No, GMS isn’t an acronym for a bodily issue like IBD (irritable bowel disease) — it stands for good market syndrome. While most symptoms of GMS are acute and easy to miss, if not properly identified, they can cause serious problems down the line. Some of those symptoms include, but are not limited to: 

• “My sales are fine, I don’t need to spend any money on that.”
• “I’m beating my goals, we don’t need to invest in any new technology now.”
• “This is a seller’s market and inventory is at an all-time low, I’m not going to waste the time and money on photos and videos of my homes. It’s too hard to coordinate getting it done before it closes.”
• “I understand that most of my leads aren’t getting followed up with, but I’m ahead of my plan. I don’t want to rock the ship too much now.”
• “I don’t have time to look at my CRM to see what’s happening with our customers.”
• “We don’t have the bandwidth to focus on the customer experience now. We will deal with that later.”

The Effects of GMS

Do any of these symptoms sound familiar to you? If they do, you or your team could have GMS. If these symptoms go unchecked, they could lead to things like watery eyes from your competitors leaving you in the dust, suddenly being dazed and confused wondering where all your customers went, and restless leg syndrome from all the worrying about what you’re going to do next.

We hear it every single day, all over the country, in all different markets, from builders of all different sizes. Oftentimes, we’re too busy being “a curator of sales” that we don’t focus on the basics. You know, the things no one loves to talk about or pay attention to. Things like lead response time, customer follow-up from onsite salespeople, and the customer experience (are we delivering the experience that our customers expect from the largest purchase of their lives)? 

Reduce the Risks

One of the key things to remember is: “it’s always easier to keep up than catch up.” Now, this normally applies to keeping up with your normal day-to-day tasks and not getting behind. But we think it also applies to keeping up with consumer trends and experience. It’s a lot easier to dedicate time, money, and resources to improve your business for the future while things are going really well instead of trying to play catch-up because things have shifted some… or a lot. 

Now is the time to identify what some of those “sunk costs” are, cut the line, and move on to something better. Hanging on to things that aren’t working for you because it wasn’t “that long ago” that “it” was created is a form of GMS. GMS is preventing you from being in enough pain today to go ahead and make that change.