Clients First: The Two Word Miracle

Sellers Are Not Sitting Next to You in Your Car

Our biggest challenge was time—too many clients and too little time. We looked at our business and realized that buyers take a lot more time than sellers. With a seller, you go out and list the property, then spend your time marketing it. The thing is that if you are marketing one house versus 20 houses, you don’t spend 20 times as much time on marketing. The sellers are not sitting next to you in your car. With buyers, however, you spend whatever time it takes; if you have 20 buyers, it takes more hours than there are in a day.

We decided that Donna would do all the legwork with the clients, and then, when they were ready to write an offer, we would meet up at a local coffee shop and JoAnn and I would do the paperwork. It sounded simple, but JoAnn and I were emotional wrecks. How could we handle the handoff? What should we say? Our clients were precious to us. We put them first. We cared. How would we know whether Donna was putting our Clients First?

We knew that Donna was honest, and we knew that she cared. What we didn’t know was whether she could get up to speed on the homes available, whether they were priced right, and how to present them to a prospective buyer. We worked closely with her at first and found out that one of her talents was an uncanny memory for houses. I remember showing 10 houses and getting confused. Donna remembered every house and every detail. It amazes me today that when the subject comes up of a house ...