Who in their right mind would be real estate partners with their mother in-law? Well, I guess that would be me.
I started in real estate eight years ago by joining forces with my mother in-law. Sandie was a fairly successful agent for around 18 years and had worked worked for various brokers over that time. She encouraged me to come into the business with her. I had always been interested in real estate and thought this might be a great opportunity to test it out.
Sandie was thinking about winding down her career and saw an opportunity to pass on her client list and good will to a family member. She was good with people and had a database of around 150 people. At that time, Sandie had never sent an email or been on the Internet. We were logging directly into the MLS database computers. We didn't have a digital camera. We were glueing 4X6 prints onto flyers.
I brought technology to the business little by little. Sandie taught me the nuts and bolts of real estate while I taught Sandie all about computers and the Internet. Our best move was getting our website online in October of 1999. The next best thing we did was getting an IDX home search tool up on our website. It seemed to be a pretty radical thing back then.
People always ask us how we get along. We have very different personalities and mother in-laws are just a problem to begin with. I guess we have learned how to tolerate each other. We both work with our own clients for the most part but split all commissions 50/50. We can always step in for each other when one of us is too busy. It really gives us a lot of scheduling flexibility that we wouldn't have if we were working by ourselves.
It's also nice in that it allows us to cast a larger net as far as attracting business. It's good diversification. Some people only want to work with Sandie while others only want to work with me. Sometimes Sandie is on a hot streak when all of my deals seem to be falling apart. It smooths out the ups and downs in the business.
I also don't have to worry about getting cheated in any way. We have each other to bounce things off of. When one might be getting frustrated with a situation, the other can step in and keep things under control.
My wife probably likes it too. It gives her the ability to have someone keep an eye on me. Sometimes when my wife and I have disagreements, I can kind of get my side across more easily by explaining things to Sandie. It's kind of like having an interpretor. Women sometimes seem to be talk a different language.
The bottom line is that we compliment each other pretty well.
Working with family members creates its own challenges but also generates some nice opportunities.
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