Property Point

If you want to find a terrific way to waste time, get on to TikTok. Download the app and get started wasting as much time as you want.

The Chinese Government is watching and storing information about you but who cares? Those short, clever videos will cater to your interests and keep you mindlessly entertained for hours … if you let it.

I have a TikTok time-frame and time-limit to ensure it doesn’t take over my life but I do get to watch health, fitness, food, real estate, politics and sport-related videos that get served up to me as I scroll through.

They have videos that test your health. There is the one that gets you to hold your breath while a red dot moves along a horizontal line to test your lung capacity. If you can hold your breath till the dot reaches the end of the line you’re not going to die this week. Which is always a relief.

There’s another one that tests your hearing. It starts with a piercing, high-frequency sound and there’s a number 80 on the screen that tells you that’s what a normal 80-year-old can hear.

Then the number starts descending and the sound gets more difficult to hear, 79, 78, 77 … it’s easy in the 70s. 59, 58, 57 … it’s getting harder, but I can still hear it pretty well.

Once it starts to get to around 40 it gets hard for me to hear and, full disclosure, I hear a faint sound at 34 but at 32 I am out, can’t hear a thing. It keeps going into the 20s and I can only hear the sound of silence. Damn kids … most don’t need glasses to read either.

The thing about these hearing tests is that no matter how much you try to hear, forcing yourself to listen, it doesn’t make any difference. You can either hear the sound or you can’t and focusing on listening won’t help.

Life in a service industry, and certainly in real estate, is different because listening does make a difference.

There are plenty of agents who can hear just fine but they don’t listen. They don’t listen to what is important to a seller, how the seller wants things done, the process they want the agent to follow.

Sometimes the agent likes the sound of their own voice and they’re just not listening to what is important to the seller; a seller always wants the best price the market will pay but often there are other important matters such as when they want inspections, what they feel about the marketing, the signage, costs, things they are willing to do and others they don’t want to do, how they want feedback provided etc.

The same principle applies to agents who don’t listen to buyers and ignore what they want.

The Greek philosopher Epictetus said: “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” Real estate agents need to remember that.

If you are thinking about selling, give me a call. I promise to listen.

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