When your son dies...

Some of you know my 22 year old son was killed in a car accident the first of September. It has been a difficult time for our family. Thank you for your patience with me while I get my sea legs with this. Since you are all friends, I will share more about Phillip and his life with you as time goes on...I actually set up a blog for him and have been blogging some of my challenges. www.phillipshelton.com

I really miss him and you might wonder what this has to do with real estate. Well, nothing really except sometimes as professionals...we must think about what the other agent we are working with could be going through. I have been upfront about my struggles with agents because quite frankly, the first month, my brain wasn't clicking at 100%. Now, I had a title person tell me that my 50% was better than what she saw most at 100%. I take this as a compliment and understand that I am my own worst critic. My clients were my saving grace during the after mass. There were days I shut down. I was honest and told them I was doing that. Some days I didn't get out of my pajamas. I was always on top of their transaction and I had a another great agent step up to the plate and support me with one transaction that was in the middle of inspections. I wanted to make sure everyone was covered.

The point is...this isn't something that will be fixed in a month. It has been three months as I write this and I still cry daily. I still think of him. I miss him. It is the Holiday season now. I miss him. It is not logical. I can be looking at a pencil and think of him. There is no rhyme or reason what my brain is doing with my thoughts. The best thing anyone can do is offer compassion and support. After all, we are professionals and treating each other with respect is part of being professional.

Here is a video of my son...I love it that it captures his personality and expressions. He was very expressive with his eyes. I miss you Phillip Henry...may you rest well. Love, Mom

I have worked with some agents who I am ashamed they are in the business. I had one like this right before Phillip died. She was driving my clients around, working directly with them. They were sending paperwork to her...this was after I set a boundary with them about driving 100 miles each way to pick them up...they wanted rides to the airport. I did it a couple of times and then asked them to rent a car and they called the listing agent and she drove them and spent time with them. They in turn were angry with me and gossiping about me...the listing agent felt inclined to tell me the buyers and sellers got together with the help of her, to bad mouth me. Nice. I would have called her broker...she was the DB.

In the end, it closed. She called me incompetent. My broker laughed at this. She had set it up so she rescued and was the savior. The sad thing was, there were things she did that worked against them....I was guiding them on the back side as she would CC me on the correspondence and then they would respond to her. For example: they send a list of repairs directly to her that they wanted. I told them they just closed their inspection window so they could do no further inspections. The seller sent a resonse back saying...we will have that checked. We will have someone look at that, etc. It didn't say anything about fixing it or correcting it. I sent an email pointing this out to them...still they accepted directly to the listing agent. It was the most frustrating transaction ever. Could I get into trouble for exposing her here? Perhaps. I don't know...I didn't go through the proper channels of exposing her as I had planned to when my son died.

I would love to hear your comments about this agent and any experiences you have had with bad agents and how you handled it.