Protecting the Value of Your Time-- Using Up-Front Contracts

I basically turned away a Realtor last week as a potential client before we’d ever met or even spoke by phone or face-to-face. I say turned away because, after a few email exchanges, my last message didn’t generate any follow-up response and, frankly, I’m not really expecting to receive one going forward. Apparently, my conditions for trying to earn the business were too stringent. 

Now mind you I’ve worked extensively with thousands of Realtors over the years so I know there are some terrific people out there managing the home sale process efficiently and effectively with style and grace, managing the silly whims, angry outbursts, and general psyches of their clients. I also know there are ‘others’ in the business who don’t always display the same style and grace. 

If you’re the first kind, I salute you for the amazingly difficult job you do. It takes incredible patience dealing with buyers and sellers of property and the emotional roller coaster rides they’ll take you on throughout the buying and selling. If you’re of the other ilk—well, I salute you too but with a different hand configuration.

We connected online and I asked for a handful of photos, dimensions, and basic facts to try and get a general order of magnitude on the potential project’s cost before meeting onsite. As is my standard practice, rather than drop everything on my current daily plan and jump in the car, drive 40 miles, make a physical assessment of the home’s needs, rush back to the office to develop a detailed quotation for her clients to review, I reviewed the photos and provided a range of probable cost and made a request for a ‘deposit’ to do any more detailed onsite work and quotation. The deposit, of course, would be applied to the contract if and when it became a legitimate project. That concept apparently violated some Realtor missive that states “I tell you to jump and you ask me how high?” and it seems I broke some rule of engagement by trying to remain in control of MY time and MY sales process both. My guess is I didn’t get the gig—but frankly I also guessed early on there was no true gig to really get.

I don't ask for a deposit from every prospect but I do when working with new [to me] Realtors. Over the years, I’ve had dozens of Realtors with client project requests and many have been legitimately handled and turned into work for my company—and a commission for me. That’s what’s supposed to happen—it’s how I put food on the table. But for every one that became a viable project there were a dozen where the Realtor called desperate for a quote “to get the work approved” [always urgently], insisted that I make a site visit as soon as humanly possible [regardless of the distance], happily thanked me for the fast turnaround and detailed assessment of what was required, what the costs would be, when the work could commence, and then promptly forgot my name and number. Eventually, through persistent follow-up, they would admit that their clients used the information to negotiate a credit in escrow [either to give a potential buyer leverage or to help the seller overcome an obvious property negative]. The Realtor would gather the facts necessary to help their client negotiate but those facts, gathered at my expense, would be for work that might or might not ever become an actual project in the field. The Realtor always got paid but for me and my company—seldom. 

My sales-trainer friend Chip calls it an up-front contract [I always said 'pre-commitment'] and it doesn’t always have to be for money but rather for some commitment of what exactly is going to happen next if we all do what’s being asked now. I asked for a commitment before I expended my time (as a sales professional time is the one thing I value most), my company’s resources (driving 40 miles one way and back cost my company something besides my time), and the lost opportunity that came from me not devoting time and energy toward my other paying clients. Apparently, my Realtor prospect thought me trying to protect against having my time wasted was unreasonable and unfair. I’m OK with my decision and, while I prefer hers was different, I’m OK with it since it was, at the very least, made quickly and efficiently.   

For every one of you Realtors out there who has ever cleaned the car and filled the tank, driven a carload of lookie-loo clients around for an afternoon, shown them house after house after house you’ve already previewed only to see them never buy anything—or worse, forget you and buy something from a different Realtor who happened to stumble onto their path unexpectedly at precisely the opportune moment—I’ll tip a glass to you tonight and hope that when we ever meet you’ll understand as I will when one of us does something to assure he or she isn’t merely being used as a free gambit and thrown away. I’m happy to earn it but I want it to be possible to earn in the first place before I start throwing time and energy in the chase. I know you feel the same way in your industry—you’ve told me thousands of times!

Here’s to us and to up-front contracts and commitments and to doing it right! And while you can’t see it, I’m saluting the others right now….

#timemanagement #precommitment #Realtors #lookieloo #salestips