by Marlene Graham, RealEstateAgentReferrals.com Tropics Real Estate
One of the neatest things about being a real estate agent is that in many cases, you are your clients' first best friend in a community. And if you truly understand that, you will get many referrals from your clients. And in many cases you may well be the recipient of a very special lifelong friendship. Sure there times when a potential client will use you as a tour guide and/or an information source and then cut a deal with someone on the side, a relative with a license perhaps, to save a buck or two. But the truth is most people appreciate hard work and know that agents have to average out their time and money spent over a year.
On the other hand, I must admit that there are people -- myself included when I wasn't an agent -- who really take real estate agents for granted. They don't intend to be mean, but they really don't think about the expense of being an agent and how many hours you might work, even weeks, and how much money you might spend, before you make a sale to them. If ever.
And while I don't expect every client to buy (otherwise they'd be terrified to get in the car with me), all I ask for is their loyalty. If they do buy down the road, I want them to buy from me. If they go into an Open House, I want them to tell that Realtor that they have a Realtor, etc. But again that is an earned privilege. To deserve that kind of loyalty, you need to spend "quality time" with your client(s) and give them the guidance and education they need to make a good decision. They need to enjoy being with you and they need to know they can trust you. You are obviously not going to be perfect since you are human, but you have to be as "perfect" as you can be.
Though we all know buying real estate is not so terribly scary, we need to think about it from the client's perspective. In many cases they are buying in a community they don't know much about -- except what you have told them -- and they know you want them to buy within your selling area or you won't make money, and so they are sometimes (and reasonably so) skeptical about what you might say. But as most real estate agents know, a one-time commission is not worth misleading a client, so the best thing is to be honest to see if your community fits their needs. If you don't know an area very well, do a referral with an agent that does. Always think of the client FIRST and the rewards will come your way in the end. I've had clients who didn't buy from me, ultimately refer clients to me. Trust me. In most cases it does come back to you in one way or the other.
FOR CLIENTS
If you are a client looking for an agent, we know that is scary turf. You never know if the real estate agent has your best interest at heart, or is solely after a commission, or if they are knowledgable enough. But the truth is after spending many years as a skeptical journalist -- and only getting into the world of real estate because I married one of those "agents" -- I realize, as in any business, there is the good and the "not so good." Generally by "interviewing" an agent you can get a good sense of their basis of knowledge in an area and their commitment.
On this site we are are only accepting up to twenty (20) agents and or companies per town. And though we don't know the scruples of them all, if we start getting a number of complaints about a particular agent, we will replace them with another agent waiting on the list. So please let us know. We want quality agents represented here.
We feel very strongly about elevating the way people think about real estate agents. And we also want you to know how incredibly hard good agents actually work: They take clients out on their own nickel, their own gas, sometimes they buy lunches and dinners, sometimes they leave their kids' softball games, etc. to make themselves available when the client wants to go. It's like being on call. And invariably when an agent decides to go out of town for a few days, that is when the client they have been waiting for all year suddenly decides to pop into town. And we know that.
I happen to be an agent in a second-home town and that makes it doubly crazy because first of all, I want my clients to understand how great my town is so they will want to buy; and those of us in tourist towns, in order to do our jobs correctly, need to be tourist centers of a sort. In fact, I have my own tourist center complete with brochures just for that very reason. I want to provide all the visitor information I can so that their only decision will be which roof to put over their heads.
TO AGENTS AND CLIENTS
Please enjoy the use of this site.
To Real Estate Buyers and Investors, this site will help you find an agent and/or the website information they provide on a specific locale.
To Agents, we hope you will use this site to find an agent in another area to whom you can not only refer a client, but WITH whom you can develop a professional relationship.
It's a win/win for all of us to help each other out in a tough economic climate. But remember after the rain comes the sunshine!
Feel free to contact me at MarleneGraham@earthlink.net. By the way, I live and work in Naples Florida. So enjoy my tourist sites www.naplestouristcenter.com, www.bonitatouristcenter.com, www.marcotouristcenter.com, www.marcotouristcenter.com, www.pineislandtouristcenter.com