Answer:

It all seemed so clear in real estate school.  You are to always have your clients’ best interests in mind.  You are to do all you can to benefit them.  That made sense then.

Then you got out in the real world and started running into real dilemmas that challenged this notion.

The first one I ran into went something like this…

A new real estate company opened up in town advertising a very low, flat fee listing service.  They advertised like crazy, were very aggressive in the marketplace, and soon had signs up all over town.  And even worse, they were getting reputation for really talking down and bad-mouthing other agencies.  I started to hear other agents say things like, “Well, I am certainly not going to show any of their listings!”  And at first, I was tempted to jump right in.  After all, they were a real threat (or at least we thought they were at the time) to our market.  They paid less than half of what most other agencies were paying to cooperate on a listing. 

Then I thought back on what my real job is in this business.  If my real purpose was to serve my clients in their best interest, how could I justify not showing them a home that might be exactly what they were looking for, regardless of who had it listed?  The answer was pretty obvious to me… I could not justify it.  My client’s needs had to come first… before how much I would get paid, how I felt about the other agency, or how I hated helping getting their listings sold. 
Sure, I could have gotten some larger commission checks on some of my transactions by not showing them all the homes available.  But what message would I be sending to my clients and, more importantly, to myself. 

Whether or not a person is a client has nothing to do with whether or not they buy or sell a house with me.  It has everything to do with whether or not this person will refer me to another person and how they feel about me personally. 

With this thought in mind, I swallowed hard and sold a lot of this company’s listings over the years.  I hated the fact that I was helping to keep them in business, and that I was making significantly less money than I might have made otherwise, but I felt confident in my actions knowing that I was truly serving my client’s best interest.  This service and attitude towards my clients has resulted in many times more business and referrals than whatever amount of money I felt like I ‘lost” by selling a listing that did not benefit me as financially as I had wished.  Sometimes my clients knew I was getting very little compensation for them buying a particular home and they made a specific effort to send business my way to make up for it.  But most of the time, my clients simply could tell that I truly had their best interest in mind, and that resonated with them to form a trust and loyalty.