Battle of the Best

I’m sitting at our corporate training center watching a panel discussion. The moderator gives a situation, and one of the panelists starts talking. He gets interrupted – You’re wrong! The person interrupting the first one starts explaining why they think the other person is wrong, and finally we circulate to the lawyer and ask for his opinion. They are discussing law, or more than law, legal consequences for actions that may seem completely harmless. I spend my morning at this brilliant training with our branch managers discussing their approaches to different situations, whether it is earnest money, escalation addendum or inspection. Why is inspection a company policy, even on the listing side? Can you pay more than 5% earnest money? What may happen? What if it ends in court due to a breach in contract? How should an escalation clause be treated? No, they do not agree on everything but they all make their point and I learn a lot.

This is just one of many the free trainings my company offers. It’s not just for us newer brokers, many in the room have been in the industry for five, ten or fifteen years. We even have a couple of Principal Managing Brokers there, as our industry is in a constant flux, and with the market the approach to things keep changing.

I should probably rave about my company more often but as for most, it’s just another brokerage it just tends not to happen. I work with Coldwell Banker Bain, a company that is often looked up to in the industry as on top of license laws, the Washington State law and Federal Law we follow the Realtor Code of Ethics as well as our internal company policies. We are instructed and trained from the very beginning to do the right thing, to have integrity in our way of work and even if things do not go the way we were thinking they would, to always be the better person. We do not yell, we do not argue and when we no longer know how to approach a situation our branch managers and company lawyer will step in.

Coldwell Banker Bain has over 30 offices in the PNW area, and what really makes us different is that we are all in this together. CB Bain is the largest single-owner real estate company in the Pacific Northwest, and I can pop into any other CB Bain office to use their meeting rooms, make copies or to ask for advice from a senior broker or the Principal Managing Broker. I mean any time. We are one, and we work together. As a CB Bain broker, I’m a Realtor. Not all brokers are Realtors. In fact, out of 25,000 brokers in our area, only about 8,000 are in fact Realtors. A real estate broker is a person with a license to practice. A Realtor is a member of the National Association of REALTORS®, which means that he or she must uphold the standards of the association and its code of ethics.