Liked It; Didn’t Love It: Querying your novel as a real estate agent

My buyer took a final look around the million-dollar condo. “I like it, but I don’t love it,” he shrugged. “At least, not enough to pay a million dollars for it.” I like it, but I don’t love it. Where had I heard those words before? Oh, yes. Attached to every book I’d ever written. 

For seven years, I was lucky enough to have a literary agent. In writing workshops and classes, when I mentioned that I was represented, the instructors treated me differently. “Getting an agent is harder than getting published,” they’d say. “You’re almost there.” 

Spoiler alert: I was not almost there. And this spring, after four books that had gone “on sub,” three of them multiple times, my agent gave up on me. Now I was back in the query trenches, which, according to other aspiring writers on Twitter, were tougher than they’d ever been. I’m thickening my skin and bracing myself for a lot of bad news. And I’m hoping that my years of work as a real estate agent has given me some perspective into the process. 

Like my buyer who “liked it, but didn’t love it,” literary agents and publishers aren’t just looking for a good book without any obvious flaws. They’re looking for a home that they’ll love for years. I want my book to be that home. But I know they have so many options, and there are so many more writers out there than publishers. 

Here are a few more ways that real estate and publishing overlap: 

 Buyers take forever. When I first got into real estate, my broker warned me that the average buyer takes between 12-18 months to find their home. At the time, this seemed ridiculous to me—I hadn’t taken nearly as long to find the houses I ended up buying—but as time went on, I found it to be true. Buyers start off excited and energetic, but as the search goes on, they lose enthusiasm and the desire to look. And then things change in their lives, or in the market, and time passes and sometimes your buyer decides to leave town completely or use a different agent, and a year has gone by and you have nothing to show for it. I still have books out that my agent sent last year. The editors greeted her pitch email with, “Sounds fabulous! I’ll read it right away!” Then… crickets. Some editors never get back to you. Some agents don’t, either. 

  Editors sometimes have really picky reasons to reject a book. Many times I’ve gotten “pass” emails praising character, setting, plot, theme. But they didn’t like the ending, or they found a minor character unbelievable. I could fix this! The same way a paint color in the kitchen could be changed, or a bathroom could be updated. But publishers want something they love, and so do buyers, and you can’t talk someone into falling in love with a book or a house. Either they’ll fall in love and are willing to work with you to fix the problems, or they only like it, and they move on to the next book or the next house or the next woman in their dating app. 

 The pitch is sometimes better than the product. As real estate agents, we pretty up a house with staging and terrific photos. As writers, we hire editors to pretty up our prose and help us write query letters and synopses. But putting a gloss on something that doesn’t work only postpones the inevitable. Buyers will see that your lovely photos hide a too-small kitchen or that your polished first 20 pages hide an episodic plot. 

  The process is similar for both. You list the house; you send out your queries. You get a buyer who wants to see the house; you get an agent who wants the first 20 pages! You show the property and send off your pages, filled with hope and excitement. For the writer, disappointment often follows. For the agent… well, that’s where things get a little different. 

 The big difference between the real estate agent and the writer is that eventually the house will sell. You might have to lower the price by a little or a lot, you may have to replace a roof or an AC unit, but someone will buy that house. Especially these days, when, despite decades-high interest rates, we’re still about a million homes short of what the population needs. There are no such guarantees in publishing. In fact, it’s more likely that one outstanding book will attract several agents and sell at auction, while ninety percent of submissions fail to find a single buyer. There are many more books out there than there are agents to rep them or traditional publishers to distribute them. The only guarantee writers have is our belief in ourselves and the commitment to keep writing no matter what. Maybe this book won’t sell, but the next one will! 

Keep writing, writing fam. And I’ll keep looking for new agents to query, and new condos for that picky (but wealthy!) buyer of mine. 

And if you need a realtor in Pinellas County, Florida, hit me up.

What Realtors Can Learn from Selling Sunset And what Selling Sunset can learn from Realtors

The clothes! The catfights! The C-list celebrities! There are so many reasons to watching Selling Sunset! As a Realtor, I don’t think I’m alone for watching for the houses. What’s it like to list a property for $30 million? What’s it like to have a buyer with that budget? Most Realtors can only dream. And because this industry pays on commission, most of us won’t earn in a year what the Selling Sunset gals make for one deal. Sadly, there’s no correlation between the amount of commission and the amount of work necessary to close the deal. Personally, I’ve had homes selling for under $200K that have been a nightmare and helped buyers with million-dollar condos that took under five hours of total work. I tell myself it all balances out in the end. Eventually.
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Even though the personal drama seems to dominate Sunset, there are still lessons to be gleaned from these real estate fashionistas. When Jason sat down his team and warned them that the high interest rates had put a damper on the top end of the market, he echoed what my own broker had been saying. Here are some moments from this season that rang true to me… as well as moments when I wanted to give those agents some advice!
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*“In real estate, you can’t sit around and wait for the phone to ring.” – Chrishelle.

