I met for dinner last night with a bunch of my old buds from my Duke Power (Energy) days. I spent the better part of my adult life there working with a bunch of great folks, and we still get together occasionally. This dinner (euphemism for beer and nachos) was on the occasion of the retirement of Don who I’ve known since around 1974. We always have a nice time when we get together for some funny talk and some semi-serious talk. The subject of my post-Duke career in real estate came up, and a comment was made about how they could never consider being in sales. This is a bunch of engineers, so you can understand. I told them that while I was working at Duke, I thought about that from time to time since I can’t stand for a “salesman” of any sort to try to get me to buy something. That just turns me off totally. My Duke buds just couldn’t believe that I was able to do that successfully.
The answer of course is that this is not what I do when working with real estate buyers and sellers. I wouldn’t even be in this business if I hadn’t done a stint after Duke with a technical company as a manager who also got involved in helping the company’s clients buy products that worked best for them. I found that I actually enjoyed listening to and understanding what people want, and helping them reach their goals. That eventually led to my investigating real estate and finding that, properly done, the job of a Realtor is not to push someone to buy something, but to listen to wants and preferences, help people clarify their priorities, then help them find the right properties to consider and negotiate a transaction that is in their best interest. The flip side of this is as a listing agent I won’t try to push a person to buy my listing. The correct and honest thing to do is to present the property in such a positive and complete way that if it is a good match for a buyer, it will be obvious to the buyer. That includes helping the seller price the property competitively.
I explained all of that to my friends. I also explained that any Realtor who is interested in referral business, the very best kind of business there is, will do everything he or she can to be sure that the client has no regrets in hindsight. A happy client will send me future business and be happy that they can recommend me confidently. So, yes, you could say I’m working this way out of self-interest because I need future business to stay afloat. But the nice thing is that the style of business that brings referrals for future business is the style of business that makes clients happy, now and in the future.
That’s a win-win situation.






