Good afternoon. It's October 1st, and I’m still thinking about a conversation I had with one of my friends. The question came up: should you work with a real estate agent who’s never done a deal? Should you be the guinea pig for someone doing their first real estate transaction?

It’s an interesting question. As a real estate agent, having done a number of deals, I didn’t really have an issue with my first deal. It went relatively smoothly, and that was that. But the deal I’m hearing about is going horribly. I can quickly trace why — the agent is getting no mentorship. They’re not getting any support from their office.

Some offices claim they'll train you to be a good agent, and they mean it. But other offices just pay lip service to training, much like how they handle technology. Most brokerages will give you an email address with corporate branding to make you look legit. They’ll say they have onboarding managers and that they’re great at training. But in this particular case, things are going wrong over and over again.

We saw the first red flag yesterday: what the buyers want and what their budget is don’t align. They can’t afford anything right now, but instead of waiting, they’re going to buy a terrible house. It’s priced cheaply, and there’s a reason why it’s cheap. This agent needs a deal because if they don’t get paid, they can’t keep being an agent. They’re probably doing the math and realizing that even on this deal, they’ll barely make anything. It’s just a bad situation.

I’ve worked with new agents before, but in one case, the new agent had an experienced agent working alongside them. So, I was able to talk to the experienced agent and get the deal done. That’s not happening in this case.

So, should you use a friend who just got into real estate as your agent? Should you be their first client? No — unless you know for a fact that someone experienced is supervising them, and I’m not talking about the broker. Brokers have 100 agents to look after. They’re not going to pay attention to just one. You need an experienced agent who’s actually done deals. Even then, I’m not sure why you’d take that risk.

That said, everyone has to start somewhere, and if you’re really good friends and can handle a bungled real estate deal, then you’ll probably be fine.

With that, I’m headed out. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Later.