There was a featured post last week asking the question, do you make friends with your clients and remain friends after closing? A lot of agents, well, most of the agents said yes, they do make and keep the friendships after closing.
This response made me ponder how many of our clients actually become our friends. The first thing that must be defined before one can properly answer this question is-
"what is a friend?"
What is your definition of a friend?
- Is a friend a person you go out to dinner with or you only make a call to them once a year?
- Is a friend a person you call to cry on their shoulder and vent and let it all hang out?
- Is a friend a person with whom you trust your secrets with?
- Or is a friend someone who just friends you on facebook?
Because I think that these days the term "friend" is used quite loosely. What comes to my mind when agents say they make friends with most of their clients after closing is that these agents must have a lot of time on their hands.
How many "friends" can you have at the end of the day truthfully and still really be "friends"? How many times do you call on your friends and go out with them or meet them for lunch. Let's say you meet a friend a day for lunch, well, that is only 30 friends. So that would mean that you could have 30 friends if you define a friend as someone you go out to lunch with once a month. So what happens when you have more than 30 closings in a year?
So the next question that came to my mind is how many houses are you selling? How many listings are you selling?
If you only have one listing a year that you sell and about 5 to 7 buyers a year to sell a house to then I could conceivably believe that you can turn those clients into friends and maintain a meaningful relationship with each of them.
But like Nestor says, we are hired to do a job and that is to market and sell our listings not necessarily to become friends. In fact, our clients don't even have to like us, they just need to know that we know how to sell their property. Of course, there are people who are our clients and have become our friends over the years. I am not saying we don't make friends with our clients. What I am saying is that when you carry a lot of listings it is not a practical goal to have.
The reality in our markets here in Florida is that it is a very transient state. Even in our Church, families move in and families move out frequently to other states. Most of our sellers who are short sellers we have never even met. Most of them are out of state sellers who have a second home here or investment properties here in Florida or they have relocated for a job in another state. We are not likely going to get many referrals from many of these clients because they are not the kind of people who are going to go around showing off that they lost their shirts in a short sale or that they had financial hardships. Not something to really be tooting your horn about if you know what I mean. We do get a lot of referrals from our clients but not all of them will be apt to discuss real estate for a while.
Then there is your life. You have a life outside of real estate. I wonder about the agents who make friends with almost every client. Does that mean the agent is single or has no family? No kids? No spouse?
Because after work, family, church and community involvement- how much time is really left to go and hang out with all those friends you made by selling all those houses you sold?
Since family is where and who we spend most of our time with- we have 9 children and 8 of them are grown ups- there is not a lot of time left in the day for chatting and going out to events with friends. Those relationships are more important to us than friendships outside of our family. Heck, we are so busy with the going ons with our family right now that I have not even spoken to my very best friend in over a month.
Perhaps a better term for all these friends agents are making would be "acquaintances"?
Copyright © by Katerina Gasset 2011* ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
*Do You Really Make Friends With All Your Clients?*
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