When I was a kid, we’d watch cartoons.  One of the things that made me laugh was when some character would step on a rake.  I don’t know if this was something people did in real life and it was so funny they made a reference to it in cartoons, or if someone just made it up.  Anyway, at around 12 years of age or so, I took a rake out of the garage and stepped on it.  Sure enough, the exact same thing happened like the cartoons!

Being involved in real estate sales can seem like stepping on a rake sometimes.  My daughter had a choir concert the other night.  The concert lasted maybe an hour.  Because we got there early, I had a little time to clean up some loose ends on the business phone.  What a mistake that turned out to be.  Within the space of a half hour:

I found out that one of my good friends and someone I work with was getting a divorce.  Whack!

I had a client text me to put in an offer on a house that they can’t afford. Whack!

I got a new buyer referral from a friend, which was awesome.  When I called, the buyer told me that she lied to my friend and she’s had an agent for 2 months already.  Whack!

I had a potential buyer email me that they were going to go with a different real estate agent because it was a 2nd cousin of one of the buyers and they didn’t want dinners to get awkward.  Whack!

I didn’t focus on the choir concert because I was thinking about business.  Whack!

By the time I left the concert, I was feeling pretty beaten up!  I’ve wondered where real estate agents go in the past and a day like the one I was having has got to be the reason they disappear.

When something like this happens, I always consider what I could have done different, or the decisions that I was ultimately in control of.  I certainly wasn’t involved in the divorce, and I counseled my buyers against putting in offers they couldn’t afford.  While it’s certainly disappointing, the buyer referral happens all the time.  And, if I had a dollar for every time a potential new client magically found a relative in the real estate business, I’d be a millionaire!

By 11 o’clock that night I was ready to turn off the old work phone for good.  As a real estate agent, you have to persevere.  Bad days are not unusual.  Sometimes the velocity of bad news gets even the best real estate agent down.  I think it’s pretty healthy to get down when there’s a run of bad news.  After all, how unhealthy is it when you hold that stuff in?  It isn’t.

After reading through this, you know that the agents of Deerwood Realty aren’t immune to stepping on a rake every now and then.  Still, you have an advantage when you work with us.  We put our clients first.  Rakes be dammed!

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