Welcome back to Go Gaddis real estate radio right here on AM 920. Thank you for sticking with us through the break in this segment, a day in the life of a realtor. What does it look like now? Some of you might be bored, but I don't care what it's like to be a day in the life of the realtor. But so many people dream of having the independence of being a real estate agent and all the big money that they think everybody makes.
And I'm not saying some people don't make big money, but not everybody makes big money. In real estate, and I've got a little story for you about something that happened to me in the day of the life of a real estate agent. You're listening to Go Gaddis Real Estate Radio, and our mission here is really simple.
When you're buying a home, when you're selling a home, you're making some of the biggest financial decisions of your entire life. You probably are like me, and most other people I know, and you have so much going on in life that you can barely get all of the things that you need to do in a day done. And now you're trying to sell a house, and you're trying to buy a house, and you're trying to add all of that on top of your additional, of your original responsibilities, whether it's a job, or a family, or school, or church, or whatever it is.
I mean, we're just busy, and the reality is, Many of us are forced to make decisions based on a quarter of the information we need, or half of the information we need, or none of the information we need. I was talking, we need, I was talking with someone the other day, and they purchased a home. They didn't know how the homestead exemption would be affected.
And they didn't realize that the person who owned the home had a senior citizens discount. So this person paid a couple thousand dollars a year in taxes on a home where the taxes should have been for a normal owner, 5, 000 or 5, 500. This was not a client of ours. This was somebody who was very upset trying to figure out how to solve the problem when the mortgage company didn't prorate things correctly.
They didn't collect the right amount of money from them for their escrow account and so... Once they've been in the house a year and a half, the mortgage company says, Hey, you owe us another 4, 000 towards your escrow account. We can either up your payment so that you pay it off equally over the next 12 months, which means your payment goes up.
350, 370, or you can just send us 4, 000. That's the kind of thing that I don't want anybody to have to experience. Now, if you worked with us, we would tell you, these are the exemptions that are in place, here's what's going to happen at the end of your first year, and you might say, you know what? I'm good.
Leave it there. I'll save the money. I don't mind paying the extra money. But you would know everything you needed to know before you made that decision. And don't forget, we want to connect with you. We really do. Go to gogaddisradio. com. You can ask questions. I'd love to answer them on air, but I'm happy to answer them off air as well, and I don't believe that I have a corner on the market for answering real estate questions correctly, but I have access to a ton of experts who can help me with answers to questions you might ask, really anything real estate related.
You can make comments if you want to. You can push back or challenge things we say. You can share your ideas with us. You can request that we do Some fairly detailed research on your neighborhood to help you understand as a homeowner whether you or not you have a particular advantage when it comes to selling your home or maybe even a disadvantage in some cases and we can give you that information.
We can share it on the air if you want us to and you can also subscribe to our podcast. We're available on every major podcasting platform. I was on a call, a coaching call today, with home inspectors from all across the country. And we asked the home inspectors, what's your superpower? What's your unique selling proposition?
And everybody, you're all familiar with Zoom meetings, and so everybody's going in the chat box and they're typing in their little answer. And all of a sudden, one comes by and it just shut me down. It said, I never stop working. Now I don't care how badly you want to be a success in work. I can't think of anybody who would want to work more compared to less.
Even if they just got time to goof off and didn't even make good use of the... Time off, certainly we would prefer to spend it with our family and people who are close to us and love us and help us grow our spiritual lives and our physical fitness and all of that kind of stuff. And I will tell you that real estate agents in many cases work from sunup until sundown.
Uh, because of the flexibility we have, they could choose to structure their days or weeks differently, but in many cases they don't. Jordan in Alpharetta says he is curious, or it could be she, about being a real estate agent. What is a day in the life of the real estate agent like? And it can involve almost anything.
Let's talk first about the duties of a real estate agent. It can involve administrative and marketing and communication tasks. Certainly calls and emails and meeting with clients and other real estate professionals. Scheduling and showing properties. Submitting offers on... Properties, negotiating terms, updating paperwork, adding amendments, things like that.
But agents are responsible for communication and I don't, I always laugh when I do this because I don't want anybody who is a real estate agent who's listening to the show to think I'm talking bad about them because there are some flippin fantastic real estate agents in metro Atlanta and all over the country but there are some awful ones too.
And something that is so important to A real estate agent, and two, anybody who works with a real estate agent is that real estate agent's ability to communicate. If you are going to work with a real estate agent, my suggestion is you work with someone you're very comfortable with their communication style because you're going to have to listen to them.
