In this job I have to be a Jane of all trades, master of few. I need to know a little bit about taxes and accounting, business and real estate law, plumbing, roofing, landscaping, oh the list goes on. I need to know this not because I should give you advice in these matters, but so I can spot the red flags. Those situations that require me to tell the buyer or the seller they need an expert.
When I worked in Oregon I had a list of attorneys for just such times. Many of the homes there could not be sold with a conventional mortgage. They needed owner financing, which requires a contract written by an attorney. The first name on my list was an attorney who never wrote a boilerplate contract. She could write sales contracts off the top of her head and they were brilliant. She could cover all the bases for that particular sale and I always felt that my clients were well taken care of.
The second attorney was recommended to be by another broker. She called him the “pit bull”. She admired him so much because she had to face him in a deposition. He grilled her for three hours straight. She said that if she had actually done something wrong, he would have gotten it out of her.
The third attorney was a man so mean and so nasty, both in person and by reputation, that the mere mention of his name to the opposing side would cause surrender.
Only once did I have to use the list to tell clients I had seen those red flags and that I thought they should hire either the pit bull or the nasty one. They went with the nasty one and the problems were resolved the next day.
So, what am I a master of? Well, I’d like to think it’s my negotiating skills or my organizational skills. There good. I’ve had lots of practice. But people tell me that my best skill is as a listener. I guess I prize that above all. For without the ability to truly listen, there would be no point in having any of the other skills. Often the blogs I write here are in response to something I heard a client say or their tone of voice. I don’t listen just for words, but how you say them. I hear a lot more than people realize. So, my response is often in these pages.
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