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.