They're going to have to be willing to talk to you and give you all the information you need. Real estate agents are responsible for marketing, develop a marketing plan and figure out how to find somebody to buy your home. They're responsible for negotiation. This is also, um, not a particularly strong skill of a lot of real estate agents.
They haven't had high level negotiated negotiations. They are unfortunately willing to give away their clients. interest, meaning they're probably talk too much is maybe the best way to say that. And agents who are not good negotiators are, you know, fairly easily influenced by a real estate agent who isn't.
And in many cases, those agents would tell you, no, I'm not being influenced by that person. And the good negotiators, the other person doesn't even know what's happening. They're just doing the things that they've proven work over the years. Research, uh, real estate agents also have to do research. They have to, Research market information, selling prices, and all that kind of stuff, understanding comparables.
They got to schedule all kind of stuff. Schedule showings, schedule pictures, schedule this, schedule, uh, uh, you know, showings for sellers, schedule open houses, all that kind of stuff. Real estate agents work with a lot of technology and I know we all do. The real benefit of being a real estate agent is the amount of flexibility you have.
If you wanted to take a Tuesday off, you should be, as a real estate agent, able to do that without having to answer to someone specifically. The reality is, is what real estate agents should be doing is they should either be showing property, submitting offers, negotiating contracts, and inspection amendments.
So that's why a lot of real estate agents decide to join teams. I run a real estate team, it's called Modern Traditions Realty Group. It's a small team, 7 team members, 7 sales team members, 6 sales team members, and then, uh, 6 staff members. And people join our team because they don't want to do all the prospecting, the marketing, the administrative, and all the things that need to be done.
They want to show properties, they want to write offers, they want to finalize contracts. Take care of inspection amendments and attend closing. If you have any interest in talking to us about what it might look like for you to join our firm, this was not meant to be a commercial for us, but if you're listening and thinking, I'd like to talk to them, I'd love to talk to you myself.
And easiest way to reach me is 7 7 0 4 I've been a real estate agent myself for 23 years. I started in March of 2000. 2000, and really, I started full-time in March of 2002, and I've been in thousands and thousands of homes and I've met thousands and thousands of people and, um, One of the things that I remember happened is I had to go out and check on a property.
It was a property that we had had a buyer. We were representing a buyer to buy the property and they were being represented by one of my agents and we needed to get into the house for some reason. I don't even remember what it was. And I went to the neighborhood, and it turns out that this house and the house of the neighbor next door, they were both vacant at the time.
This was during, unfortunately, the recession, so there was a lot of short sales and foreclosures. They must have been really good friends, because both of the backyards were fenced in together. This yard was fenced in with the neighbor's yard to the right. And so I opened the door. to the, uh, the, the gate and I walk through and it's kind of eerie and I'm thinking that's kind of weird that these two yards are together and so I start looking around and I walk and I'm probably about 40 or 50 feet away from the gate.
I'm walking over behind the deck and I'm going to climb the two. Basically almost, uh, one and a half stories of stairs to get up to the deck so I could go in the back door because that's where one of the lock boxes was. And I look at the top of the landing on the stairs on the deck at the next door neighbor's house and there was a big Rottweiler.
Now, I'm not talking badly about Rottweilers. If you're a Rottweiler fan, I love dogs. I love dogs. I've met so many nice and friendly dogs. But this Rottweiler looked at me and... It turned out to be a she, so I'm going to say it was a she. And she started to charge me. And I was trying to figure out could I get out of the fence before she could get to me.
And the answer, unfortunately, was no. I got about four or five feet away from the fence. And I knew that something bad was getting ready to happen. So I turned around and I squared off because I'm thinking, Hey, I'm going to have to fight this dog. And I don't know if I can, but I'm going to have to try.
And when that beautiful girl got to me, all she wanted to do was play. Now she was a big one, and so she scratched my arms and she scratched my chest with her claws and she was just playing it or, or, or play it playing and having fun, but it scared the crap out of me. That is it. A day in the life of the real estate agent.
I think it scared me so badly I forgot to go in the house and take a look at what I needed to, and I think I had to come back the next day. This segment of the show is brought to you by the law firm. Of O'Kelley and Sorahan. They are our preferred real estate attorney. 770 497 1880 is the number. If you need to sell your house anytime in the next six months to a year, go to gogaddisradio.com
Click on 28,000 more. Put in a little information and let us show you how we think we can sell your house for 28,000 more than your next door neighbor sold his or her house for. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back in our neighborhood spotlight, we're featuring Brenfield and Suwanee also, how do you know if you have a water leak at your home?
I have to have some expertise on that. And are there reasons to visit a home more than one time before you buy it? Stick with us. We've got those subjects and more. We'll be back.