Part Three: Risk and Real Estate Sales - Living with Risk

(Author's Note: In Part Two we learned that risk is so much a part of our lives that we must make special efforts to recognize it when it is encountered.)

Technique 2: Living with Risk

Since it is impossible to totally avoid risk it is essential to devise a business plan that will allow us to quantify the amount of risk we can tolerate and to totally limit risk beyond that acceptable personal level. This is not rocket science; it’s a lot more important than that; this is your life. You must devise a personal business plan that will provide an acceptable lifestyle for you and your dependents while simultaneously limiting risk to your personal tolerance level.

Risk is always a result of decision making, and decision making is what we do.  This will always be true.  Using risk management techniques, however, indicates that the risk taker is aware of taking the risk, has thought out the potential consequences, and if risk ultimately brings ruin, can see a way to live with the consequences. 

There is one never-fail way to minimize the damaging effects (think stress) of risk taking behaviors; find something to do that takes your mind completely off your job for several hours a week.  It doesn’t matter what that something is, as long as it’s legal.  Many real estate licensees participate in sports or exercise to blow off steam; others volunteer for community projects, take non-real estate classes, garden, play video games or take long naps. The only two rules are:

1. keep it legal, and, 
2. the activity must take your mind completely off real estate sales while you are engaged in it. 

Many of you are thinking this is laughably simple advice while others find it difficult to the point of impossible.  The more difficult you think it will be to achieve this state of Real Estate Sales Thought Avoidance, the more you really need to find your activity and stick with it.  Program the appointment for relaxation  into your PDA and keep it.  You will return to your business rested and refreshed and perhaps will see possibilities that were hidden from you before.

Relaxed and refreshed, you will find that there are ways to integrate standard risk management techniques into your daily practice of real estate.  It is a proven fact that few real estate licensees will use a risk management technique until not using it has caused a problem, so don’t feel different if that is your preferred method of operation.  It simply means you’re average.  On the other hand, if you aspire to be better than average, you will find ways to incorporate risk management into every task of the real estate licensee’s job.  Life can be much, much better when risk is managed.

(Carmel Streater is no stranger to risk.  The most recent (and public) example of her risk level can be measured by having served as 2006-2007 president of the Real Estate Educators Association, a much more dangerous endeavor than the organization’s name would indicate.  She listed and sold real estate for over thirty years and has been a real estate instructor for the past twenty years.  Finding herself a simultaneous victim of real estate sales burnout and empty nest syndrome, she completed a PhD in Adult Education with an area of specialization in Training and Human Resource Development.  Streater’s work now is exclusively in teaching, course development and assorted writing projects.  Her hobbies are her six grandchildren and attempting to keep up with changes in the real estate business.)

Relevant Links

Part One: Risk and Real Estate 

Part Two: Risk and Real Estate - Recognizing Risk