Email Elizabethdiscrimination in real estate
Reasons to Ignore Price Points When Choosing Real Estate Clients
Criteria for choosing real estate clients should be based on the agent’s ability to perform.
An agent friend called to ask about a recent blog that she thought might apply to choosing real estate clients. I had discussed prioritizing and spending time on functions that lead to closing. She somehow misread or maybe I wasn’t clear enough. My point was to talk to people whose conversation could lead to acquiring or closing a transaction, and not to spend time talking with sales people, telemarketers, schmoozing mortgage brokers, pretty much ignoring anything that is not directly real estate related.
The question put to me was when is it OK to not work with a client whose price point is very low and requires a lot of work, without signs of immediate reward. Is it all right to tell buyers, for example, that an agent who spends time working with them is giving up valuable time that could be spent working with buyers whose offers won’t get rejected due to competing cash offers and whose price points are more plausible? That the agent prefers instead to target a more financially rewarding buyer?
I thought about the question and how I felt about it. It’s a foreign concept to me. Here’s what I believe. This is about ethics and integrity. If a real estate agent when choosing real estate clients uses ease of transaction and sales price as determining factors, where does one draw the line? And won’t that line change as time goes on? If you start with the assumption that, for example, you won’t work with buyers who are looking for a home under $100,000, how long does it take before you decide you won’t work with buyers looking for a home under $200,000? Under $300,000?
What kind of person does that make the real estate agent? Not a very nice person, I concluded. In fact, it makes the agent kind of an asshole, forgive my descriptive French, but it’s an accurate description. I think an attitude like that would fester and mushroom into a monster. One would be like Donald Trump. You can’t say some people are worth your services and some are not because they don’t have enough money to interest you. Well, you can, but you’d be an asshole.
That has never been my practice when choosing real estate clients. I never look at the sales price or the amount of work involved. I’m a Sacramento Realtor. I don’t discriminate. Selling Sacramento real estate is my job. Some transactions are more lucrative than others, and some are easier, but it doesn’t mean money or a slam dunk is my focus. My focus is to work with anybody who needs help. I never look at the bottom line sales price. Ever.
I put transactions into escrow. As long as I have transactions in escrow, I know I won’t starve to death, and my cats will enjoy heat over the winter. Some years I make more money than others, some years less, but I am always ranked in some form in the top 10 agents in Sacramento. Part of that way I accomplish that is by not choosing real estate clients based on how much money I will make. I’ve learned a long time ago to ignore that part of the business, odd as that might sound to some of you.
Why Are the ERA and Equality Act Not Federal Laws Already?
Why is California only one of 14 states to make it against the law to discriminate against LGBT people?
There are times that I can so busy selling Sacramento real estate, so wrapped up in the process and how we do things in California, that I can forget that most states in the rest of the country lag behind us when it comes to discrimination of the LGBT community. That’s putting it politely, I suppose. Lag. There shouldn’t be any politeness about common human decency. I was reminded of this while watching Jon Oliver Tonight questioning Republicans (candidates for president) about whether they would attend a gay wedding, and how none could answer that simple question, and how businesses and individuals in other states apart from California openly practice discrimination against gay people.
It’s appalling.
This is not to say that we don’t have idiots in California who also discriminate, many most likely from Jefferson territory, but at least in California such behavior is against the law. Discrimination against sexual orientation is a state law but not a federal law. Our own Federal Fair Housing Act does NOT name sexual orientation as a protected class. It’s insane that this is 2015 and our federal laws allow discrimination. But when you stop to think about it, the Equal Rights Amendment, which provides equal rights for women under the law, is NOT part of the U.S. Constitution, either. It was introduced to Congress in 1923, and it is still not ratified by all 50 states, so it is not law. Unfreakin’ believable.
We’ve been fighting for the ERA for almost 100 years!
The ERA was ratified by 35 states, 3 short of the 38 it needed to be passed into law. The holdout states were mostly southwest and southeast, but at least the ERA got the support of the state of Texas, which is remarkable onto itself. The Equality Act, talked about by Jon Oliver this week, is missing the support of those same states, plus a lot more. In fact, only 14 states and Washington, D.C. support equal rights for the LGBT community.
Gay people can now get married BUT they can be fired from their jobs, evicted from their rentals and denied service in a restaurant in 36 states in our country. Just reading those words makes my throat choke. How did we get to be so backwards in this country? How did Americans lose sight of progressiveness and our intelligence? We weathered a disgraceful period that finally legally ended in the 1960s through the Civil Rights turmoil, and this type of discrimination isn’t any different, not really.
The 1959 Unruh Civil Rights Act makes discrimination against Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgendered individuals against the law in California. They say other states often follow what we do in California, but it’s been 56 years for us already. What’s the deal with those other 36 states?
Treating all people equal, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, should be simple for us. Easy for us to look into our hearts and do what is right, just and honest, at least from a legal standpoint. Come on, America, support the federal ERA and the Equality Act.
