Real Estate Agent or Hassle Hunter?
From what I could gather during my short career, a real estate agents job is all about dealing with hassles. That, of course, may depend on what your definition of hassle is, and I am sure there are some real estate agents who would disagree with my statement.
Here’s what I am trying to say: The likelihood of something going wrong during the course of a real estate transaction is quite high. The very nature of the real estate business and the number of people that must be involved in a transaction create a great many opportunities for things to go wrong.
I heard a few horror stories from fellow agents during my time in the business and was present on more than one occasion when a nervous agent was bustling around the office in the midst of preparing for a closing or some other event related to a transaction.
There are always deadlines that have to be dealt with and a certain number of tasks that must be completed on schedule if you want things to go reasonably well. There is much juggling of schedules involving different people like home inspectors, attorneys, local government employees and contractors.
And here is where I ran into another big problem with a career as a real estate agent. You were so totally dependent on so many other people that had to do their jobs during the course of a transaction.
In other words, all it took was one unreasonable jackass in the mix to create major problems and disrupt the whole carefully-orchestrated chain of events that must be completed in order to keep everyone happy and be certain of a successful transaction.
It is the real estate agent’s job to keep in touch with all these involved parties, make sure everyone knows what they needs to know and make sure that whatever needs to get done actually gets done. Like almost anything in life, difficult or incompetent people will be encountered and they will do their very best to make everyone they deal with miserable.
I must admit to some amount of hesitation when I began to learn about all of these little details of the job while in the company-sponsored training, and in retrospect, I probably should have walked out and called it quits then and there.
However, when one has so successfully deluded oneself to the point of taking a real estate class, getting licensed and being hired to work in a real estate office, it takes a while to return from that particular “trip” and root oneself firmly in reality once again.
Or to put it another way: What in the Hell was I thinking?
A job so fraught with hassle as this one was certainly not for me. Being a pretty independent-minded person, I really hated the idea of being so dependent on others in order for me to do my job.
The idea of spending time on the phone begging this one or that one to change their schedule or do me a special favor was not an appealing one. The little bit of this I actually had to do while working as an agent was not something I wanted to do again.
I was fortunate that I never had occasion to deal with any real morons, and I don’t think the outcome would have been very pleasant if I had, if you know what I mean.
I’m very much the “do it myself” type of person and have difficulty putting myself in a position where I am dependent on someone else – particularly some stranger I don’t know and have never met. This is not a good characteristic for a real estate agent.
It definitely pays to have good negotiation skills if you are planning a career in real estate. That’s pretty obvious when you think about working out deals for your customers, but also realize you have a lot of negotiation to do with other people you must work with as well. I was not blessed with these skills and that was just another nail in the coffin of my real estate career.
Coming Next: Thanks To The People Who Helped Me Decide To Quit
