Maybe REALTORS Should Scrimmage

October 17, 2006 |

I officiated my first scrimmage of the basketball season at Longwood University on Monday.  One of the purposes of pre-season scrimmages, aside from giving both players and officials game practice, is to get accustomed to the rule changes for the upcoming season.  Invariably, there are rule changes before every season.  Pre-season scrimmages help players become accustomed to the new rules or rule changes, and give officials practice in enforcing those new rules and changes.

Since officials are charged with enforcing the rules, there is much discussion of the rule changes at the pre-season clinics.  The players, however, have to rely on their coaches for dissemination of the rule changes.  Being that coaches are busy people, as are players, the message about rule changes sometimes gets a bit lost or confused.

Such was not the case, however, at Longwood University.  My partners and I went through a very thorough pre-game, so we were very aware as to the rule change situations.  While you can never be sure about the players, we were pleasantly surprised.  For very early in the scrimmage, a situation arose in which one of my partners enforced a new rule.  I won’t bore you with the details; but the rule change is pretty significant, as it took away the ability of players to call a time-out in a situation that previously had been allowed.  The interesting thing about this situation was that as soon as my partner enforced the rule, one of the players turned and said, “Yeah, that’s right.  You can’t do that anymore.  They told us that over the summer.”  To my amazement, everyone on the team was not only aware of the rule change, but they had already incorporated it into their game.  To the credit of the coach, he stopped the scrimmage and gathered all the players together to listen to an explanation of the rule in order to ensure that everyone knew exactly what was going on.  He did this on subsequent occasions as well.

This led me to thinking about the processes involved in real estate.  The fact that the player in my scrimmage had already been notified about the rule change alleviated any possible confusion that might arise once the rule was enforced.  The same can be done in real estate transactions.  If agents let their clients know what can or will happen, their clients are much less likely to feel confused later on.  In the same respect, if clients let their agents know what they are planning and what they expect to happen, the agent is much less likely to be confused later on.  As a REALTOR, I don’t really get a scrimmage to try things out on people.  I must adjust on the fly.  What I can do, however, is to make my clients aware of what will happen in certain situations.  They can do the same for me.  This keeps everyone on the same page, and reduces the potential for confusion and mistakes; and reducing confusion and mistakes usually helps to ensure a satisfactory result for everyone.

[tags] real estate, realtor, charlottesville, basketball, officiating, longwood, pre-game [/tags]

Posted by Daniel | Filed Under Buying, Industry Issues, Officiating, Selling 

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