The newest person at the brokerage is the one who opens the blinds and waits
Still working through licensing and doing the errands that come with being the newest person attached to a brokerage. One of those errands is going to a house early, turning on every light, opening blinds, making sure the place smells like nothing, and waiting.
This one was a finished luxury flip. Renovated top to bottom, on market four months at that point, and the showing was a private one for an out-of-state buyer's agent bringing clients through. I got there fifty minutes early because the instructions were specific about the lights. Twenty-two switches on the main floor. I counted because I had time.
The listing agent had left me a sheet with notes on what to say if asked. The slab material and where it came from. The name of the guy who did the millwork. Which windows were original and which were replaced, and the fact that the original ones were restored rather than swapped, because apparently that matters to a certain buyer in that neighborhood and hurts you with a different one.
Nobody came. The buyer's agent texted at the appointment time to say the clients had made an offer on something else that morning and were standing down. Then she asked me, purely conversationally, how long it had been listed. I said four months. She said, that's about right for that price up there.
I turned off twenty-two switches and locked up.
What stayed with me is the sheet. Somebody had thought carefully about how one buyer would love the restored windows and another would think they were a maintenance problem, and had written both answers down for whichever person walked in. That's a level of buyer-specific work I hadn't understood was part of the job. And then no buyer walked in, for the fifth month running.