When it comes to choosing an agent to help buy or sell your home, trust is earned — not bought.
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The personal stories of one Realtor’s battles and triumphs in the highly-competitive Bay Area Real Estate Market, seeking to illuminate and humanize the very real ups-and-downs of homeownership.
“Hey Julie,” the text message said, “We have the last remaining spots for the Top 12 Most Trusted Real Estate Agents in your state for 2024.” (2025 wasn’t important?) “After that you won’t get this opportunity again. What would you like to do?” (Nothing.)
These automated texts show up more and more frequently thanks to AI bots, but when you drill down on them, they’re nothing more than a “pay to play” scheme. I don’t know about you, but if I’m paying an institution, OR a media outlet, Or a client to BUY trust, it seems like the very opposite of what I’m supposed to do, which is to EARN trust, not purchase it.
In fact, I’m fairly certain that one can’t actually buy trust. Certainly, you can try. You can gather your friends to vote for you on social media. You can pay for billboards with catchy taglines. You can advertise in glossy magazines, and you can even rebate the customer part of the commission. But at the end of the day, trust isn’t a commodity that can, or should be bought. Trust isn’t based on contests of popularity, or slick speeches, or billboards; it’s based on actions, intentions, behavior, follow-through, and most importantly, your word.
And given that our word is everything, we should carefully consider what we say, and mean it, because trust is the foundation to every successful partnering, including that of Realtor®/Client. And as we are often meeting people we’ve never met before, we’re going to need to build trust with one another from the very start. You need to trust us, just as we need to trust you.
The difficulty for many consumers, is that there are A LOT of Agents out there, and many of us appear to do the same thing, which makes it nearly impossible for the layman to distinguish one from the other. The natural assumption is that we know what we’re doing, that we’re the experts in our fields, and that we take our responsibilities seriously . . . and while that should be true, as with all professions, not all Realtors® are created equal; we get better at our craft with time and experience (and dare I say, age?).
And at the risk of showing my age, I’ve been around for more than a few decades, so I’ve had a front-row seat to the vast changes in our profession, for better and for worse. And while the ability to gather a fair amount of information online has made it easy to dabble in the world of real estate, it’s also created the illusion that preparing, marketing and negotiating one’s single-largest investment is easy. It isn’t.
And while there’s no doubt that social media is at the center of how we present our homes in today’s digital world, properties are still being sold one threshold at a time, and you better know what you’re doing, because it matters a great deal to the Seller as well as to the Buyer. Lose trust, and that’s the end of the ballgame . . . .
But buying accolades doesn’t just come in the form of “pay to play” lists; there are Agents who will tell a Seller anything they want to hear in order to “buy” their listing, a practice Sarah and I avoid at all costs. At the end of the day, the market will decide the value of your home – not the Realtor® – and anyone who promises you a specific outcome should be suspect from the start. As Realtor’s are paid on commission, we’re already incentivized to bring you the highest and best result, but guaranteeing a sales price is a difficult road to walk (or run). Thus, the toughest question to answer for anybody is: “How much will my house sell for?” (It will sell for what the market will bear.)
Certainly, there’s a range in which we should comfortably expect the house to sell, but beyond that, it’s anybody’s guess. If we get the outlier (aka: “the gift”) anything could happen, which is what makes real estate so exciting. There’s a HUGE unknown, especially in our market where no two homes are alike, nor are any two results. This is where trust is key – our Sellers need to know that they can trust the process; that they can let go, and that we have their backs. In short, they need to trust us completely. (We recognize that’s difficult for many people to do.)
That being said, it’s important to note that Realtors® don’t control the outcome. However, we do control how a property presents, the story we tell, and how it’s maintained throughout the marketing period, We can build excitement, leverage the interest, and negotiate with skill and tact. We can escort the Homeowners through the process with compassion and care, but none of that happens without the building blocks of “trust,” and here’s how it sounds:
“Thirteen years ago we called Julie, having almost given up on finding the perfect home for our family in Piedmont. Months later, we were moving into an absolute gem of a house, all because she made it happen. Years later, we moved once again, and Julie and Sarah made selling our home the easiest part of the transition by far. Honest, thoughtful, thorough, and an absolute pleasure to work with, you cannot go wrong by trusting their team to help you buy or sell a home. They are the real deal and we are forever grateful for their guidance and expertise!” (Thank you.)
When it comes to buying or selling a home, this kind of trust is both the goal and the reward, but make no mistake, it’s earned, not bought.
How can we help you?
Julie Gardner & Sarah Abel | Compass Realty
Not just Realtors, but consultants in all things house and home, we’re here to educate, explore, examine and refer . . . In short, you may count on us to take care of your home as if it were our own and anyone who knows us, knows we take pretty darn good care of our homes.
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