Capability
Brown
In
18th Century England, if you wanted your estate
landscaped to perfection, you called upon Lancelot
Brown, the leading landscape architect of the day.
He was so talented and got such good results that
no one called him Lancelot any more. They called
him Capability Brown, the name by which he is remembered
today.
I
was thinking that it would sure make it easier to
shop for a mortgage professional and a real estate
broker if you could choose from people who were
widely known by such names as Terrific Jones, Dependable
Smith, or Incredible Stewart. Of course, if such
monikers were widely used, there would also be people
known as Doofus Davis, Imbecile Murray, and Disaster
Schroeder, those who would qualify for one of Andy
Rooney‘s I AM STUPID! signs.
That
would make it easy to avoid the idiots, those with
a proven track record of undependability, and find
those professionals who could lead you through the
process of buying a home with a minimum of fuss
and a maximum of savings. Unfortunately, the world
doesn’t work that way. It is extraordinarily worthwhile
to find the good ones and avoid the bad ones although
this must not be obvious to many people that competence
is so important. Otherwise the doofuses would lave
left long ago. They are still out there, waiting
for your call. Let’s look at a real estate transaction
more closely.
There
are a large number of people involved in every real
estate transaction. First there are usually two
real estate brokers, yours and the sellers.’ There
is a settlement agent – escrow, or a title company,
or an attorney - a title insurance company, a home
inspector, a termite inspector, perhaps a city or
county inspector. If you get a loan, add a loan
representative, an appraiser, a loan processor,
underwriters, document drawers, and funders. You
can also double that number because of assistants
and the various transaction coordinators. Add these
up and you may have 20 people “touching” your transaction
at one stage or another.
Next,
remember that, by definition, half of the people
involved in any business are less competent than
average. Of course, the other half are better than
average transaction have less ability than average.
You are bound to end up with some in each group
working on your deal. They are also very busy.
Your agent may have only two or three deals working
and the loan rep may have a dozen loans in the pipeline,
but at the other companies, an employee maybe working
on 150 transactions, of which yours is only one.
Finally,
other than the two agents you choose, your real
estate agent and the loan rep, none of the rest
of these people cares if or when your transaction
closes. They are, by and large, clerical people
who are paid by the hour, not by the transaction,
and they go home at 5PM, even if there is something
important to be done on your deal.
How
do you keep the deal on track? That’s where having
responsible agents come in. Bluntly, the responsible
agent will make sure that the other people involved
all do their jobs. And it can be a full time job.
Of course, we agents know all this and try to
choose other people in the transaction. I have
appraisers that I have used for over 10 years and
we’ve been using the same escrow officer for almost
four years, and she’s on her third company. I choose
lenders carefully too. I want ones that have more
than their share of talented, dedicated people.
I then work hard developing relationships of mutual
trust with these people so that when I need something,
they are disposed to work on my client’s deal.
When
times are busy, as they are now, I sometimes think
that about half my job is being a professional nag.
You call people and get voice mail, they don’t
return your phone calls, and don’t keep commitments
when you get them. If I don’t do these things,
the job just does not get done.
Which
brings me to the final point: choosing professionals.
There is simply no substitute for getting referrals
from friends, interviewing agents in person, getting
references from these agents, and calling the references
to check out how they have performed in the past.
You’ll also want to ask questions about how long
they’ve been in the business, how many deals they
have in the hopper now, and other questions designed
to tell you what kind of a name the world would
add to their given names, if given a chance.
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