When the Challenge is Your Client
While the majority of real estate clients are easy to work with, any Realtor® who has been in business for more than a year or two can tell you about someone who’s made the entire real estate transaction a bit more difficult. Professional Realtors®, of course, keep the details of their clients’ information secret, but agents do occasionally vent about aggravating buyers or uncooperative sellers without naming names. Sales professionals can learn from each other about how to handle or avoid toxic clients, and to try to empathize with them.
“I think it’s important to remember that we’re often dealing with people at their absolute worst,” says Traci Oliver, a Realtor® with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Fairfax. “When someone is buying or selling a home, they’re experiencing the highest possible level of stress on a personal and emotional basis, and at the same time handling the biggest expense of their lives. Even people who are naturally logical can become illogical when they’re in a vulnerable state.”
“When someone is buying or selling a home, they’re experiencing the highest possible level of stress on a personal and emotional basis, and at the same time handling the biggest expense of their lives. Even people who are naturally logical can become illogical when they’re in a vulnerable state."
While plenty of Realtors® have worked with indecisive first-time buyers, Oliver says sellers are stressed because they don’t have control over getting people to see their home or making a good offer.
CHALLENGING BUYERS
When Reid Voss, a Realtor® with Avery-Hess, Realtors® in Springfield, was a relatively new agent, he worked with an extremely demanding buyer.
“It taught me how important it is to educate buyers and to be clear about your expectations,” says Voss. “This buyer wanted me to drop everything with a few minutes’ notice to take him to see places. I think I spent more than 200 hours showing him property. He made three offers, all of which were accepted, but he got cold feet each time, and we managed to find a way to get him out of it. At that point I fired him because his behavior was starting to hurt my reputation. As far as I know, he still hasn’t bought a home.”
Carolyn Capalbo, a Realtor® with Keller Williams Realty in Manassas, agrees that it’s important to set your clients’ expectations up front, but she says not all clients listen.
“Some buyers I’ve worked with ask to see places above their price range, or look at $500,000 homes and assume they can get them with an offer of $400,000,” says Capalbo. “You have to explain that right now the deviation between the sales price and the list price is only 3 percent or less, so there’s no point in seeing something that’s 10 percent above their maximum price. I’ve chosen not to work with some clients who refuse to get a preapproval for a loan.”
Occasionally Realtors® will act against their instincts and take on a client in spite of a sense that they may have a bad relationship. Christine Morgan, a Realtor® with McEnearney Associates in McLean, says she accepted a referral from a previous client even though her client told her the woman was “not my friend, just my neighbor, so I won’t be upset if you choose not to work with her.” The referral, who was looking to buy a home, turned out to be one of the nastiest clients Morgan has experienced.
“She called me literally 15 times a day and thought she knew everything,” says Morgan. “Once we had an offer accepted she wanted to renegotiate the deal even before the home inspection had been done because she said there was something wrong with the house. Before that incident, she had made offers four times that had been rejected because she was offering $800,000 on $900,000 listings.”
Eventually, the client texted Morgan and said she planned to stop looking, but Morgan found out she lied because she contacted a lender Morgan knows well for a loan approval the day after she sent the text.
“If you have the ability to pick and choose who you work with, it’s always better to follow your instincts and avoid working with anyone who’s nasty,” says Morgan.
Ariana Gillette, an associate broker with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Fairfax, worked longer with a difficult client than she should have because she was focused on building her relocation business with a particular company. Her advice to Realtors® with challenging clients: “Cut ‘em loose earlier rather than later.”
“If you have the ability to pick and choose who you work with, it’s always better to follow your instincts and avoid working with anyone who’s nasty.”
In Gillette’s case, the client looked at 50 or more one-bedroom condos, often demanding that Gillette show them to her with less than one hour’s notice. When she finally made an offer and negotiations began, she demanded that the carpet in one room be steam cleaned or she would cancel the contract.
The home inspector she hired, not someone Gillette recommended, insisted that a modification was needed on the HVAC system. The owner and another inspector who was consulted said that the modification would nullify the condo’s master insurance plan. Eventually, that demand was dropped and the deal closed.
“Unfortunately, even though I had done my best to accommodate her demands throughout the holidays and even while I was on vacation in January, this client trashed me in the survey,” says Gillette. “I found out later I could have asked to have her reassigned under the relocation agreement, which is what I should have done. You have to protect yourself and also your reputation.”
