation (baby boomers) would buy a house and then tell their friends while his generation would tell his friends, solicite feedback and then buy the house. Ah… the social networking crowd.

The speed part is true, though. It is changing everyone’s business. Here at Infinity Softworks we are taking steps internally to be able to handle support from a BlackBerry. Hey, we sell mobile products. Why shouldn’t we be mobile? But most importantly, it allows us to respond very quickly to enquiries. All this blather about how to make customers more loyal. Easy answer. Make useful products, charge reasonable prices, treat customers with respect, respond quickly and accurately when they ask a question. Doesn’t seem so hard.

Another aside — I wonder if social networking will be as popular as these late teens/early 20-somethings get older. I find I barely have time for my handful of close friends and family, let alone 100 other associates on the web. A different kind of friendship, I guess. My day consists of work, wife, daughter, sleeping and eating, not necessarily in that order. For the other five minutes…

“At the end of the day, [business success] is all about perseverence.” – Russ Capper, Prudential Real Estate

The show wasn’t huge. There were maybe 1,000 or 2,000 people there so I would see the same people walking the halls. One person I noticed was walking around with crutches. I’m assuming he had cerebral palsy or MS or something similar. But he was there, attending seminars, talking to vendors and making the most of the show.

At one point, he was walking between a couple of people talking and a sign, got a little close to the sign and tripped over it. The sign was on a light-weight stand. For most of us, we would have knocked the sign down but for him, he lost his balance and went straight down.

The two people talking stopped, went to help him up and then stopped when they realized that he was going to help himself. The man grabbed his crutches, stood himself up, said something polite to the two people and kept going. He wasn’t embarrased at all. The whole event happened with more dignity than I could have mustered.

As he walked away, all I could think of was Mr. Caper’s comment.

I just returned from Real Estate Connect, a conference in San Francisco that focuses on connecting real estate with technology. There is an awful lot going on in this market. Traditional control resides with Multiple Listing Services and the National Association of Realtors. They set the terms by which buyers and sellers communicate, including the listings themselves. Now this control is being slaughtered by online companies (see Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin, just to name a few). As the record industry found out, the control of content is quickly moving to the web (in this case, the listings themselves).

Over the years, we have found that a number of our clients are in the real estate space. Customers include real estate agents and brokers, mortgage brokers and loan officers, and real estate legal experts. They have all had a need to perform what-if scenario analysis in the field. So we went to this conference hoping to understand the shifting sands and see how we might fit in even better.

We learned a ton and believe it will have a huge impact on our future businesses. Given that, there was an awful lot of discussion about getting the customer involved in the process but very little discussion on how mobility plays a part. A lot of the emphasis was on blogging — realtors connecting to their clients and community through blogs, social networking sites aimed at familiarizing oneself with the potential buying neighborhood, and mash-ups (for instance, combining maps with listings).

I, however, want to know more about a topic that was briefly discussed: real-time real estate (or just-in-time real estate). It seems to me that this is what our customers are buying powerOne products for — to get an instant answer to a complicated question that helps close the deal now.

So… we have more work to do and more to learn. And I’m sure looking forward to it.