Agents Must be Qualified to Work on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team

Josh Amolsch, Dianne Slutsky, Elizabeth Weintraub, Barbara Dow

You can’t make up this stuff. Yesterday morning at 7:33, midstream reading the Sacramento Bee and chewing a piece of gluten-free whole-grain toast, I noticed my cell phone vibrate on the kitchen table. Local caller. I picked it up. The caller asked if it was too early to call. Now, you’d think she would have considered that fact before entering my phone number . . . I responded: obviously not since I answered. I can be a smart aleck sometimes. She wanted to know if I am a top producer Sacramento Realtor like she read on my website, sounding as though she wondered if I misrepresented myself.

Just what one wants to hear early in the morning. Are you an honest person? I asked who she was and what she wanted, which seemed to somewhat bristle her. She repeated her question. Why, why does this 7:33 AM caller want to know how much money I make, and why is she interrupting my breakfast?

Turns out she wanted to know if I would consider putting together a team of agents and whether I would hire her if she got her real estate license. You’d think the first thing she would have done was peruse my website to determine that the Elizabeth Weintraub Team already exists, and she could have looked over my closed listings to realize that I am indeed a top producer Sacramento Realtor, but not everybody has the patience nor the where-with-all to successfully navigate online.

Eyeing my carton of non-fat Greek yogurt, although not with the same intensity and drooly attention as our cat, Pica, I moved quickly to end the call by saying I don’t hire new agents. You’ve got to have experience and be fully qualified to work on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team. Oh, says, the caller, the conversation was over then. Thank goodness. Except it wasn’t.

She went on to flatly state there is a bubble next summer and wondered if I was aware. She heard it on the radio. What is this? Jehovah’s Witnesses on my doorstep at 7:30? We still have thousands of homeowners underwater in Sacramento. Very few homes for sale. I suggested that maybe this is not the best time for her to be entering the real estate industry if she truly believes a bubble is about to burst. She followed that up by insisting she was a very intelligent woman who has a mortgage lender’s license, and had once sold her own home which, in her mind, makes her fully qualified to work to work on the Elizabeth Weintraub Team.

No, no, shoot me now. And then it got worse.

You don’t need a Realtor to sell a home, she insisted. Well, why didn’t she tell me THAT in the first place because I had no idea my services were completely useless. It’s so easy, she continued, all you have to do is call a title company. What? Even experienced agents are struggling to close transactions in today’s market — the world of Sacramento real estate is extremely complicated — and here is this nitwit who wants to enter a profession she truly believes is unnecessary?

I considered referring her to my office manager but then I might have to see her face in my office, and she would be disruptive to others around us, give more undeserving Realtors a bad name, and decided against it. Just wished her well and pitied the next agent she undoubtedly will disturb.