Are there any great books about being a real estate agent? Is this profession really like it is depicted in comedies and cartoons? Are we really self-serving, conniving manipulators of the truth to get a sale? Professionals in other industries produce writers who wrap their considerable professional knowledge around the subject of the career and produce interesting insights into their profession. Lawyers and Doctors have left their profession to produce wonderful books where the central characters are lawyers and doctors, why are there no realtors that leave the profession to write about what it is like to be a realtor? Is it that the successful realtors are making the kind of money that they don’t want to leave that profession to move to the world of writing, or is it that the ones who are not successful don’t know enough of what it takes to be a good agent to actually write about it.
A great agent is someone who has multiple skills and can stop on a dime, shift gears and give you an accurate and passionate answer to a left field question. Agents are required to keep abreast of the ongoing changes in the laws regarding home ownership. It needn’t be said that this is a lot of work these days with the landscape of homeownership being drastically changed weekly with new laws and regulations.
There are lots of “how to” books about real estate. Every realtor that passes through the million dollar mark seems to have a book on how they did it and are willing to share that knowledge with you for some tidy sum, but no one is writing any narratives on what it is like to wake up every day and realize that they need to find a prospect and make them a client.
There are no stories about how an agent looses a client because another agent promised to lower their commission. There are no stories about the kind of people I got a couple of calls from yesterday. This woman called in to get some information on one of our listings, not mine. I looked it up for her and gave her information, not being satisfied she wanted information on another house that was not our listing. I offered to send her the information to her email or cell phone. She told me disdainfully that she could look up the MLS material any time she wanted and wasn’t’ going to give me her email address. I asked if she was an agent and she said she was a teacher and hung up on me saying all agents were idiots. All this for helping her, you just can’t make this stuff up. I am sure across the country at least a thousand agents had a similar rude and uninformed person demean their work. Ah well, I went on to work on more productive tasks and finished the day in a room of agents listening to an informed agent Mark Smith, share with us his considerable experience and expertise with Short Sales. It was nice to be among people who care about their profession and are willing to learn and share, I just wish there was a good summer read about our profession
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