You know you’re a real estate agent if… top 40 ways

You know you are a Real Estate Agent if …

1. Your car (or mode of transportation) has as many filing cabinets (or places that files can be stuffed) as your office
2. Your monthly cell phone minutes are almost in the 6 figure mark.
3. You can effectively answer the phone, reply to an email, send a fax, eat your lunch, review title work, send a text message, (throw a sheep), and set a showing at one time.
4. The only time that you can be social (outside of work) is at 2am – online with the other real estate agents.
5. You politely sit at the closing table across from the other agent who was so useless and incompetent through the entire process that you had to do BOTH sides of the transaction, yet he still gets his x% commission PLUS his $300 transaction fee, and you want desperately to throw those complimentary title company cookies at him, but his lawyer is sitting next to him, and you can’t afford a trip to jail … again.
6. You are on your way to one of 50 appointments in a day when your buyer client calls and says, “I HAVE to see THIS house RIGHT AWAY! This is the one! This is the one!” about a house that you are quite certain they won’t like, but after politely telling them why it won’t meet their criteria, you make the illegal U-turn anyway and meet them at the property, where they hate the home, hate the neighborhood, the bedrooms are too small, there aren’t enough bedrooms and then are disappointed that you showed them something like that.
7. You are an alcoholic.
8. You have seven favorite restaurants where they all know your name, your profession, your client base, your title company, your lenders and that you’re an alcoholic.
9. Starbucks is three of your seven favorite restaurants.
10. Your Realtor® Radar goes off when anyone in a 3 mile radius starts talking about real estate.
11. You’ve read the Code of Ethics, you follow the Code of Ethics, but cannot understand why 90% of the agents that you do a deal with act as if the Code was written in Vulcan.
12. You have created different files for your investor “clients”: File A: Investors who know what they are looking for and know what they are doing. File B: Investors who kind of know what they are looking for and kind of know what they are doing. File T (for trash): “Investors” who tell you to call them when you find a good deal, from their apartment/Mom’s basement.
13. You wish you were as popular and important as those lead-selling emailers/spammers/telemarketers would like you to believe.
14. You are also a psychiatrist, divorce counselor, marriage counselor, babysitter, mind-reader, job consultant, teacher, mentor, creative genius … and an alcoholic.
15. You sell a home to a couple, only to get a call 2 months later that they are getting a divorce; they thought the stress-free process of buying a house together would heal their broken marriage, but now they need to sell because one person can’t live with “that A$$h01e” anymore. (See #14)
16. No matter how hard you work, one client will think you are overpaid.
17. That one client who thinks you were overpaid goes out and gets their license because it is soooo easy to do real estate, and after one miserably failed year they go back to their previous job and you can’t help but smirk as you put them back on your newsletter list.
18. You tell your seller from day one that the asking price needs to be lower and you keep telling them this throughout the listing period. After a few months of it not selling, they get mad at you, hire another agent, lower their price to what you told them in the first place and it sells in 2 days.
19. You plan for a small vacation and all the business that you could ever want comes out of the woodwork 3 days before you leave.
20. You come back from your small vacation to find 2,381 messages in your inbox and a “full” voicemail box.
21. Your competitions hair is larger than your overnight bag.
22. You’re still and alcoholic.
23. You hold open houses just for the opportunity to check all of your emails and post blogs about how ineffective open houses are.
24. You yell at your computer when the internet is down.
25. You yell at your computer when there are no pictures in an MLS listing.
26. You yell at your computer when your 8^th cup of coffee spills on the keyboard.
27. You actively show a couple of buyers over 200 homes over a course of a year in a price range that they demand to stay at. You find out that they have a champagne taste on a beer budget and suggest that they bump up their purchase price to closer to their actual qualification mark, as that will afford them more of the luxuries that they are looking for, but they refuse time and time again. Then you wake up one morning to a phone call from their lender congratulating you for finally finding a home for them (WTF?!?), and that is when you realize that they called on a sign in a yard on a home that was right at their qualification mark and went under contract with that agent. (Sorry. Personal Rant … but you get the drift …)
28. You are a master at figuring out how to make almost everything in your life a “business expense” .
29. You always get that slight knot in your stomach when you drive by a FSBO.
30. Your own sister decides to sell FSBO.
31. Pre-packaged and microwavable foods are your best friends – even better when they can be eaten while driving.
32. You reconfigure your whole day to show a home and your “potential buyer” stands you up .
33. You go to show a home to a buyer client and …
    1. There’s no key in the lockbox
    2. The key in the lockbox does not open the door
    3. There’s no lockbox
    4. You unknowingly set off the house alarm and don’t know how to turn it off
    5. There is a dead/drunk/sleeping person in one of the rooms
    6. The seller is there and manages to lengthen your showing time to 1 ½ hours with all of the stories that they have to share (see #14)
    7. The neighbor manages to lengthen your showing time to 1 ½ hours with all of the stories that they have to share about how much they love/hate the Sellers (see #14)
    8. You lock your car keys, the house key and your cell phone in the vacant house
34. You attend any “Broker Open” that offers food.
35. You attend every “Broker Open” that offers alcohol (see #7 and #22).
36. You hesitate to have anything printed on the back of your business card, because they make such great note pads.
    
37. You have been on the way to a closing when you get a call that the buyer went out and financed $15k in new furniture for a home that they can no longer qualify for because of their new furniture loan.
38. After one year in real estate your spouse either leaves you (out of frustration) or joins you (out of
    masochism???)
39. Your children want to become long haul truck drivers while working part time as full time doctors when they grow up because they don’t want to work as much as you do.
40. You are still an alcoholic.

(Of course, if you are a Renegade Realtor® then there are about 35 more things to add to this list.)