Are your email messages helping you or hurting you?
After you spend hours and perhaps even pay a real estate copywriter to help develop your marketing materials, are you erasing all the good 
those well-prepared materials do with email messages that don’t match the same quality of communication?
When you answer an on-line inquiry or send information to a potential client who called on the phone, are you being just as careful as you were with those printed materials? Or are you in a hurry?
Misspelled words, misused words, typos, and rambling sentences can do a lot of damage to your credibility.
So before you hit send on a message to a prospect – or to anyone but your family and close friends – take the time to proofread. And if you know you have trouble with spelling and word usage, get someone else to proofread for you.
Take extra care with messages sent from your phone – auto-correct and small keyboards combine to create some pretty strange sentences.
While you’re at it, give your blog posts equal scrutiy.
Yes, blogging is an informal venue – but potential clients might be reading your words. A typo here and there might go unnoticed, but when you consistently misuse words like here and hear, their and there, and your and you’re, or when you use apostrophes to indicate plurals, they might wonder about you. Can you write a coherent purchase and sale agreement?
Blog comments can hurt your credibility too – I found the following on a real estate blog, written by someone who says he’s a 40 year veteran of real estate:
“In the 1990′s RE recession this was the role of HUD who took the homes in exchange for re-emburceing the lenders for the full loan amounts. But all the people who solved the problem in the 1990′s are now out of the loop and the new boys and girls in charge haven’t had the stomace to do what will absoultly work.”
The words we use help us communicate – or not.
So proofread!
P.S. is there perhaps more latitude/understanding for those for whom English is a second language?
I tend to think the answer is yes.
What do you think?
Image courtesy of fantasista at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
