How to Work With Emotional Real Estate Agents

Do you ever have days when you feel compelled to tell some whiny person to just put a sock in it? I’m not talking about my husband, in case he’s reading this and wondering. It’s the buyer’s agents who can get all excited and turn into white knight agents, turning up the volume and drama over some piddly little thing, when the agent hasn’t even spoken to the buyer. A Sacramento real estate agent can’t take this kind of stuff personally because it’s not personal. It’s some other agent’s misaligned ego that’s doing the talking.

This is not to say that to be successful in real estate that an agent needs a skin as thick as an Everglades alligator. To the contrary, good real estate agents need a really big heart and hearts can be broken. More important is the ability to put situations into perspective, to be calm, rational and think things through before reacting.

I suspect that the aforementioned is called adulthood, although I’m not really sure. Because not having any kids to use as a measuring stick, I’m not certain I have fully developed into an adult. The days all sort of look the same to me, and then one day I look in the mirror and I’m over 60. Unsupervised because my parents are dead and gone. Nobody to account to but myself.

People tell me I have an even temperament. Probably because I am not the type of person to explode as my immediate reaction to something seemingly stupid — even if inside my brain I’m thinking WTF, I don’t say it until I’ve thought through the situation. Like, take a buyer’s agent who asks me if the seller will accept, oh, say, $50,000 less on a brand new extremely well priced listing. An agent will ask that question because buyers asked.

Instead, I wonder why that agent has not studied the comparable sales in the neighborhood. I wonder why the agent hasn’t taken the time to educate her client. I wonder why the agent is in real estate, and how long it will take before she ends up behind the counter at Starbucks. But I don’t say any of those things. I just ask why. Asking questions is the best way to diffuse potentially explosive situations. It’s also a good way to find out what another person is really thinking before jumping to conclusions.