You ultimately change tacks and become a real estate broker, handling both home sales and rentals. Yet you admit in your book that many brokers have a less than stellar reputation for a reason.
One of the phrases I like to use as an agent is: "All I want to do is give you the level of service you get from your Mercedes dealer." And it's really a sad commentary when I think that if I were as communicative and honest as a good car salesman, I'd be raising the standards of my profession.
The incentives are to lie and to push. Most Realtors are like that because the ability to transact quickly, even at the price of pushing their clients into deals, is what makes them money. Realtors don't get paid till closing. If the industry were structured such that you would pay me a flat fee to run around with you as a buyer's agent and explain to you the subtle differences between two towns, then I would be rewarded for being patient and being a font of information. But as it stands, if I'm patient and I'm a font of information and you don't buy, I'm out of luck.
I also think clients don't really compensate you for being laid back and better. Like, I have a smaller clientele, and my clients love me, and they refer. Which is great. But I think I probably also attract a lot of people who look around for six months and then don't buy. I won't shove them into buying. But on the other hand, my paycheck's lighter because of that.
You have a number of stories in the book of people who look at homes for months -- or years -- and never make a purchase. What's going on?
Why do you and I go into Saks and try on dresses that we may not end up buying? There's a certain part of the aspiration curve where you do have to look at it to decide if it's right for you. And a certain percentage of those people who are aspiring and trying to figure out if it's right for [them] will go, "No, it's really not." But of course they're doing that on my time.
Are you going to stay with it?
I'd like to keep agenting and keep writing at the same time. And I hope that there's room for both. In my 20s, I always wanted to be a comedy writer. So now it just tickles me beyond words that this book is being seen as funny. On the other hand, I really like the satisfaction of getting someone the right home or selling someone's home and watching the paycheck in their pocket enable them to do something that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to do.
You write in the book that people coming into brokering with an upper-middle-class background have an advantage. Can you explain?
In general one of the huge advantages to being a broker is having a network -- because when you start, before you're proven, you sell to your friends. And the bigger your network of friends is, the better you do. A corollary to that is, the richer your friends are, the better you do.
There's also a sort of sensibility. When I studied for my license in New Jersey, there were some poor African-American kids in my class. There's this one girl who's a hairdresser and she's asking questions we would consider basics in the industry. She literally doesn't know how agents get paid. Whereas I think most upper-middle-class people hear talk such as "I can't believe I'm paying that firm 6 percent to sell the house" at the dinner table. And an upper-middle-class person who's a salesperson doesn't have to learn how to deal with poor people. A poor person who wants to be a salesperson wants to learn how to deal with people with money.
What's the biggest lie brokers tell clients?
I think that we as an industry have gone out of our way to disseminate the myth that this is going to be easy. Moving is hard. Buying is hard. Selling is hard. Renovating is hard. These are all huge life changes. They're all an incredible hassle. They're all really hard to do as a single person. They're even harder to do when there are family members involved. And I think we really have tried to tie it up in a bow and say, "Look, a new house will solve all your problems."
What do you think is in store for the market next?
I always tell people that if I truly understood and could predict what would happen to a market, I wouldn't have to be an agent. I could be a hedge fund guy on a yacht somewhere. So don't believe anyone who tells you they can predict markets, because they're always lying.
About the writer
Helaine Olen is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and numerous other publications. Her book, co-written with Stephanie Losee, "Office Mate: The Employee Manual for Finding -- and Managing -- Romance on the Job," will be published this fall.
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