Owning and managing a real estate brokerage in St. Louis isn’t always perfect bliss.  There are days that are absolutely miserable.  Still, we persevere.  We often talk about baseball being a game of failure, and real estate sales are definitely in the same category.  In baseball, if you are batting .300, that’s considered good.  In real estate, if you are closing more than 2% of your leads, that’s outstanding.  Think of that, 98% of the time you are failing.  A lot of real estate agents can’t handle that sort of failure.  To win the game, however, you have to be in the batter’s box.  Here are some common swings and misses as a real estate agent in St. Louis.

  1. A potential client calls you to list a house for a price that’s never going to sell. As a real estate agent, you’re always looking for home listings.  It’s the foundation of your business.  You get a call from a friend of a friend and they’ve heard good things about you and want you to be their real estate agent on their listing.  When you meet with them, after showing all the relevant comparable sold properties, they insist on a price much higher and then decide to use an agent who literally bought the listing.


  1. A home buyer who refuses to buy a house. Showing homes for sale is not quite as easy as it looks.  If you have 5 different homes a buyer wants to see, that’s five appointments that you have to make.  When a buyer takes months or years to make a decision, and then the decision is that they are going to stay in their current home, well, that’s good for them, but terrible for the real estate agent.  The excitement of having a home buyer quickly fades with the realization that they aren’t going to buy.


  1. One of your friends lists with someone else. You have lots of friends.  They know you are a real estate agent.  They express that should they ever sell their home, they will use you.  Then they list with someone else because they saw an ad or something and forgot.   This is quite different than someone who doesn’t know you who doesn’t use your services as real estate expert.   Some agents have solved this by not having any friends.  I don’t recommend that.


  1. Presenting a fair offer for a buyer and being blown out of the water by another offer. Your buyer sees a home that they would like to write a contract on.  You carefully construct an offer that makes a lot of sense for the home seller and the buyer.  The seller’s agent thanks you for the purchase offer and you wait.  Many hours later, the seller’s agent calls you with the news:  Your offer has been bested by over $20,000.  The tour of listed homes continues!


  1. Spending many dollars on new forms of real estate advertising. It’s been said that to make money in real estate, you should sell to real estate agents.  I don’t know if we are different than others in our never ending quest to buy the next big thing, but we seem to fall for it over and over.  Every few weeks, I’ll get a call from someone who has the best advertising rates or the best new piece of technology, and guess what?  They are going to sell it to me EXCLUSIVELY in my area!  Oh Joy!  When there is a 1 year up front commitment, or there’s a high initial buy in, just know it’s a scam.

These are just a few of the swings and misses as a real estate agent in St. Louis that I’ve experienced.  There’s many, many more.  If you find yourself getting down about one of these things, just remember that you need to stay in the batter’s box until you see a good pitch to hit.  When you get one, you’re not going to miss.