The art of de-hiring

With the firm’s reputation at stake, a broker must make the tough decisions.

by Louise Hull   "People are known by the company they keep–and a company is known by the people they keep."

The older I get, the more I value the lessons I learned from my parents. My father was a small-business man. He never made a lot of money, but he taught my brothers and me a lot of good common sense. The quote above was one of his favorites. After I began my real estate business, I thought more and more of some of the things my dad told me. Sometimes, his words hit pretty close to home.

Have you, as a broker, ever had a high-producing agent (or any agent, for that matter) who walked the line of ethics with toes over the line all the time? You think you can’t afford to let them go? My question to you is: Can you afford to keep them? Lawsuits are expensive in terms of money and time. And how do you place a value on your company reputation? High ethical standards, excellence in customer service, integrity … these should be the ideals we seek–not profitability alone.

How many times has a contract come into your office on outdated forms? Of course, this only happens when the agent is from another company. How many times have you had an agent from some other company ask what you consider to be really dumb questions and then sanctimoniously said to yourself, "Boy, I’m glad I don’t have the liability for that agent." I wonder if any of the other brokers are secretly saying the same thing about any of your people–or mine.

Our attitudes toward other broker’s agents are much like many of us view other peoples’ children. Our own children are precious darlings, while other people’s kids are monsters. When it comes to our own real estate offices, we have this same objectivity problem. We make excuses for our own people, yet we are hypercritical when we witness agents from other firms carry out the same practices. If we, as brokers, have incompetent agents in our employ, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We sometimes get so busy with our day-to-day responsibilities that we forget our main responsibility as a managing broker is the competency of our firm.

When I travel, I like to listen to training/motivational tapes. On one occasion, I was driving to Austin–for a TAR meeting, I’m sure–and I heard Brian Tracy say this:

"When you are facing a difficult decision, ask yourself this question: If I had known then, what I know now, would I have … taken this job, gotten into this relationship, moved to this city, hired this person? If the answer is no, then stop going down that road. Take whatever action is necessary to eliminate the problem."

My automobile cassette player was screaming an agent’s name at me! Three days later, she was no longer in real estate. I know there are situations that do not speak to us so clearly, but since it was an issue of character, I knew the only real solution.

Another of my favorite quotes (and I can’t credit this one to my father): "It is far better to have trained an employee and lost them than to have failed to have trained them and kept them." Surely this is true for both employees and independent contractors. Some of us have agents who are crying for better training, and that "buck" stops with the broker. Some agents just are not cut out for this business. If there is a problem that is incurable through instruction (incompetence, intelligence, or integrity), perhaps we should ask ourselves: If I had known then what I know now . . .

Louise Hull, CRB, CRS, GRI, is broker/owner of Cornerstone Properties in Victoria. She is a TREC commissioner and served as TAR chairman of the board in 2000. You can e-mail her at louise@louisehull.com.

Illustration © Artville.

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