I’ve been finishing up my continuing education (five hours to go) so I’ve been in the office nearly every day for a week.

This is pretty unusual for me, because I’m almost never in the office. If I’m meeting a client, I go to where the client is. If I have to run a computer search, I sit in my apartment.

I notice as I’m hanging out that the office is LOUD. All those other agents, yakking away about their own things. There’s a lot of trading info back-and-forth (“I have this listing, any customers for it?”) but nothing that I couldn’t get if I stopped in once a week.

The main reason to go, it seems, is that I can eavesdrop on my sponsoring brokers. Now whenever I have something complicated going on, I call in. My higher-ups are very good about assessing a situation and telling me how to react (“Well, if you lost that customer to another broker, here’s what you say so you sound classy and not sour”) but they also handle their own situations with their own listings.

And so, by eavesdropping, I’m learning – here’s what you say to the seller when the buyer breaks contract; here’s what you say to the landlord when he gives you a limited listing to drive him towards an exclusive; here’s what you say to the buyer to point out that interest rates have rarely been lower than they are today.

It helps strengthen my own internal agent voice – which is helpful, because sometimes the voice that comes out on the phone can sound squeaky when it’s unrehearsed.

I am now going into a new situation, which is that I’m going to pitch a listing to someone I had been courting online. I was excited to hear that they had a two-bedroom to sell – roughly a million-dollar property given the neighborhood they’re in – and not so excited to hear that their last agent had failed them.

Alison Rogers is a licensed salesperson and author of “Diary of a Real Estate Rookie.”

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