This morning I feel like I am unknowingly wearing a "kick me" sign on my Realtor backside. The jeers are coming from all corners of my professional playground. Would someone please steal my lunch money and put me out of my misery?

As parents, we take great care to teach our children the social graces. Say please and thank you. Kiss your grandmother. Don’t chew on that power cord with your mouth open. Then, in the blink of an eye, they grow up to be buyers and sellers and agents.

Everyone has just gotten so grumpy lately. Sellers are unhappy that their homes are not worth nearly what they were several years ago. These are the lucky ones. Many others involuntarily ceded their homes. Buyers are unhappy, also. Stories of homes selling for pennies on the dollar, they are finding, are greatly exaggerated. Still freaked out about future prices, they are anxious — anxious about buying too soon, yet anxious that they may wait too long. And finally, there are the agents. Many of us are having a really bad day. Even if our income hasn’t measurably suffered at the hands of this current market, the level of effort required to close a transaction has multiplied tenfold.

Admittedly, we are all operating in a pressure cooker. But, have we forgotten everything our parents taught us? Lately, slingshots of contempt and frustration are aimed at me from every direction. While the majority of people I find myself working with are genuinely good, kind and courteous, too many others are tending to channel the schoolyard bully, and I am an easy target. The market is my fault. Escrow fees are my fault. Long market times are my doing. When they are really feeling blue or angry or boxed in, I am most certainly complicit in the whole global-warming fiasco. And I will be hearing about it.

This morning, for instance, I have an entire set of disclosures and escrow instructions residing in a dumpster in another state. I was severely reprimanded because the paperwork was too personal and too extensive, and the recipient was far too busy. Under no circumstances am I to send any more contracts! Bad agent. Last week, I was read the riot act because someone during a showing had by all appearances opened a dresser drawer. I was nowhere near the crime scene, of course, but as the omnipotent, omnipresent listing agent, I was held responsible for this heinous act of rudeness. Accordingly, yelling at me was entirely justified.

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After each closing, I have always made it a habit to send a note to the agent on the other side of the transaction thanking them for their efforts. Sometimes, my note of appreciation is necessarily a work of fiction, but I send it nonetheless. Recently my partner suggested that I should stop doing this, as it is a nonessential and my time could be better spent on other tasks. He’s wrong. It is my one-girl stand, a refusal to relegate this one remaining act of common courtesy to the shredder. I may work with these agents again and, when I do, I would like to think that we will be working together rather than at odds.

Maybe I am just having an off week. Maybe it is the nature of a million independent contractor arms on the real estate industry body, today each seemingly flipping the other the proverbial bird. Maybe it is the market and we, the buyers, the sellers and the agents are all a little too hungry and a little too afraid of tomorrow’s bottom line. Whatever the reason, I like to think we are all better than this.

If one more person yells at me this week, I am taking my ball and going home.

Kris Berg is a real estate broker associate for Prudential California Realty in San Diego. She also writes a consumer-focused real estate blog, The San Diego Home Blog.

Berg will speak at Real Estate Connect in San Francisco, July 23-25, 2008. Register today.

***

What’s your opinion? Leave your comments below or send a letter to the editor. To contact the writer, click the byline at the top of the story.

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