Travel and Commitment

As a Real Estate agent we work with all kinds of people helping them find or sell their homes.   Different people have different expectations of their agents.   One of the most common is commission and how much an agent gets paid and where that money comes from in the buying and selling process.   That’s a topic for another blog post.   This post is about more about time commitment.

Usually clients are respectful of agent’s time, although most people have high expectations that their agent will be available whenever, wherever and for however long they need.   And that’s fine, that’s our job—we’re there to help them when we can.  

Every now and then there’s a client that’s completely disrespectful of time and it feels like you’re being used more as an agent than actually being there to help.   But again, that’s not common and certainly isn’t typical of most clients.

I had a client this weekend that just confused me this weekend though.   They were traveling from out of town, a distance that I knew was far and later found out was all the way from Nebraska, taking multiple days to get here.    They wanted to look at houses but weren’t particularly responsive in email or text to help me narrow down what to show them.  

We thought we’d found some candidates but given the current market, two of the five houses went under contract before we could get to see them.   This was in part because they cancelled and rescheduled with me on time and day four times.

Today we were finally going to meet when I got a text saying they were running over an hour late and could we move the showings (for the third time) to a later time.   When we finally met I found out they were driving over three hours today to see houses before returning to Nebraska.

I’d been working with the wife, who was very nice.   The husband once we met him got more involved and we discovered he had entirely different criteria for what he wanted and the houses we’d set up weren’t anything he was interested in seeing.   We stood around for an hour in the first home (which was new construction and had dark hard wood floors—both a no go for him) before we abandoned the remainder of the showings.

They asked me to send them some listings with new criteria (criteria I would have loved to have from the start) and then, apparently, they planned on heading back home in the morning on another two day drive.

They are relocating to the area and do need a home and we’ll continue to work with them to find them something that fits, but it seems to me like they could have saved themselves time and driving hours if they had been more communicative from the start about what they were looking for collectively as a family.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son is playing Mine Craft this afternoon.   He had his headphones on and was talking to himself as he played.    I heard him say to whatever creature he’d just created, “that’s so cool you’re blind.  I always wanted to be blind.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Nana was singing to my daughter this afternoon.   My daughter said to her, “do you know what, Nana?  Your voice sounds nice as it can be.”