So does no one ever simply concede a point?
I have a rental client coming into town tomorrow. (Actually, by the time this goes up on the Web and you read this, I’ll be showing her properties.) She’s a relo from the Midwest, referred to me by her husband’s business partner and his wife, whom I just placed. She knows, let’s see, no one in New York.
So I feel like she’s a pretty captive client, but I still have to find her the world’s greatest apartment or she won’t stay captured. And we’re in a little bit of a lull right now, it being December. I think some people who might be listing their units right about now are thinking that no one really wants to move over the holidays, so they’ll just wait until January. Since inventory is low, it won’t take that many appointments to make the circuit.
But that does mean I need every appointment that I can get. And she had one unit that she especially seemed to like from the Web, so I called about it.
And you know what the other broker said? Well, you all know because you’re not rookies. The other broker said, “Oh, I’ve had contact with her, she’s my client.”
Well I was not expecting this since I figured she knew no one in New York, and certainly hadn’t ‘fessed up about broker-shopping, but he did know her last name unprompted, so I figured he was right.
So I said, OK, hey, I’m not going to fight you over the co-broke. Get her into that apartment and I’ll start a paper trail that you can take to our sponsoring brokers if you need to, so you know I’m not going to fight you.
And I did. I sent him an e-mail that said “Hey, thanks for agreeing to show XXX to us, I acknowledge that you’ve had prior and substantive contact with my client” and I forwarded it to my sponsoring broker.
And I sent her an e-mail that said “Hey, look, I can walk you to this apartment, but I can’t tell you anything about it plus or minus because it’s his deal and I can’t mess it up.”
She apologized all over herself, she had been drawn in by the listing and had called him, he was going to be out-of-town while she was apartment shopping and was going to refer her, but never did, so she assumed she was free to become my client.
I told her she was my client, through and through, but that if this listing was the one for her it just meant the original broker got paid, and that’s just us playing nicely by our rules.
She gets it, and she trusts me, so it’s up in the air which apartment she’ll rent as you’re reading this, and whether I come home with $6,000 or with zero. But you know what? I don’t care. She’s got money, and she’ll buy someday. That will be a $50,000 payday. And you know who will get it? The patient little girl who plays by the rules.
