Turkey Time

Me, as a new agent.

Real Estate, as an industry, is hard for outsiders to understand. How do agents get paid? Don't they all make a gazillion dollars? Why don’t they all look like the Property Brothers, aka werewolves? 

The business has its own vocabulary, etiquette, and rites of passage. It’s a lot like being a Mason or a Shriner without the handbook. 

One of these rites of passage was Floor Duty. “Floor Duty” or “Desk Duty” or “Agent Duty,” now quaint and antiquated,  was a time when you would sit at the “Agent on Duty” desk and take any calls or walk-ins that were not directed toward specific agents in the hopes of getting buyer or seller leads. It honestly should have been called the Doody desk. In fact, most of my horror stories come from calls at that desk.

A lot of these calls went something like this:  

Caller: “Yeah, I’m sitting in front of this house on the corner across from the Dollar General.”

Me: “OK, do you have the street address?”

Caller, becoming frustrated: “It’s the white house and it’s on the corner and it has your sign in the yard.”

Me, knowing there are thousands of homes that meet this description: “Do you know the street name or is there an agent name on the sign?”

Caller, now almost irate: “It’s your dang listing! I’m sitting right in front of it! It’s got a flyer box on it!”

And, scene. Even if they told me what color the shutters were or that it was on a double lot, there was no way back in the post bubble world of 20 months of housing supply that I could ever figure out what house it was. And even if I did, nine times out of ten, they asked the question they probably should have led with, “How much is that rentin’ for?” or “Would they do a rent to own on that?” or “We was just curious how much it was selling for. We live next door.” In other words, no matter how hard I Nancy Drewed, I wasn’t making a sale off of these people. 

Before I knew everything I know now, I was sitting at that agent desk the week before Thanksgiving in the late aughties. The market had gone bust a year or so before and in November, or what we call “Turkey Time” in the biz (another insider term, because the only homes left on the market are turkeys), I wasn’t just feeling the pain, I was about to throw it up all over the place. 

With no closings in the pipeline and no leads in sight, I sat and played solitaire on the computer, hoping against hope that a real, live lead would call in or walk in the door. 

As luck would have it, I got a call from a couple who were visiting Gatlinburg from Miami and wanted to look at vacation condos to buy.  Gatlinburg, the mountain vacation mecca right outside the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, is a specialty market: a lot of timeshares and cabin sales. Normally, I stay the hell out of Gatlinburg, but the going was tough and I thought I was tough enough to get going to Gatlinburg. I had just broken unwritten real estate rule number one.

REAL ESTATE RULE #1:

Stay in the areas you know. 

The husband said he was in law enforcement in Miami and sent me a pre-qual letter from a Miami area lender. I didn’t call to check it. Now I had broken real estate rule number two. 

REAL ESTATE RULE #2:

Check the Buyer’s pre-qual letter, or better yet, have them pre-qualified with a local lender. 

That’s technically rule #1 for me these days, but again, there’s no handbook. 

We arranged to meet in Gatlinburg the next morning for a day’s worth of showings. 

Did I know my way around Gatlinburg? No (refer to broken rule number one), but my husband had recently bought me this fancy new thing called a GPS, so I didn’t NEED to know my way around. This little gadget would do the heavy lifting for me! 

I left early that morning, as traffic is always bad from Knoxville to the mountains. After about an hour, I pulled into the parking lot of their hotel, where they were already waiting outside to meet me. The husband was all Jersey with a porn ‘stasche and gold chain. I’m sorry to say the wife was less memorable. They got in my car, as was the custom then, and off we went. I was at three strikes with real estate rule breaking by this time. 

Real Estate Rule #3:

Never meet strangers in a strange place. 

Gatlinburg, as I mentioned, is its own real estate market. My board’s MLS key didn’t open their lockboxes at the time, so I had to try to plan out showings to meet listing agents at specific times. Luckily, these agents knew more about what they were doing than I did, because I was a lost little babe in the mountains. 

At one point, I remember my trusty GPS device told me to make a left in my Volvo, which almost drove us off a cliff’s edge. So much for heavy lifting. 

After an exhausting day of meeting agents, getting lost, and generally feeling out of my element, I dropped these nice people off at their hotel and agreed to meet at 10am the next morning to do it all over again. 

I drove back to Knoxville with the hope of a future commission in my pocket. 

The next morning, I got up early to make sure I made it through the traffic to Gatlinburg on time. I pulled into the hotel parking lot a little before 10 and waited. This was before podcasts or Audible or pretty much anything else, so I probably played Tetris on my phone. 

At 10:05 or so, I started wondering where my clients were. I sent a text, so as not to seem too bossy. If anyone could understand running late, it was me. 

Around 10:10, with no text response, I called. No answer. 

At 10:15, I decided to go into the lobby, just in case they were waiting in there. It was cold and it was possible we had gotten our wires crossed. 

There was no one  in the lobby except the desk attendant. Wondering if maybe they had overslept, I asked the front desk clerk if they could call their room. No, I didn’t have their room number, but I did have a last name. A very unique sounding Italian last name. 

The attendant proceeded to tell me there were no guests staying at the hotel under that name.

I asked if they had perhaps checked out that morning? Maybe I had really gotten my wires crossed and we were supposed to meet at the first property. 

No, no one with that name had been checked in all week. 

No one. All week. 

Dazed, I walked back to my car and tried to call again. No answer. It was 10:25 in the morning on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and my clients apparently didn’t exist. I was stunned. 

With just a flip phone and no web access, there wasn’t much I could do, but continue to call, which I now did without worrying about making them angry. No one ever answered. 

At a complete loss, I stupidly drove my broke ass to the nearby Outlet Mall to join the throngs of people enjoying super early Black Friday sales, although I wouldn’t be buying anything except a Starbucks, which I desperately needed. 

I cried the whole drive home, grieving the commission check that never existed and feeling like The Dumbest Agent on Earth. 

Needless to say, my husband was apoplectic when I told him what had happened. How could I have done that? I didn’t even know who these people were! What if I had been killed? But the GPS worked pretty good?

I did Google these people when I got back home and found nothing. No trace of them in Miami, but also no news stories that they were wanted for Realtor-napping or homicide. To this day, I have no idea where they really came from or what they were doing in my car that day. Getting a free tour? Living an HGTV dream? Casing properties? Your guess is as good as mine. 

I always think of these mystery people around Thanksgiving. I also think of how much I’ve grown as a person and an agent. There is no way I would repeat that experience now, even for someone I know. I mean, I almost drove us all over a cliff. 

I also don’t do floor duty anymore, mostly because it doesn’t exist, but also because I like to avoid crazy people who disappear into thin air. 

And I’m not saying I never break any of those three rules anymore, but I certainly never break them all at the same time. That’s because I’ve come up with a new rule.

Real Estate Rule #4

Sometimes it’s just not worth the money.