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2. When Getting the Highest Sale Price Still Isn't Enough

There are a number of skills and qualities that a highly successful real estate agent will utilize. But one of these qualities, and one that I rarely hear discussed by people, is the quality of resiliency.

Resiliency, though, can at times be the most important quality for a good agent to possess. This is because real estate sales and leasing is a business where agents normally experience extreme emotional highs and lows. One day you have eight transactions that all look like they're going to close, then the next week four of them completely fall apart. Then two weeks later, two of the four transactions that fell apart appear to now be coming alive again, and in addition you now have two new deals that didn't even exist on your radar screen three weeks ago. This is often the very nature of what an agent goes through on an ongoing basis mentally and emotionally.

But in the midst of all this, one of the most important qualities I've found that any agent can have is resiliency. With so many occasions throughout the year when you see your transactions falling apart, you have to have the mind, emotions, and stomach to not let this all get to you. You need to recognize that this is all a normal, ongoing part of the business, and stay focused on where your best opportunities are for success right now.

Mediocre agents, though, often let the disappointments of this business really get to them and suck the life out of them. They can spend weeks or months in a state of disappointment after they've had major setbacks in their business and have seen some good transactions completely fall apart on them. You may have even worked around some of these agents throughout your career in the business, too. Sometimes they'll be idly hanging around the water cooler just waiting for someone to come along who they can then tell their tales of woe and disappointment to.

When walking in their vicinity in the office you might hear them say something like, "Do you remember those four transactions that fell apart on me last month?"

And then you may respond to them by saying something like, "Yes."

Only to then be met with, "Well pull up a chair and sit down. You're not going to believe what just happened to me on this other transaction this week."

So what that agent is in effect doing is wasting his time, the time of other agents in his office, and trying to convince himself and others that his lack of success in the business is not his own fault. It's just a lot of bad luck that's come his way unfortunately. And if you don't watch out you can find yourself indulging him, listening to his stories, and feeling some productive energy getting sucked right out of you in the process, too.

The truth of the matter about this business is that some deals are going to close, and some deals are going to fall apart. And if you allow yourself to begin feeling great sadness and disappointment every time a deal doesn't close, it's going to hurt your productivity. So why then would you ever want to consciously do something that would hurt your productivity?

Oftentimes the answer to this question is something similar to, "Because I'm normally not consciously aware of what I'm doing and how much it's costing me." And this is a very normal situation for many real estate agents in our industry to experience.

The underlying problem, though, comes from getting attached to wanting the individual deals that we're working on to close. Sometimes we've already counted the commission from a transaction before it's even in our bank account, and sometimes we've already decided how we're going to spend the commission, too.

And this is oftentimes the very heart of the problem. When the deal doesn't close, we feel that something has been taken away from us that was already rightly ours---that we feel we've worked very hard for, too. But in reality, no commission is ever really ours until we've received the check and have deposited it into our bank account.

So one of the best attitudes to continually have in your business is to master your mind and emotional states so you feel positive and confident in the results you're always producing. Yes, transactions are going to fall apart on you throughout the year. This is a normal, ongoing part of being a real estate agent. But by mastering your mind and your emotional states, and being convinced that you're always in the middle of developing great new opportunities for yourself, you'll close a much higher percentage of the transactions you work on, and you'll continually uncover new opportunities that will make you more money throughout your real estate year.

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2. When Getting the Highest Sale Price Still Isn't Enough

When you've been in our industry for a long time, you see some wild things happen that can completely  take you by surprise. And some of these things can then become part of your repertoire of stories that you tell other people many years down the road, too.

Well, here's one of my stories...:)

Back in the mid 1980s there was an investment property that came on the market for sale in my area that I thought would be of interest to one of my buyers. So we immediately wrote an offer on the property, and were then met with some stiff competition from a few other buyers also.

But lo and behold I put on my best real estate agent running shoes, got the listing agent more interested in having my buyer get the deal than the other people, and we soon signed an agreement for the purchase of the property for $850,000.00. (I'm now guessing that the property is worth over $2,000,000.00 in today's market.)

So once we began moving forward with the due diligence on the transaction, my buyer informed me that he was bringing two partners into the deal along with him. One of the partners had never even purchased an investment property before, and he was very cautious and worried throughout every step of the transaction.

Well after moving through the contingency period and getting the financing, we were all set to close the transaction 90 days later. But a few days before we were scheduled to close, my buyers announced that they needed one additional week to close the transaction. One of them had a CD maturing that he was going to utilize for his down payment, but he now realized that it wasn't going to mature until one week after our scheduled closing date.

Upon hearing this the seller went ballistic, saying that he had already obligated himself to purchase another property with the money he would be receiving, and that my buyers were endangering his other transaction with their request for a one week extension. But he soon gave in and granted my buyers the extension.

Let's flash forward now to one week later on the day the transaction was scheduled to record. I live in California, which is an escrow state, and typically in this situation the escrow agent will call the real estate agents informing them when title has successfully changed hands and been recorded in the names of the new buyers.

So at 10:00 a.m. on the morning of the closing, our escrow agent called to inform me that the grant deed had been recorded, and congratulated me on successfully closing the transaction through her. So, needless to say, I put the phone down and began feeling good about closing the deal and the approximately $20,000.00 that was coming my way as a result of it. Then something completely unprecedented and unexpected happened that would never happen again throughout my entire 20-year career as a real estate agent...

The escrow agent called me back again about 20 minutes later, telling me that we now had a problem. I responded with, "What do you mean we have a problem? The sale of the property has already been recorded. How could we possibly have a problem?"

She then responded with, "The title company just ran another search on the property, and they've picked up a new $300,000.00 trust deed that's just been recorded on it. I'm going to follow-up on what caused this and I'll be getting back to you."

So, as compared with how I was feeling 20 minutes earlier, I was now wondering what this all meant in terms of this deal actually closing. But about 30 minutes later, our escrow agent called me again with a new update...

"Hi Jim. Here's what happened. Our messenger was on his way to deliver the seller his check with the proceeds but we got a hold of the messenger in time and stopped him before he reached the seller's office. I just got off the phone with the seller, and when I asked him about this new $300,000.00 trust deed he responded to me with 'What $300,000.00 trust deed are you talking about?' But when I told him he wouldn't be getting any of his proceeds from the sale until this new $300,000.00 trust deed was removed from the title, he quickly responded to me with, 'Oh that $300,000.00 trust deed!'"

So what the seller had successfully done was borrow an additional $300,000.00 from a private party the week before when we were originally scheduled to close the transaction, which was why he was so irate about the one week delay in closing. He was planning on that private party taking several days to record the new trust deed, which is exactly what happened. But in this situation the $300,000.00 trust deed was recorded just as title was being transferred on the property one week after its scheduled closing time.

Any way you look at it the buyers would have been protected by the title insurance policy which didn't list the new $300,000.00 trust deed as an exclusion to their coverage, but still this was an extremely high drama situation to be involved in as an agent. The seller was hoping that the $300,000.00 trust deed would be recorded sometime after the transaction closed, and that no one would be making any title searches on the property for sometime thereafter into the future.

So the seller immediately paid off the trust deed through escrow, his lender signed off on the reconveyance, and everybody was back to where we were supposed to be once again.

But from my experience as an agent, wow, what a wild set of circumstances we went through at the last minute that I hope to never, ever experience again!

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