Winter, spring, summer or fall,
all you got to do is call
and I'll be there yeah yeah yeah.
Ain´t it good to know
that you´ve got a friend
people can be so cold
they'll hurt you and desert you
well they'll take your soul if you let them
oh yeah don't you let them.
James Taylor
If you've been in Real Estate very long you know what Mr. Taylor sang is true. Clients can be cold. They will hurt you and desert you and sometimes your clients will even take your soul if you're not careful. Every now and then this discussion comes up among agents and I found myself having it again last week with a fairly new agent in our office. He was having trouble getting hold of a client whom he had been working with. They quit taking his calls and weren't calling him back. His emails went unanswered. Seems they vanished.
What really happened is that they probably dumped him. They are probably hooked up with another agent that they met at an open house. Or they may have called the listing agent because they felt he wasn't getting them what they wanted or he wasn't moving fast enough for them. My bet is that they are already hooked up with another agent who promised them the world. Surely not! Yep, I'm afraid clients will walk away and never look back these days. And when it happens it hurts.
It seems like clients dump their agents more readily these days. I'm not sure if this is unique to just our industry, but it seems to be happening in increasing numbers and frequency. I believe this is partly due to the housing information explosion via the internet and partly due to the current national attitude towards the economy, the oil spill in the Gulf, the political environment, unemployment and on and on and on.
So what can be done? What do you do when a client dumps you? I recommend, after the week of non-returned phone calls and emails, to back off. You might call once a week and send an email every so often, but sometimes backing off can be a good approach. If the client is shopping with another agent, they're not going to talk to you at the moment. After a few weeks, you might re-establish contact. Sometimes, even after a month or two, this works. And the reason it works is because the buyer has usually worked the new agent out of their system. They've looked at houses and seen that that other agent, who promised them so much really wasn't any better than you were. It is at that point they're open to taking your calls again. That is, of course, if they didn't buy something!
James Taylor photo from Flickr Creative commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allie-in-wonderland/2664198505/
Finger photo from Flickr Creative commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/3538414354/
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