Every morning I get to the office a little before 8:00 am. I pour some coffee, turn the computer on and get ready for my day. Once the computer is up and running, the first thing I do is check my email to see if I missed anything while I was sleeping. Then I pull up our MLS and go over everything that came up the day before. Since I get to the office before most Realtors, there usually isn't anything new that I haven't seen. Today, due to our agent tour, I didn't get to look at the MLS until around 11:00 am. Imagine my surprise when the first thing I saw was a new listing on a home I had listed that had expired. The part that galled me was, the house was listed at the price I had recommended numerous times to the seller if she wanted to sell her home. She refused my every attempt to get a price reduction and then acted like it was all my fault her home didn't sell. Then she relists it with someone else and goes down to where I was telling her it needed to be for months.

Every Monday we have an office meeting where we talk about what went on during the week and discuss ways to make ourselves better as agents. During these meetings I have heard time and again how important it is to price a listing correctly if it is going to have any chance of selling in this difficult market. I know many agents will take any listing at any price and then beat the seller up on the price until they lower it. At Coldwell Banker Mountain Gallery we believe that we aren't doing our sellers any favors by following this line of thinking. It is better to be honest up front and risk losing a listing than to be dishonest and have to deal with an angry client because their home isn't selling.

My point to all of this is, I should have been much more assertive during the initial listing presentation. At the time I didn't have any escrows going and I felt like any business was better than no business. I was wrong. By being " weak " all I did was buy myself a headache for six months. I dreaded having to contact this seller because all I had to report was bad news and try to talk her into a price reduction. She had her back up because she was mad her home wasn't selling and she had a mortgage she had to pay. What I needed to realize is, any seller who bought their home after 2004 is probably in the same boat. It is our duty, as the experts, to not candy coat it and let them know how things really stand. If I had been more blunt, I may not have gotten the listing but I would have saved myself a great deal of effort and time. Who knows, I may have gotten it at a price that would actually have sold.