Safety Matters: Come into the Office

Hi, everybody, Cheryl Knowlton, coming at you with today safety tip of the week.

So, one of the biggest premises of the amazing Real Estate Safety Matters Course written by the National Association of Realtors is a belief that we should invite our buyers to what we call CITO or Come into the Office.

The idea behind that is to have your buyers, people that you don’t k n ow already, meet you in the office first as part of your systems and your safety protocols for a number of reasons.

We go into these in great detail in the safety course, which I would highly invite you and strongly encourage you to take. Lot and lots of good reasons for this.

In the event that your buyers don’t have time for that, don’t want to do that for some reason, I encourage you to have them meet you in a public place first. More real estate gets transacted at Starbucks than any other location outside of real estate offices.

Please keep yourself safe and don’t meet strange people in strange places.  We call that being a pop-tart Realtor—jumping up from you desk to meet someone you’ve never met before, heaven forbid, in a property you are unfamiliar with. That is not good business practice. It’s actually unprofessional. Please don’t do that.

Invite your buyer clients to meet you in the office first.  If they won’t, again, just try to meet them in a public place.  If they are unwilling to do that strongly consider not taking them on as a buyer.

You are responsible for your own safety and your protocols. It’s when we break our typical systems that we get into trouble. I love you. I care about you and want you to be safe.

So, I encourage you to take this idea.  Utilize it in your business.  Change habits, if you have to.  But, I promise you’ll not regret making this big change.