The Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". It's not that I'm naive, but whatever happened to this rule?
Some time ago, my husband and I were looking for a house to call home. We went to this one open house and it was clearly a bit overpriced based on the condition of the home. It had a lot of deferred maintanence issues and a fair share of cracked and unlevel concrete around the pool, driveway and garage. Ok, so we started looking around and found our way upstairs and were discussing the pros and cons. While having this discussion, we could hear this loud man ripping the house apart verbally. He was saying it would going to cost at least $40,000 to replace all the windows, the cracks here and there were going to be another chunk of money, the carpet needed to be replaced and on and on. The man and his wife worked their way upstairs and found us and proceeded to tell us that the house was way overpriced and the agent was crazy for asking what he was for the house and they should have accepted the one low offer they got. He then proceeded to say he knew what he was talking about as they were agents. At this point my husband said, "so is my wife". The couple then stated they lived in (insert name of an expensive housing tract), and proceeded to bad mouth the area and I just kept thinking to myself, why are you doing this? Why would you come into someone's open house and just trash it?
I understand this is a competitive line of work, but do we as agents have to resort to this kind of behavior? All I kept thinking was that I never want to do business with this agent nor do I want them to ever come to one of my open houses. Yes, the house was overpriced for what was needed, so what, but was this really necessary? Ok, so the house is overpriced, tell that to your client don't do this in front of other people. Yes, we have a duty to take care of our clients, but like this? I also feel that as agents, we need to look after one another not drive a wedge between each other regardless of what brokerage we come from. I vowed to always be professional and treat my fellow agents with respect.
If you were in my shoes, how would you have handled the (or any) less than respectful agent? How would you handle this agent if it were your open house?
Comments(17)