I Got Fired Here Is What I Learned
I got the phone call today that every real estate agent dreads, and that is, we decided to go with another realtor. It stings even worse when the client had already agreed to use me and told me how excited they were and that everything was gonna be great. Only to find out that they changed their mind after they said yes. That’s one of the hardest parts of real estate!
What I was told is that the reason why they decided to go with another realtor is that we order an appraisal and that because I didn’t tell them how much their house was worth at our initial meeting. That made them uncomfortable and I should’ve done a better job explaining why it is that we order an appraisal.
I want to go over some of those reasons: The first thing that I’ll say is that we, as real estate agents, wear a lot of different hats. We are marketers, negotiators, counselors, advisors, decorators …sometimes. (I don’t do that but some of them do) and the photography, I don’t do that, either…
We can’t specialize in everything! I can’t be the best at every part of the process and my thought process; there are some really important parts to selling your house. One, maybe the most important one, is finding the price. The second one is gonna be getting the house ready to sell and fixing it up to get the most money.
We hire people that are specialists to handle that part of the business. I could tell you how much your home is worth and I’d probably be really close. But why not hire somebody whose job it is, when they wake up every morning, the sole income for their family and the way that they put gas in their car and clothes on their back and a roof over their head is to figure out how much houses are worth? That’s literally my appraiser’s job. That’s all he does for a living. He’s been doing it for 25 years and he does hundreds and hundreds of appraisals every year. He’s a specialist. He’s an expert.
It’s like when you go to a general doctor and then your general doctor refers you to a specialist. The other thing that the appraiser does is take some of that tension off of the relationship between the real estate agent and the homeowner. If I think your house is worth less than you think it’s worth, then you’re always gonna be second-guessing everything I’m telling you to do, and you might second-guess my ability to properly assess value. You might think that somehow I don’t appreciate your house or I’m gonna undersell it. I think another one is, if I think it’s worth less than you do, then I won’t get excited about it and I won’t push it as hard because I don’t believe in it. The owner wants the realtor to believe in their price.
I would say by getting the appraisal, it creates a different scenario where now we’re both on the same page, where I believe in the appraiser’s price and hopefully you believe in the appraiser’s price so now our goal is to get to that price or even over that price. I think the appraisal is really important for us and our business, and I feel like that it’s gotten our clients a lot of money. Because again, one of two things can happen. The house will be worth more or less than what you or I think it is. And in the cases where it’s worth more, then we all just high-five each other, and guess what? If you hadn’t had that appraisal, you might’ve listed it for less and you might’ve given your equity away for free. And if it appraises for less, you might’ve listed it for higher, make it sit on the market longer than it should have and missed your opportunity to make the most money, and then been disappointed when it finally did sell because it took too long. You made a bunch of mortgage payments unnecessarily. You had to lower the price. You felt defeated, frustrated. And then it went from what is normally a great experience to a rough experience.
