I've been anactive agent for less than a year but I've had some early success. I credit the success to four things, 1) I'm working real hard. 2) My wife has been 100% supportive of this venture into real estate. 3) Luck, I have had some great sales walk into the office while I was on desk duty-timing. and 4) Speaking of timing, having a strong sense of humor. Not everyone loves my sense of humor but it is a distinguishing characteristic of mine and I'm not shy about using it.
So when I'm out with new clients, early in our "relationship" I pepper them with off-handed comments, the occassional irreverent statement or a good joke or two. The effect down the road is that when the client inevitably becomes a pain in the rear end, I am not stuck having to be politically correct. In my office they call this "Lenny being Lenny" Let me explain:
I'm currently dealing with a husband/wife, let's call them Sally & Bill, who like to go completley under the radar during the week. Won't return calls, emails or texts with anything in more than one word non-answer; something like - "Hi Bill, if we're going to look at some more homes this weekend we need to establish a time. I can see you Saturday morning or Sunday afernoon. Which works better?" Their typical response: "Great!"
Huh?
So, when on Friday night I get a list of about ten homes they want to see and a note saying let's get together at ten tomorrow instead of diplomatically finding a way to say I already booked the time, I take the offensive and say "Bill, I guess I've done a spectacular job of making you think that you are the only client I have. Now it's true that you are my most "interesting" client but I have others to care for. Why don't you send me your list now and meet me here on Sunday." Amazingly this fairly honest approach almost always works. If they can't be flexible I do go out of my way to make things work but if I can't, I just let them know.
Now it's easy to say I should just fire these clients. They don't respect what I'm doing or the amount of behind the scenes effort I'm putting into them. But the catch is that they are going to buy a home in the $750k range and they are completely loyal to me in their own bizarre way. I find that comics can often get away with saying the blatant truth when "normal" people can't.
Have you ever had a husband/wife team where one can look at a dozen homes and still want more while the other says "I'll just wait in the car". I find it's easy to tell the one with the short attention span-why don't you stay home. I'll take your spouse and we'll shop till they drop. He's like a camel-can go weeks without stopping. Then we'll present you with a top two list." That almost always works and it speeds up the process a whole lot.
My favorite line of the past couple weeks was after finding a great home for a client. A home that they said this is worth the asking price (and it was) and they said the magic words, "we love it". I said if this is your home we need to write an offer right now. The husband said "but I refuse to pay the asking price". This is where I can easily get away with saying to the wife "Why did you marry this guy?"
The response is usually something like a tongue in cheek-"well he's got other redeeming qualities". At which point I can just say ""well redeem him all you want but if you want this house it's silly to argue over what will be a difference of 20 bucks a month in your mortgage." They usually write.
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