Similarities Between Hospice and Sacramento Real Estate

Elizabeth Weintraub and Barbara Dow at the Sacramento Cemetery playing an Ingress game.

If you think there are no similarities between hospice and Sacramento real estate, then you are not a real estate agent in Sacramento. Which is sort of surprising when you realize that one out of every 35 people in the state of California has a real estate license; yet we all painfully know, too, that simply possessing a real estate license does not make a person a real estate agent, but still. Busy agents who work in real estate day-in and day-out will readily spot the shared common denominators.

My brother who is dying from sarcoma cancer has taken a turn for the worse. He got to see Bruce Springsteen in St. Paul last year, though, as at the last minute a fellow Minnesotan told me how to get tickets for him. I also realize that he will not be using the tickets to see Don Henley from the Eagles at the Minnesota State Fair this August, a show for which I had optimistically managed to snag premium seating. The sad news from back home means I am making a trip to Minneapolis next week. In my multi-tasking world, is best for me to focus on several things at once: to visit my brother at his in-home hospice and Sacramento real estate.

Because there is always something horrible going on in Sacramento real estate to divert my attention. Some fresh new hell. To snap my head like a dog toward a squirrel. My goal is the same as most real estate agents, and that is to keep our clients happy by managing expectations and delivering results. If anything goes wrong, any little thing outside of our immediate control, many times the client will blame us. I hear agents talk about clients who scream bloody murder at their agent and blame agents for things that the agents are not responsible for, making them suffer the brunt of an explosion simply because they are the client’s main point of contact.

One can be defensive or proactive in these situations, and defensiveness loses: it loses in hospice and Sacramento real estate.

My brother was estranged for 20 years at his own choosing. When his end of life was imminent, he changed his mind and reached out. I’ll never get the answer out of him as to why he stopped communicating with me and my sister. I can’t make him divulge. No reason to even hold out hope for it. I can just be there to help him make the transition out of this world. To lend support. The older we get, the better we get at it. Just like I help sellers leave behind homes filled with memories of joy, sadness, pain and love.

Hospice and Sacramento real estate are more like close sisters at times than you might imagine.