Disclaimer: Canadians are generally less litigious than our American cousins. If you are American, I suggest you take my advice with many grains of salt. And, whether you\u2019re Canadian or American, use your own discretion and take personal responsibility for whatever calculated risks you choose to take on as part of your business. After all, no judge is ever going to let you off the hook just because, \u201cTed said so!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every real estate lawyer will tell you that you should never recommend a single service provider. Their reasoning is simple and completely logical; If the person you recommend messes up, you could be held liable.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This makes complete sense from a strictly legal perspective in terms of minimizing your personal liability. However, I consciously choose to disregard this sound legal advice.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Using home inspectors as an example, I\u2019ll explain why, but you could apply the same principles to any service provider you recommend, including lawyers! <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s the scenario: Your buyers have an accepted offer, conditional to a home inspection, and they\u2019re asking for your advice on finding a good inspector. \ufe0f<\/p>\n\n\n\n What are you supposed to do? Pretend you don\u2019t know one? <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you can\u2019t provide good advice to your clients when they need it, what good are you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Some lawyers recommend giving your clients a large list of potential service providers, but how is that limiting your liability? If any one of those inspectors messes up and a lawsuit ensues, did you not still explicitly recommend everyone on that list? <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019d rather minimize the risk and recommend only one or two service providers that I trust to do a great job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First things first:<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you recommend an inspector, you better make bloody damn sure they\u2019re excellent at what they do. Here\u2019s why I think my two inspectors are great:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s how I pitch my preferred inspectors to my buyer clients:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ve got two outstanding home inspectors I can recommend. They\u2019re both meticulous, they never miss a thing, and after the inspection, they each provide an extremely detailed and informative report on your home, including pictures of every problem area. Honestly, in my opinion, these are probably the two best inspectors in the city. Would you like me to set this up for you?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point, hopefully, you\u2019ve built a high level of trust and rapport with your clients, so allowing you to continue being in control of all the details is a no-brainer. After all, they probably know zero inspectors, and you know the two best ones in the city!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t remember the last time a client said, \u201cno!\u201d So, I make all the arrangements for them, setting up the day and time, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is infinitely better than having some unknown inspector come in and mess up your deal due to incompetence or stupidity, or both. This has happened to all of us, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why do I have two inspectors? Simple: if one of them is unavailable, I can always get the other one. It\u2019s important not to put all your eggs in one basket. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Have I ever gotten myself in trouble by recommending a particular service provider?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Never. Why? Because the people I recommend are the best at what they do. Therefore, I\u2019m willing to accept the tiny risk that something might go wrong one day, because the benefits outweigh the risks by a long shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The biggest benefit? My clients get a thorough understanding of exactly what they are buying. There are no surprises. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In my opinion, if you\u2019re going to be a great REALTOR\u00ae, you must be willing to recommend expert service providers. Therefore, you must also be willing to accept some level of risk for the recommendations you make. The key is to minimize that risk by recommending only the best of the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next week, I\u2019ll talk about properly establishing your clients\u2019 expectations before the home inspection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Disclaimer: Canadians are generally less litigious than our American cousins. If you are American, I suggest you take my advice with many grains of salt. And, whether you\u2019re Canadian or American, use your own discretion and take personal responsibility for whatever calculated risks you choose to take on as part of your business. After all, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":223,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agentskills2.dvsrvr.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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