Dec. 26, 2006 - The Still of the Night |
These are the moments when I find humor in those who endeavor to practice real estate as a part-time endeavor. Some would say that perhaps they are to be envied, as they have their regular career upon which they can focus ... their drive is not to become the best agent they can for their clients, but to be a choice of convenience for those they know, hoping all the while they don't make some crucial error along the way.
It's 11:02 in the evening ... two of the three children, the wife and the beagle all are in bed. (The 14-year-old likely will not be asleep for another couple of hours in keeping with her gradual transition into a teenage vampire, avoiding the light in favor of her cave-like bedroom.) I've finished glancing at my RSS reader, searching for articles of interest. I've continued tinkering with the formatting on this blog, searching for ways to make it more user-friendly than I already hope it to be. I've tinkered with my other three websites, searching for any missing element that could cause the sites to rise in the search engines. And still sleep eludes me.
My 7-year-old believes I work all the time which, naturally, isn't quite true. But I am on call for large portions of the day. And real estate is a job that demands immediacy.
Yesterday afternoon I received an e-mail from someone in Wittmann looking to place their home and acreage on the market. By the end of the night last night, Christmas evening be damned, he had a response. We'll be meeting Thursday and I'm confident it will be my sign being placed in the front yard of the house.
Last weekend I was dropping off some paperwork at an acquaintance's house, on my way to meet some prospective clients in Surprise. It ends up she wants to put her home on the market, too. We'll be meeting this weekend, once my daughter is back at her mom's and I have a little more time with which to work.
The bottom line is when my clients need me, I am here. I may not answer the phone every time they call (usually because I'm already on the other line), but they will hear back from within the hour. This has held true whether I'm mowing the yard or sitting through a movie. If one of my clients also was having trouble sleeping and e-mailed me now, they'd have a response within minutes. It's what they expect, what consumers in general expect in this Internet-driven age, and it's what I deliver.
Though I have more free time than those punching a clock, the time rarely feels as if it's my own. There ALWAYS is one more phone call I can make, one more web page to update, one more e-mail to send. For a part-time these may not be high priorities. But they aren't building their career on a foundation of service. To fall into a poker analogy, they're waiting for the nuts and being blinded off one fee at a time.
(Translation ... while waiting for the low-hanging fruit of friends and colleagues, they're spending money they may not earn back on licensing, renewals, continuing education and board fees.)
Are they the lucky ones? At 11:12 p.m. (yes, this took 10 minutes) it sometimes seems so ... they're asleep in their beds. But at 5:30 tomorrow morning when their alarms go off, they head to their jobs and they do nothing to expand their real estate knowledge ... I don't think so.
(c) Jonathan Dalton, 2006 / Jonathan Dalton's Arizona Homes
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