We had a transaction where anything that could go wrong did.
The buyer situation was complicated, layered with investment and business dealings. We made the lender and their entire team earn the closing. There were rentbacks. Home sale contingencies. Egos on every side of the table.
Attorneys got involved. There were fights over who would keep the earnest money deposit. And the other side was less than helpful from the first day to the last.
There were plenty of moments that the deal could have died, and plenty of moments I thought to myself, “No closing is worth having to go through all this.”
We closed. And here is the part I did not expect. That client is now an A-plus client for life. Not in spite of how messy it got, but because of how we handled it when it got messy.
That is the thing about a hard closing. It does not define you. But it absolutely shapes you, and you get to control how it shapes you.
Most agents get that backward. They let the deal define them and never stop to think about how it shaped them.
Surviving the messy middle
In the middle of it, when it was at its worst, I kept coming back to one thing: We signed on to represent that client. We have a duty to them. That does not pause because the other side is difficult or the deal turns ugly.
But the duty was only half of it. The other half was what I did after. Every transaction, especially the hard ones, is where we learn to be better agents. So I took every interaction, including my own, and went back through it.
- What happened
- Why it happened
- What could have been done differently, and not just by the other side.
- What could I have done differently, so that when this happens again, and it will, I am more ready for it.
That last part is the whole game. It is easy to catalog what everyone else did wrong. It is harder, and far more useful, to ask what you would do differently.
I take it a step further. I have called other managing brokers to get their read on a situation. At my level, they are dealing with the same caliber of issues, so they can actually see it clearly. But here is how I do it, and it matters. I present it as neutral as I possibly can.
Because I am not calling to hear that I was right, that the other person was the villain, that I was the victim. A cosign teaches you nothing. I am calling for an objective look at what happened, which means I have to be willing to hear that I was part of the problem.
Now compare that to the agent who just complains
I have managed and coached for a long time, and what I tell my agents is this: You get a few minutes to complain about it, then we move on to the next thing.
A few minutes is healthy. Living there is not. When you make a bad deal part of your personality, when the story becomes your identity, you are not learning anything. You are just replaying it.
And every time you tell it without looking for a way to get better, you are wasting the time of whoever you are talking to. More importantly, you are wasting your own.
Analyzing a problem is what turns it into something you can learn from. Complaining about it just turns it into who you are. Same deal, two completely different outcomes, and you choose which one it becomes.
So no, you are not your last closing. You are not the deal that fell apart, the month that went quiet or the transaction that put you through the wringer.
But you are shaped by all of it, every single time, and that part is yours to direct. The hard ones can make you bitter, or they can make you better. They can become your excuse or your education.
That nightmare deal is one of the best things that ever happened to my business, because I let it teach me instead of letting it define me.
Get your few minutes to complain. Then go get better.
