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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.
Why Do People Start a Real Estate Career?
Few people know that I bought my first real estate brokerage at age 26. That’s sort of an anomaly, especially for a woman back in 1978. It’s even odder today because there are so few young people in real estate. Why, according to the National Association of REALTORS, the median age of a real estate agent today is 57. I imagine, however, that due to the troubled state of our economy, that median age is about to change.
Why do people start a real estate career? I’ll tell you why but agents aren’t gonna like it. They go into real estate because they can’t get a job doing anything else. That’s the truth. They are misfits. They either can’t conform to the outside workplace or else they can’t get a job.
It used to be mostly the rebels who sought out real estate careers, because in the 1970s, an agent didn’t need even a high school education. It was only over the past dozen years or so that education requirements for brokers were put into place. Today, to get a real estate license in California, apart from passing an examination, applicants must also complete a series of 3 real estate classes and be fingerprinted / checked by the F.B.I. As long as a person doesn’t have an arrest record (and there’s some question about that), just about anybody can get a real estate license.
I came into the business because I was already had a real estate career as an escrow officer. I was swamped revamping deals by helping agents salvage their blown-up transactions due to 18%-and-rising interest rates when I suddenly realized I was on the wrong side of the business. On top of this, I had completed real estate and escrow courses, carrying 20 credits a year, through a community college in Orange County, California, while working full-time at a title company. Not your normal Sacramento real estate agent entry to the business.
But today, we have a wide spread of unemployed people, kids graduating from college who can’t find a job, no matter what. Kids struggling to make it through college who can’t graduate because they can’t get into the necessary classes. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the over-50 group getting laid off. Companies can hire cheaper labor if they can dump expensive overhead. There is little loyalty between employees and corporations. It seems that the majority of people employed full-time are those in-between the 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds.
This means we’ve got this huge group of young people and all of us older people who can’t find work. I see that Warren Buffet is concentrating on young people, trying to pull them into the business. That’s a smart move. That’s what I’m telling my niece to do. Go into real estate. Start a real estate career. She might find that she has a passion for the business. She’s outgoing, personable, smart and hard-working. She seems to gain considerable personal satisfaction from helping other people.
The money is nothing to sneeze at, either.
You hear that, Laura?
Half a Chicken and a Red Radio Flyer Wagon
Because I’m one of these systematic people, meaning I devise what I feel are clever ways to monitor my Sacramento real estate business such as staying on top of new listings coming up, escrows in progress, short sales about to be approved, that sort of thing, I also apply this analytical process to track stuff in my personal life. For example, I track my weight. Of course, of all days to look at how much weight one has has gained or lost over the year, what better day to do it than Thanksgiving, I ask you?
I know what you’re probably thinking right now, what kind of goofball counts calories on Thanksgiving? That’s a day to stuff your face and not think about the amount of fat swimming in the gravy you dumped all over your giant mound of dressing, which you had crafted to look like that mountain in Close Encounters of The Third Kind. Unfortunately, I am privy to the disgusting fact I never forget on Thanksgiving, which I will now share with you so you can recall it as well: adults on average gain 1 to 3 pounds every Thanksgiving. That equates to an extra 3,500 to an additional 10,000-plus calorie intake.
If you’re one of those skinny rails that can work it off just by glancing crosswise at the treadmill, well, we all secretly hate you. There is an image that sticks in my mind when I think about fat. It’s not that I watched The Oprah Show on a regular basis but I happened to catch one episode, for some unknown reason, in which she recently lost weight. Like most of us, she’s a yo-yo dieter. Oprah pulled on to the stage a red Radio Flyer wagon filled with 67 pounds of gross fat, which represented her weight loss at that point in her life.
The other thing that struck home was the sad fact I never woke up on Christmas morning to find a Radio Flyer wagon under the tree, no matter how many wish lists I scribbled to Santa Claus. My sisters and brother all at some point received a Radio Flyer wagon for Christmas or birthdays, but not me. You’d think being the oldest that I would have been the first to get a wagon, but it was not to be. This was a depressing moment from my childhood in the 1950s, not as bad as living with an abusive and alcoholic father, but I learned how to cope with that. I never learned how to cope with not receiving a Radio Flyer wagon.
My girlfriend, Margie Moreno, upon hearing that story in 1988, went out and bought me a red Radio Flyer wagon. She put it together herself and delivered it to my house with a big red bow. That wagon lives in my garage now. I use it in the garden and it’s become an integral part of my life. Margie has long ago died. Yet, memories survive just like calendars.
