There is a lot about the real estate industry that needs improvement. But, there are some very stand-up hard working salt-of-the-earth real estate agents and loan officers that are working in a challenging market and who are literally bailing out financially challenged homeowners. They are making things happen and are doing what they can to make transactions close.
I know it is a challenging market, especially in the outer lying areas outside of Seattle/Bellevue proper and cash flow is tough, but I’m growing VERY tired of LO’s giving broker credits and agents giving up commissions earned for “challenged” borrowers who obviously have a history of financial mistakes.
I say this in the similar tone and voice of Al Pacino in his famous scene in Scent of a Woman:
I know people want transactions to close, but sometimes consumers need to face the consequences of their own decisions. Loan officers and agents sometimes need to say, “you know what?….enough is enough. I’m not dipping into my livelihood to bail you out. Dig yourself out of your own hole.
Don’t blame us for your prior agent selling you an overpriced home. Don’t blame me as a loan officer for your garbage loan sold to you by a prior mortgage broker.”
If the Bubbleheads want to trash me because I’m part of the real estate industry, so be it. But, this is the stuff that goes on behind the scenes that agents and loan officers GET NO CREDIT FOR AND SHOULD.
My favorite movie! Though the Tango scene is the one I replay more than the speech scene…Al at his finest in both.
Wow! Thanks Tim!!!
The sad thing is when we might be the agent that sold them the home a few years back, and they are now just being a bit greedy and won’t listen to reason.
Sigh.
Thanks for the encouragement… it’s a nice suprise from you!
It is frustrating to agents and LO’s to have to listen to upset clients regarding a financial situation in which they played no role in creating (I could also insert escrow/title closers here are well where a lot is tossed our way). It is even more frustrating to me seeing where a seller can hold a transaction hostage and dig in with unreasonable demands all the while heading towards foreclosure etc… in escrow we see it all, frequently.
Jon-
No worries. I just think that consumers, whatever side of the Settlement Statement they reside on, need to temper their frustrations in the proper manner.
Ardell,
I’m an Al Pacino fan and a fan of movies that depict school life in the parochial/private school system. Loved Dead Poets Society too.
They should have made a movie of my parochial/private school experience 🙂 Maybe I’ll write the book someday.
As to consumer’s venting, I have had the opposite experience. I had one client who was talked into buying first by telling her, and getting an appraisal for her home, for way over what it could ever sell for. In fact as soon as she bought her new home (she was buying down due to handicapped child) she was told she couldn’t list it for anywhere near the appraised value she had at time of purchase two weeks before! She would never have moved if she knew what her house would eventually sell for.
Yet she was one of our favorite clients and we had to fight with her to give her a large discount. I was embarrassed for the profession and felt she deserved whatever we could do for her. She felt what the agent before us did was not our problem.
We are a profession and I feel we should find a way to help anyone who was in any way hurt by one of our members.
That’s an amazing testimony Ardell.
There is a significant portion of the American population who never do any wrong. Everything bad that happens to them is someone else’s fault.
Back in my attorney days I ran into quite a few of them. They’d come in with stories about what some other attorney told them, and in cases where I knew the attorney, I either: (1) Knew it might be true because the attorney was an idiot; (2) Knew it was false because there’s no way the attorney would say such a thing; and/or (3) Had to consider the possibility that they simply didn’t understand what was told to them.
But outside the legal area you see this behavior all the time, where people don’t take personal responsibility for their decisions or actions.
Thanks Tim – you are sitting in a seat where you see the best and worst of human behavior, especially in these difficult financial times.
What we as agents and LO’s do in transactions to make things work is the quiet action that we often do to make something work. Generosity is quiet, and sometimes not appreciated enough, but that’s life.
Hopefully, the client appreciates the financial effort, and doesn’t take advantage. Tim, you sound like you’ve seen some closings where you felt the clients were taking advantage. Unfortunate, but I believe it is best to get people like that out of your life, sometimes at any price. And never let them back in.
For my own clients I am happy to do what makes sense.
My main requirement is that I have to feel that they actually appreciate what I am doing for them — that they don’t use blunt force to ‘steal’ from me:-). I’m very lucky, since nearly all of my buyers and sellers are referred to me by their friends and relatives, or they are my own past clients. These people know something about me, and I know something about them. It feels a lot like working in a ‘small town’ when there is history of personal relationships behind every transaction.
And, to be honest, I really like it when I know the other agent, the lenders and the escrow peole in the transactions. It’s not that there’s any clubbiness to that – it’s because I know that the professionals involved will do everything correctly the first time, and do everything they possibly can to make a negative situation be the least trauma as possible. The best of the best don’t stay in the business without being helpful and sensitive.
And, sometimes it’s the right thing to do to make a transaction work for a buyer and seller with help from my commission. Sometimes, NOT everytime. What I do for my own clients is what I do for them, and isn’t something I advertise. Every situation is different. I’ve been an agent since 1983, and consider myself very lucky that I still hear from and work with people I met all those years ago. Makes it a lot of fun.