The Real Cost of Doing It Yourself

What It Would Take to Build This Yourself

There is another road, and it deserves an honest look before anyone takes it: buy the tools, learn the tools, and build all of this yourself. It starts with money, and the money does not stop.

Nothing in this package runs on anything free. A website platform and a domain to build on. Video and design tools to make the work look professional. A customer system to hold every lead and follow up on time. The advertising accounts that put the finished work in front of the market. Every one of them is sold by the month, and the subscriptions stack up month after month — paid in full whether the work gets finished or not, and paid through every month a working agent is too busy selling houses to open them, which is most months.

Then comes the time, and there is an inordinate amount of it. Every tool has to be learned before it can be used well — the website platform one way, the video and design tools another, the customer system another still, and the advertising accounts will spend real money while the learning is still going on. None of it is learned in an afternoon, and none of the learning happens in business hours. It lands in the spare hours between showings and closings, the same hours the building itself has to come out of. And the learning never finishes, because the technology underneath every one of these tools keeps changing — what was learned this year has to be relearned as the platforms shift under it.

And after the money is spent and the hours are in, the honest result is this: matching this format on your own is unlikely. Not for lack of effort, and not for lack of talent. The format is what it is because it is built by leveraging the most sophisticated technology there is, and that technology changes constantly. Leveraging it well — keeping up with it, building on it, making it produce work at this level week after week — is not a side task inside a real estate business. It is a business in itself.

Price the two roads honestly and the arithmetic is not close. To match this, an agent would have to do everything Knob Hill does — the same tools, the same learning, the same keeping up, month after month and year after year. We have already done it. The cost of building that capability — the subscriptions paid, the hours spent, the lessons learned the expensive way — was carried by this business, and none of it is passed to the buyer. Add the money and the time together, and doing it yourself does not come out cheaper than the Roll-Out. It does not come out time-effective either. An agent cannot do it cheaper than us, because we have already paid to be able to do it.

That business is the business Knob Hill Consulting is in. Leveraging the most sophisticated technology there is — and keeping up as it changes — is the whole of what we do. The Roll-Out puts that leverage to work in your market from day one: built, finished, and in front of buyers and sellers while the other road is still on its first subscription.