Adventures in Real Estate

Adventures in Real Estate

Featuring Terrific Tips for New Agents

by

Jean Stites

Copyright 2013, Jean Stites.

All rights reserved.

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***

To Joann Herrell and all the folks I used to know at:

Century 21 Westberry Realty

809 West Bankhead Highway

Villa Rica, Georgia

USA

Planet Earth

Introduction

Now, when considering the ancient art and science of dividing the territory, I think most would agree that it’s often oozing with the spirit of adventure—defined by my dictionary as an experience of an exciting, hazardous, unusual, or suspenseful nature.

Yes, if you’ve opened this book, you probably already know that this certainly applies to a great many moments in the life of your typical real estate professional, with the possible exception of unusual—unless you count, for example, that time the six-foot snake fell from the rafters right onto your head....

Because of course it’s a jungle out there—the perfect setting for high adventure when viewed from the proper perspective, while those who broker the land for a living must try to think of it this way on those almost inevitable days when they’ve come to feel that working the strip-mines of Triaxis Nine would be better, by far, than dealing with real estate.

Meanwhile, it’s my hope that this little book will entertain, educate, and inspire those still out there in the trenches I used to occupy—perhaps even sparing some a bit of pain and suffering; and so with that in mind, here’s my first of several hopefully helpful tips for beginning brokers:

Never, never, never allow a client to leap out of your car on a remote rural road to photograph the giant painted saw on display in front of the house you just passed; because I can tell you from personal experience that slamming on the brakes when he shrieks, backing up a quarter mile on that winding rural road, and allowing him to photograph this eye-catching work of art will surely result in a very large man emerging from the house with a shotgun.

Plus, things will only grow worse if you’re already hopelessly lost in an area that's not on your map, because you’re going to get even more lost while speeding away from the scene.

Add ten more pain points if there are unhappy children in the back seat.

Chapter One

Office Survival Tips

Now of course, success in any endeavor demands that we never forget that God is in the details. For instance, those who’ve spent any amount of time making a living out of an office may have already learned the hard way that nothing is more vital to any paper-pusher’s success than a well-loaded, properly functioning stapler, which is why you can never find one on your desk.

Yes, co-workers, who may ordinarily be the most well-meaning of types, borrow them permanently by accident because they all have a subliminal voice—an evil twin lurking in the background, if you will—whispering to their subconscious that a person whose daily bread comes from a paper basket can never have too many staplers, demonically dragging them into a pit of pathological hoarding and selective amnesia....

Tip for beginners: don’t be a fool and think you can get by without a stapler, or else the day will surely come when you’ll be transformed into a stupefied zombie—dropping all your paperwork into a scattered heap on the floor, because some threat to your existence has made you so nervous that you feel you may run screaming from the scene....

And when this happens, don't say I didn't warn you. This is a secret that every successful businessperson knows, and I give it to you for free.

Plus, paper clips are a shaky compromise, but if you think they'll never let you down you're living in another fool's paradise even more dangerous—if such a thing is possible—than the one inhabited by those who charge blindly ahead without their staplers....

And never tape anything!

Don't ask me why.

Believe me, you don't want to know!

Just remember: if you can fasten and unfasten anything easily with one hand, over and over and over again, while listening to a customer tell you his life story on the phone—bending and mutilating this fastener it until it breaks with a therapeutic snap, because the other two calls that were blinking away on hold have now hung up—well then your clip is just not going to cut it in a modern-day business environment.

God knows, if there's anything you must be to survive, it's flexible.

Meanwhile, just think: way back at the dawn of commerce, they might’ve actually been forced to use something like paste made with flour and water, possibly eating some in spite of themselves, which—now that I think about it—may account for the near-genetic tendency of business people to attend luncheons.

***

Well anyway, moving on, two perhaps even more essential pieces of office survival equipment would have to be Humble Paper and the Almighty Pen, without which, of course, nothing is possible. Sooner or later, I imagine, success in the business world will be shown in studies to be directly proportional to the number of forests one defoliates.

And while I’m not sure about the other profession, it’s a tragic fact that most real estate brokers lean unnaturally to one side—much like the famous Tower of Pisa—because of the sheer tonnage of paper they’re usually required to haul around everywhere they go. Carrying every scrap of information that could possibly be relevant at all times, they’re always properly prepared for that inevitable day when five large men in black knock on the door demanding to know whether the spots on Ms. Susie (a.k.a. Trixie) Slabadon’s kitchen floor were turquoise or sky blue.

Write it all down, goes the tried and true motto—bringing us to the contracts themselves which, in olden days, were etched by hand on stone. This made them very heavy of course, which is why very few women went into real estate at that time.

Meanwhile, although a contract less than seventy-six pages long is often treated with scorn—as if it couldn’t possibly be real—competent brokers must nevertheless carry them along everywhere they go, in case a lawyer actually returns their call.

Even when you’re coming out of back surgery, your paperwork should be within arm’s reach, together with at least twenty-five fully functioning pens—at least half of them blue. The blue ink—so they say—is to produce at least one copy of the contract that’s without a doubt an original, but in actual fact, the real reasons for this are lost in the secret rites of the ancient ones, and are not to be questioned....

Also, experienced brokers will always have an auxiliary pen stashed in a pocket—especially when showing property, so that their client can borrow it to write down the dimensions of every room in every structure he looks at; while he’ll count on you for paper too, since you obviously carry plenty around.

Yes, it’s essential to be properly equipped so that you can simultaneously write down absolutely everything he writes down, because sooner or later he’ll leave his incredibly detailed notes on the floor of your car, and if you accidentally scoop them up and throw them away like some catatonic moron, then you can either have all those figures in your own notes, or prepare to repeat much of a very long day’s experience.

For that matter, I guess you should actually have three pens in your pocket, since if your own dries up at some point you may want to contemplate suicide, and rightly so. People expect this kind of service, and you want them to come back over and over and over again—sending all their neurotically compulsive friends and family your way too....

Of course you do!

***

While finally—when discussing equipment no office can do without—I want to be sure not to neglect the noble Copier: the machine that you must be able to operate efficiently under any and all conditions.

Because we all end up alone, coping with the copier, sooner or later—sometimes with very nervous clients hanging about—and you don’t want them wondering whether you can deal with their real estate needs, when you can’t even get this insidious machine to work....

Tip for beginners: if you expect to be a major player in the business world you must spend countless hours studying the copier’s instruction manual—paying particular attention to the part about changing the cartridge; because until you can do it in sixty seconds or less, you just can’t be sure how you’ll hold up in the trenches.

Your life may depend on this some day!

I’m not kidding!

No one listens to me....

While soon of course everyone will