My First Showing as a Newly-Minted Real Estate Broker
I got my Broker's license just one year after becoming licensed as a real estate agent. I had made the decision to open my own real estate office almost from the moment I earned my salesperson's license.
At the beginning of my career as a real estate broker, which was just over fourteen years ago, I didn't have very many listings. So I started out by showing the listings of other offices.
I remember that first showing very well. A couple from suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota walked into our office on Main Street and they pulled one of our three-panel color brochures out of a brochure holder on the reception desk. They began flipping through the pages, browsing our in-house listings.
The woman announced to me that she and her husband had been looking for a waterfront home on Madeline Island for about ten years. She went on to say that they had looked at quite a few homes and nothing they saw so far had met their rather stringent requirements as a place to spend their summer months. She worded this statement almost like a challenge, as if to say "if you want to show us something, it had better be good".
After listening to her description of the features of their ideal Lake Superior summer home, it almost seemed as if they were describing a property I had previewed the day before. This wasn't one of our listings, but it was a gorgeous property with a low shoreline bank and a sunset view, overlooking nearby Bayfield, Wisconsin. The property was subdivisible, with the equivalent of two waterfront lots and two dwellings. One of the dwellings was the main home and the other could best be described as a guest cottage.
So I responded to her challenge by saying "I have something in mind that I think you'll like". She stared at me a bit incredulously and replied, "well, you seem awfully sure of yourself". Her husband looked skeptical, maybe a bit bored, but he threw me an easy pitch by telling his wife to "get in the car and let's take a look".
The rest of this story is a very happy memory. It turns out that the buyers knew the seller and they were familiar with the property. I did very little selling once they got out of the car and began touring the home and guest cottage. It wasn't necessary to clutter the conversation with a lot of agent talk. You could tell from their comments that they were pretty wowed by this home on their own.
That first showing resulted in a sale and the house pretty much sold itself. When I delivered the buyers' offer to the listing office, the listing broker seemed pretty surprised that I had found a buyer for his listing just a day after previewing the home and less than a week since our company opened its doors.
After that first sale as a newly-licensed real estate broker, I was hooked. I knew not all my sales would be that easy and I figured I was lucky that all the stars aligned at the right moment in order to put these buyers in front of me when I had something superlative to show them. That first sale gave me confidence and taught me not to feel intimidated by a demanding buyer who seems a bit jaded when they walk into our office for the first time.
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