"JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM."

"JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM."

I had a conversation the other day with one of our real estate agents.  He was complaining about a customer of his being "all over the map" on what they wanted in a home in Tallahassee.  "They have been bouncing around for weeks now!"  So, I asked him if he had taken his customers through our discovery process.  "Oh, that just takes too long."  Longer than guessing at what they want for weeks????

I'm dumbfounded how some people insist on doing things the hard way. 

The first time I tried to buy a house was long before I got into the real estate business.  The only thing my agent, not a Tallahassee Realtor, asked me was how much I wanted to spend a month.  She didn't even pre-qualify me!  And worst of all, she never tried to discover my motivation for buying.  Over the next three weeks, she dragged me around town through close to fifty houses, all across the scale; because she had no earthly clue what I wanted.  I ended up renting again and thinking she was an idiot.  And I'm sure she ended up hating me for wasting three weeks of her life.

We have a procedure for getting to know our customers and finding out what they are looking for in the Tallahassee housing market which we call our Discover Process.  At its heart is a multiple page questionnaire.  Now, granted it's a long questionnaire, but we train our agents how to be "ask oriented" during the presentation.  This enables our agents to identify the areas their customers are really interested in and breeze through the things that are not very important to a particular customer.

My first attempt at buying a home would have turned out quite differently if the agent I went to had used something like our Discovery Process.  If she had just taken the time to sit down with me, educate me on the process of buying a home and find out what I really wanted, we both would have walked away happy.  With a little bit of intelligent effort at the outset she could have gotten paid for the time she spent on me and I would now have a nice investment property instead of four years of wasted rent.