Some situations with challenging buyers have a happier ending. When Liz Lucchesi, a Realtor® with McEnearney Associates in Alexandria, was representing the sellers of a $750,000 home, the first-time buyers who won over seven competing offers were adamant that the seller needed to resolve an issue with marine clay that their home inspector mentioned could be an issue in that area.
“The seller had resolved the issue years before and had documentation including a lifetime transferrable guarantee and warranty,” says Lucchesi. “The buyers were still very concerned, so I tried to help my client understand their fear, particularly as first-time buyers. Eventually the buyers’ agent and I were able to calm everyone down and the transaction was fine in the end. But it could have gone a different way, depending on how the agents treated each other.”
CHALLENGING SELLERS
Dale Repshas, a Realtor® with Long & Foster Real Estate in Reston, says that buyers usually end up happy as long as they’re realistic, but she’s had a couple of difficult experiences with sellers.
“One woman was selling the family home, which was pretty but had been over-improved for the neighborhood and hadn’t been well-maintained,” says Repshas. “She wasn’t cooperating with me to get rid of some of the clutter or to neutralize the place, which had a lot of faux painting, and she wouldn’t bring her price down. It turned out that she wasn’t honest with me at all and that she hadn’t been paying her mortgage.”
Repshas says she finally got a “ridiculously low” offer from a buyer and convinced both sides to accept the opinion of an independent appraiser. She says that now each of her listing agreements includes a question about whether the sellers are current on their loans.
Gayle Sfreddo, broker/owner of Century 21 Leading Edge in Old Town Alexandria, had to force some honest conversations with a seller’s family several years ago.
“My client was selling a house but had a serious substance abuse problem, so you never knew what you’d find when you showed up at the house,” says Sfreddo. “I finally contacted some family members and they took him in so I was able to get the house sold. It helped that I knew the family beforehand.”
Capalbo says she avoided a toxic situation with some demanding sellers by turning down the listing.
“These sellers insisted on pricing their home about 15 percent above the market and made extreme demands about exactly how I would market it. Then they asked me for a 59-day listing agreement,” says Capalbo. “I wanted to stay polite, so I just told them ‘I don’t feel your marketing strategy will work’ when I turned them down.”
“As an agent, your integrity is all you have, you don’t want to do anything to jeopardize it."
A Realtor® in Centreville who prefers anonymity canceled a listing agreement with some sellers whom she believed were dishonest. While she had discussed with the owners how to prepare their home for sale and suggested a realistic price, the sellers were uncooperative.
Eventually, they accepted an offer on the property, but that contract fell through after the buyers had a home inspection. The owners moved out but allowed friends to do some work on the home without letting the listing agent know.
Those friends said they found a broken window and the sellers wanted to accuse the previous prospective buyers of the damage without any proof. The listing agent called the sellers and canceled their agreement because she didn’t want to work with unethical clients. “As an agent, your integrity is all you have, you don’t want to do anything to jeopardize it,” says the agent.
This same Realtor® had another stressful experience as a listing agent that eventually had a happy ending. In that case, the sellers cooperated in getting their home into excellent condition and setting a realistic price. A clean offer came in with everything they had asked for, but the sellers wanted her to go back and ask for more from the buyers.
“I walked them through the comps again and eventually they agreed to proceed with the contract as it was written,” she says.
Repshas had another situation in which the sellers were reluctant to lower their price but eventually listened to her. The house went under contract three times. Each time, the buyers backed out for different reasons, but eventually there were two competing offers and the house went to settlement. The sellers “got weirder and weirder” throughout the transaction, with the husband in particular arguing with everyone, including Repshas. Eventually, he sarcastically mocked her during a phone conversation, which she immediately ended. She opted to communicate only by email with them for the rest of the transaction. While Repshas understood her clients’ frustration, she also needed to protect herself from her toxic clients.
“It’s incumbent on us to understand why clients feel they way they do and to try to get to a solution,” says Lucchesi.
Realtors® often find themselves acting as both a mental health and real estate professional when faced with challenging clients. It’s important to recognize whether a relationship can be salvaged. Adding “TLC” to an agent’s list of designations might be the answer. A little bit can go a long way towards ensuring a successful transaction.
Top 5 Tips for Working with Challenging Clients
1. Set your clients’ expectations and educate them from the beginning of your relationship.
2. Remember that you’re dealing with people when they’re experiencing maximum stress.
3. You can decide not to work with toxic clients.
4. Communicate with difficult clients by email so you can document any disputes.
5. Always protect your reputation.
Michele Lerner, a freelance writer based in the Washington, D.C. area, has been writing about real estate and personal finance for more than 20 years for print and online publications.