Late last November my car, my silver hybrid vehicle of client transporting glory, had a grisly encounter with a speeding teenager. My poor, innocent car was parked innocuously in Capitol Hill. It didn’t survive.
This presents a rather significant challenge to anybody in my line of work. I had clients I needed to meet in two different counties over the next several days, and it took some time to determine that my car was, in fact, beyond resurrection. (“There’s a chance,” the repair folk kept saying. “You had it in such good condition, the insurance company will value it really well.” *sigh*)
That was rough, but it was also enlightening. I spent some time pouring over showing logs and reviewing client interactions and realized something: I only actually need my car for about 25% of my clients. Nearly everybody else either wants to use their car, or walk from one showing to the next, and my car was serving only to get me to and from our initial meeting point. Everybody knows that if you’re going to be a real estate broker you have to have a car. But there are lots of things everybody knows about real estate, and most of it is either wrong, or only true most of the time. I have five years of car-weilding real estate experience under my belt. Now I’m going to snag a year trying it to the other way.
As invested as I am in doing science well, making sure I can gracefully take care of all of my clients is absolutely the most important thing, so there are constraints. I’ve got memberships with Zip Car and Car2go, and unless the client indicates that a car won’t be necessary, I’m going to show up with one.
But not all the showings I do in a week are with clients. During the week, different neighborhoods will do Broker Opens, where I can go to see new listings ahead of the crowd. If something goes terribly wrong with getting around, it’ll cost me time and frustration, but it won’t directly hurt my clients. Every week, I’ll document my trials, travails, and triumphs for you to follow along.
Here’s to an adventurous 2016!