Finding a deal is the easy part. Here’s the messy first transaction that showed me where real estate is actually won.
Everybody thinks the hard part of real estate is finding the deal. My very first transaction taught me the exact opposite. Finding it took an afternoon. Closing it took me months of not giving up, and it nearly fell apart more than once. Here’s the story of the messiest first deal you’ve ever heard, and the lesson I still run my business on today.
This was right after I moved to Phoenix. I was twenty-four, brand new, at the first company I ever worked with, and back then deals were genuinely hard to find because investors were buying up everything in sight. An investor I knew was going door to door in the western suburbs, literally knocking and asking people whether they’d sell. He found a family willing to sell for a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars, and the whole thing was about as scrappy as it gets. He didn’t even write a real check; he wrote out a personal IOU by hand and put the contract together himself, the way the seminars taught back then. Then a buyer came along who wanted to get into investing, and we assigned that contract to her for a hundred and thirty-five thousand. The difference, roughly seventy-five hundred dollars, was our fee. On paper, the deal was done. Except it wasn’t, because finding it was the easy part. My job was to get it closed.
Finding a deal is nothing; closing it is everything. This was the first thing that deal beat into me. Anyone can knock on a door and get someone to say yes. That’s the fun part, the part that feels like progress. But a signed contract is just a promise, and a promise isn’t a closing. Between “we have a deal” and “the keys change hands” sits a mountain of things that can go wrong, and somebody has to be willing to climb it. On this deal, the person who found it was finished the moment the buyer signed. I was the one who had to get it across the finish line, and I learned fast that the finish line is where real estate actually happens.
"A signed contract is just a promise, and a promise isn’t a closing. Somebody has to be willing to climb the mountain in between."
This closing did not want to happen. The buyer was self-employed with very thin credit, the kind of financial profile that makes a lender say no almost automatically. Getting her funded wasn’t a phone call, it was a project. I spent months on it, chasing paperwork and working the financing from every angle, refusing to let it die when any reasonable person would have walked away. And I felt genuinely guilty, because we’d collected our fee right at the start, and there I was months later still fighting to deliver what she’d paid for. That guilt drove me. I wasn’t going to take that money and let her down, so I kept going until it was done.
The lesson was worth more than the commission. After months of grinding, the buyer got funded and the deal closed, my very first one. But what I walked away with was bigger than the money: I learned that I’m the person who doesn’t quit on a deal. When everyone else’s job is finished, mine is just getting started, and I’ll grind through months of problems to protect the person who trusted me. That isn’t something you learn from a seminar or a how-to video. You learn it by living through a deal that should have died and refusing to let it. Every client I’ve had since has gotten that same version of me, the one who treats your closing like it’s the only thing that matters, because I learned early that it is.
That was a scrappy hundred-and-thirty-five-thousand-dollar assignment in the Phoenix suburbs, and these days I’m helping buyers and sellers here in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Very different price points, very different city, but the lesson has never changed. Anyone can get you excited about a deal. The real question is who will be standing there, months deep, making sure it actually closes.
If you want someone who treats your transaction like it’s the only one that matters, that’s the kind of Realtor I’ve been since day one. Call or text me at 718-938-5406, email me at [email protected], or visit newyorklovestherosenteam.com.
