When I first started in Real Estate, as a newbie, the goal was to get the chance to work "Floor Time". The ultimate indicator of your performance was landing one of the Floor Time shifts on Mondays. You see, Mondays are coveted because in our market, all real estate offices are closed on Sundays and on Saturdays, they typically close by 1:00 PM. So by Monday, the phones would ring off the hook with callers wanting information on a property they saw while driving around over the weekend or by sellers who decided over the weekend to list their home and needed an agent to come over. Monday calls had always been the most fruitful therefore, most desired. But Floor Time, not just Monday Floor Time, wasn't just handed to you - you had to earn the right and privilege to answer those incoming calls. If you didn't know how to handle those calls, you simply wouldn't get that opportunity. And seeing it from a broker's perspective, why would they want to put someone on those calls who didn't know how to handle the standard, blind-callers echoes..."I'm just calling for the price" or "I'm calling for my son, daughter, friend, etc." or "Just tell me what's your commission - I don't want to give you any info yet"...when they spend a lot of money to have that phone ring? Learning to cultivate those blind-callers into a closed transaction is continuously a challenge and is not for the faint-hearted.

Well, I'm not a newbie anymore and have been working Floor Time for several years with great success however, as of late, all I seem to be doing during my assigned Floor Time (Mondays included) is fielding off callers who want to sell me personalized pens or advertising space in the local sports calendar or talking with callers who are looking for rentals because they are being "kicked-out" by their landlords. The crickets are chirping and its 8:30 in the morning!

Long gone are the blind-callers...I would love the challenge of building their trust (because blind-callers don't trust any of us);...Long gone are the buyers who saw a property over the weekend and want to know more about it....I would love to talk with a first-time home buyer and bring them in to sit down and really go over the whole process (but alas, there are none because of the knee-jerk reactions the lenders have imposed, making it nearly impossible to get pre-approved); Long gone are the sellers...I would love to talk with those sellers who really need to sell (but can't because of, yes, the knee-jerk reactions of lenders who aren't pre-approving any buyers). Grudgingly, the callers I don't want to talk to are the bottom-dwellers and they seem to be the only ones who are calling...you know the ones...those who feel that because a sign is in the yard, they "know" the sellers must be desperate therefore, write offers that are completely disrespectful.

Floor Time has become exhausting, dreadful, and probably the most unproductive time of my day. My heart goes out to my broker, who most certainly is vexed by this whole situation, and to myself as I spend these hours up close and personal with the effects the media has pounded into the minds of so many. What is one to do except to keep their axe to the stone, work Floor Time again on Wednesday, and hope the crickets stop chirping.