I pulled out my calendar yesterday and noted the weights I have posted over the past 11 months. Yes, goofy as it may seem, I track my weight every few days. When I averaged all of my weights, which believe me I struggle to maintain at my age, my weight had gone steadily downhill from January to July, and then back up to the point where I’m at the same weight as I was in January, plus two pounds. It could be worse. It could be 3 extra chickens, which would be an extra 12 pounds. But when I put it into perspective, the weight increase amounts to only half a chicken. That’s not so bad.
Back in the last century, chickens used to weigh 3 pounds a piece, but for some reason today they are much fatter, and now they all weigh 4 pounds or more. Could be chicken steroids. I use the chicken-weight method when I ponder weight gain or loss. When my husband mentioned that we have the power to just not go for a second helping at Thanksgiving yesterday, that was an extremely good idea. Who knew he was so motivational? Just like Oprah! Of course, we didn’t skip dessert, though. We’re not that foolish.
What it Means to Be a Motivated Seller in Sacramento
It’s not unusual for sellers to ask a Sacramento real estate agent to please tell buyers that they they are motivated sellers. They think that the term “motivated seller” is a code phrase for something important and immensely material to their marketing. I suppose they get this idea because they see the words “motivated seller” in other agent’s listings and think we speak some kind of silent language to each other.
They’re not completely wrong. Agents do engage in conversations with other agents that sound completely foreign to the public. We burn sage and dance naked under full moons, too, but I’m not telling you where. However, the truth is most sellers have no idea what “motivated seller” really means. It doesn’t mean what they think.
First, let’s look at why they think they have to say it. Some sellers believe that even though their home is on the market, some buyers and their agents might wrongly presume that the sellers don’t really want to sell. The reason that buyers and their agents might presume a seller might not want to sell is because the price of that home could be unreasonable or, in some instances, absurd. So, sellers want to assure buyers that they are not unreasonable, they are not absurd, and they really do want to sell even though it might not appear that way because, guess what? They are motivated sellers.
Every seller on the Sacramento real estate market is motivated or they shouldn’t on the market. An agent who slips “motivated seller” into a listing is typically telling other agents in that agent-speak-code that their seller is priced too high and will not reduce the price. It is the agent who is desperate. The agent desperately wants an offer, any offer, even a lowball offer, so they can take that offer to the seller and beat the seller over the head with it until the seller lowers the price.
It could mean the motivated sellers are stubborn, cagey and inflexible. The listing agent might be hoping that other agents will shock the seller into reality.
A motivated seller who is motivated to sell presents his home in the best possible light, and chooses a sales price a buyer is willing to pay. He doesn’t have to advertise that he is motivated because his home listing and sales price will say it for him.
Why Sacramento Listings Are Withdrawn, Canceled or Expired From MLS
Not to have a single withdrawn, canceled or expired real estate listing in today’s Sacramento real estate market is completely impossible among top producers, yet some websites rank agents by percentage of listings sold. If a Sacramento real estate agent had only two listings a year — and that’s about the number of listings that most agents list — and she sold one and the other seller canceled, the agent would show a 50% ratio, which is really bad.
There are many reasons why a home listing in Sacramento might not see its way to closing, and most of those reasons are out of the agent’s control. Let’s take a look at withdrawn or canceled listings, for example. This is excluding a canceled listing that comes back on the market with a new MLS number to reset the days on market, or is off the market for a spell during a winter vacation or improvement project. Typically, 3 things cause a canceled listing:
- Insanity
- Exhaustion
- Overpriced
Insanity. When an agent deals with a large cross section of the population, she is likely to encounter a few sellers who suffer from sort of mental incapacity. They could be completely psychotic or simply bipolar but not every seller is balanced. Is it the agent’s fault that she doesn’t have time to administer the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test prior to accepting the listing?
Exhaustion. This happens more frequently during short sales because these types of transactions take much longer than other types of home sales. If the buyer, for example, drops dead or buys another home (same thing to the seller, basically), thereby canceling, the short sale can start over. There are many reasons for short sale rejection, and sellers need patience to eventually close. Some sellers give up the fight and choose foreclosure.
Overpriced. This is the most common reason for a withdrawn, canceled or expired listing. It is the worst mistake a seller can make, but sellers choose the sales price. When a home doesn’t sell due to price, sellers become angry at themselves and some of that anger ends up hurled in the agent’s direction, too, because who wants to squirm in their own hostility all by themselves? Misery loves company.
There is a guy in my real estate office who makes a very good living by working with withdrawn, canceled and expired listings. He spends all day in a space about the size of a phone booth calling these sellers. Can you imagine his phone conversations? The guy has got to be an armadillo in disguise or a saint, I’m not sure which.
In any case, all of these canceled listings can affect an agent’s percentage performance on some websites, and percentage of listings sold is not an accurate indicator of the agent’s actual performance.
