If your agent lies to you, you've been pushed into fantasyland, not a good place to buy or sell a home

When a professional is willing to tell you a lie, and you take that lie as the truth, you are now operating in a fantasy world. You've stepped outside of reality.

You want to be grounded in reality, to be armed with facts when making decisions that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Transcript

10 years or so ago, I'm talking with a commercial real estate agent and he asks me about the Home Showcase which was a weekly publication of printed listings that came out with the newspaper,  And he asked me if I advertised properties there and I said yeah, for sure I do.

And he said well is it effective? and my answer was no, it's not effective at all. We rarely ever get a call from the newspaper anymore.

So why do you do it was his next question and my answer to that was, well our clients expect us to.

To which he responds, well isn't it time that we stop lying to our clients?

And man, that really struck me hard at the core because I consider myself a pretty honest guy, but I realized that yeah, that is a lie. Here I am a real estate agent and I'm actually doing something that I know is totally ineffective because the person I'm working for might think that it's necessary.

You know, whenever... We're living in a society that's really used to white lies. They're harmless we feel, but you know, as a real estate agent or any other type of professional, when you step over the line and you tell your client something that isn't true, you've actually made a little tear in the fabric of reality. You've moved them into a world of fantasy and they're actually making decisions based on false information and God only knows where that's going to end up. It could end up anywhere, but it's probably not gonna be good and even in a case like this where you might think well that's pretty harmless.

But the truth is if I'm focusing resources on things that are ineffective, that takes those resources away from things that can really be effective.

So since that day, I have never run another newspaper ad and since that day I've spent well over $100,000 on online advertisements and the exposure that we've been able to bring to our listings has gone through the roof because of that.

So you have to examine these moments of untruth from every possible angle and when you do, I think you'll realize that you're hurting the person that you're telling the lie to and you're probably hurting yourself too because at your core you know that you've done something wrong and that's gonna come back to bite you in the ass.