This is so true. Although most agents don’t have a TV show to help with their exposure, we’re all encouraged to continuously reach out via text, phone calls, videos, etc. For the most successful agents, trying to drum up new business is a fulltime endeavor. Those of us who do sit back and wait for the phone to ring are often the last people sellers actually call.
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“My deal fell out of escrow. Turns out the fire insurance was $200 thousand dollars.” – Emma. Are you surprised that someone willing to pay $20 million for a house doesn’t want to pay $200,000 a year for insurance? So was Emma. But she shouldn’t have been. While we don’t have to worry about fire insurance in Florida, flood insurance is a big deal, especially for one-story properties right on the water. Savvy Realtors put up insurance quotes on the MLS with their other disclosures so there are no surprises after the house has gone under contract. I’m sure Emma will know this next time!
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“The penthouse isn’t worth that price. You and Jason are too personally invested in the project to see that.” – Chrishelle. More words of wisdom from the series main character, who has learned to stand on her own two feet as a woman and a Realtor during the series. Being too personally invested is enough of a problem that real estate agents sometimes ask their colleagues to represent them instead of selling their own homes to avoid making costly errors. Selling and buying a home is an emotional process, overlaid with memories and relationships. Jason, Mary, and Romain worked so hard on this penthouse, it’s easy to see how they may have lost perspective on its true value. Guess we’ll have to wait till next season to find out!
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“Our sellers are canceling the listing because Jason didn’t go the showings.” – Emma. Maybe this is the same house that didn’t sell because of the fire insurance. Not sure. While Emma is dead right that agents need to fulfill the promises they make to their clients, blaming the broker for not attending the showings is silly. Houses aren’t rejected; price points are rejected. When a house sits on the market, the seller and agent need to either reduce the price or make changes so the home’s value equals the sales price. No one’s going to reject a house they love because the broker wasn’t at the showing.

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“You texted my client and offered to show him listings!” – Bre. In an earlier meeting, Bre said she never asked clients to sign buyers agreements, saying that her clients were friends and she trusted them. Then she shows a house to a client, who tells her that Emma texted him, offering to show him properties! While I have no doubt that this show is heavily edited and conversations don’t portray exactly what happened, Bre’s dilemma is not uncommon. In Florida, a buyer’s agreement has no legal heft—no one is obligated to use a certain agent for a sale, even if said agent spent a year showing the client properties and writing up offers. Still, poaching is considered such bad form that I prefer not to speak to friends while they are buying or selling homes with other agents in order to avoid “tampering.” (Also because it’s seriously annoying when friends choose to work with other agents, then call me to complain about what their agent is doing wrong.) Did Emma really try to poach, or did the producers edit Bre’s conversation with her client to make Emma’s text sound worse than it was? I don’t know. Last season Emma had a client who told her that Christine had offered her $5000 to use her instead of Emma, which was such a weak bribe it seemed almost unbelievable. The lesson: Only work with people you trust.
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“Jason put you on my listing, and then you didn’t do anything!” – Nicole. Nicole seems to be taking the villain spot vacated by Christine. Or maybe she and Chelsea are sharing it, I don’t know. This entire storyline confused me, because as Chrishelle pointed out, the sale in question happened three years ago and she and Nicole had been friendly since. And Nicole’s beef should have been with Jason. More broadly, this issue of Jason putting agents on listings is a problem I don’t have, and I don’t know any other agents who do. Maybe it’s a California thing, but here in Florida, agents get their own listings. Still, agents sometimes split listings with other agents who who might not do their fair share of the work. It happens, it sucks; you learn your lesson and move on. Chrishelle said she had referred clients to Nicole, so it seemed like she had paid her back in any case. To me, this just seemed like more manufactured drama to make Nicole look bad and Mary seem like an ineffective manager. The lesson here, again: Only work with people you trust. If you make a mistake, chalk it up to bad luck and remember that things even out in the end. One day you might be the agent not pulling her own weight but getting a check at the end of the day.

Selling Sunset may be a guilty pleasure, but the show also reinforces important lessons for agents. As a realtor, I may not have billionaire clients, a camera crew or a size 0 body, but I can do everything possible to sell my listings and get my buyers ready for the biggest purchase of their lives. But if anyone knows a billionaire looking to buy in Pinellas County, Florida, please send her my way!

*quotes aren't exact, but I tried!

Things We Should Know But Are Clueless About

It’s time for another blog hop with my favorite blogging friends! This week’s theme is: Things We Should Know But Are Clueless About… Enjoy!

When I was a kid, I thought there would be some magical age when I would know everything. When I was 12, that age was 16. When I was 16, that age was 21. When I was 21, that age was 30. When I was 30, I realized it was never going to happen.

I’m 55 now, and while the list of things I don’t know has grown shorter, there are some things on that list that I’m never going to master. Things like:

-- How to walk in high heels. I’m 5’6 (alright, maybe 5’5 now), so heels were never a must. I think I bought my first pair in college? They are so painful, and I don’t like being in pain. I read recently that they are designed to be painful and women are just supposed to put up with it. That sounds monstrous to me. I wear sandals or boots. Nothing with a heel. And my feet are good!

-- How to parallel park. I know I did this a few times in my life, because it was on the driving test I passed in 1985. And I got my license (after two tries) so I definitely knew how to do this at one point. Nowadays I have a few strategies for dealing with this troublesome parking requirement:

o Make my husband drive

o Make my friend drive

o Take a Lyft

o Park out of the way on a curb that has no cars nearby

o Pull in at the end spot

o Stay home! There’s good stuff on TV! Why go out?

-- How to Slack or whatever it is that people with real jobs are using to communicate with each other these days. It’s like a text message for the whole company? Or a private Twitter? Who invented that? And why? (I do know how to use fun real estate tools like Dotloop and Moxi though!)

-- How to boat, jet-ski, or operate any other kind of watercraft. I live in Florida, one block from Tampa Bay. But I don’t like crashing and/or possibly drowning, so I’m pretty much a landlubber. I will get on a boat if someone else is driving it, but I have yet to be coaxed onto the back of a jet ski.

-- How to cook a turkey, steak, ham, or other big-meal type dish. I can make pasta but that’s about it. Luckily I married a man who can cook and for the past few years we have hosted Thanksgiving and Christmas at our house. I gladly do the dishes!

I’m so interested in see what Deb has failed to master in her years on the planet… I’ll be checking here for her blog post tomorrow, and you should, too!