The Real Estate Agent’s Point of View
When clients first come in to purchase a property, our main priority is to get to know them better. We understand that purchasing a home is not only a great financial commitment but also a very personal experience.
Every person has different likes and dislikes. They have different concepts of words and phrases that we use so freely, such as ‘good quality’, ‘cheap’ or ‘large’. What exactly determines the quality of a building – at what stage does it change from poor, to good, to excellent quality?
The stereo-typical Real Estate Agent has a terrible reputation and therefore the average consumer enters our office with caution, keen to give minimum information and not wanting to play all their cards at once.
However, the role of an estate agent can be compared to that of a doctor. The doctor needs a patient to be open and honest so as to be able to test and diagnose the patient’s condition. If the patient merely wants a sick note to enable them to nurse a stinking hangover, giving the doctor false symptoms will only send the doctor in the wrong direction and possibly undertaking unnecessary tests. Similarly, we, as agents, very much like the doctor who receives incorrect information, end up showing the wrong kind of products and working on unrealistic budgets.
We recently had a client eager to buy a property with a garden. They preferably wanted a townhouse. We showed numerous townhouses and garden apartments, only to find out, a few weeks later that the client had bought an apartment on an upper level with no garden! The cases are numerous – we have had clients saying that they will never buy on the mountainside of Sabinillas, they only want to buy on the beachside, yet after refusing to see anything on that side, they settle for something on the mountainside.
Sometimes the doctor will diagnose something that you never even anticipated. In the same way a Real Estate Agent may at times recommend a property that seems to be outside the criteria of the client.
So as you can see, understanding a person’s needs and requirements is key to our role in Real Estate as, only then, can we really match what they are looking for, to what is available.