Working at Home

Notice how relaxed and suave this home worker appears___fresh cup of coffee, stylish sweater, sleek laptop. The lure of making $200 per hour stuffing envelopes (they always add "up to") has been around forever but the internet has made working at home not only possible but in some cases smarter than commuting to an office.

Take our industry for example. Some agents are beginning to center their work time at home rather than doing "floor time" as we call it at the broker's retail office downtown. There at home, uninterrupted by jangling phones and waves of conversation the home worker can really focus on tasks and handle clients in the ideal one-on-one manner that customers uniformly prefer.

But there is another business advantage to having agents working at home covering a specific geographical area; people usually know their 'hoods and have the connections to get things done. Years living in a certain area provides the knowledge that buyers and sellers need in this confusing world.

So in many markets real estate offices are becoming a central hub staffed by people trained specifically to meet and greet walk-in clients or callers and direct them to either an agent on call who can come in to the office and work with them, or increasingly to the home office of an agent in the neighborhood the client is shopping.

Here the internet comes in again because many buyers have already done the shopping on sites like Realtor.com so when they walk in the door they usually have a list of homes that they would like to see already printed out. In other words they don't just walk in as in "walk in off the street"; they've been in touch with the agent for some time and a meeting has been pre-arranged well in advance.

Sally and I are fortunate to have a broker who appreciates this trend and I feel the quality of our lifestyle has improved because we work at home. Contrary to what you might think (and very unlike the model in the picture) it is NOT kicked back, though. We find ourselves putting in more hours and more odd hours than expected.

You see, we're on call 24/7/365 by choice. Customers call on holidays and in the middle of dinner. People will knock on our door too, without calling ahead. So it's very different than going to an office; you aren't taking work home after work, you're living with it. I always felt like I was duplicating my job, having a desk at the office and a homework place at home. In fact I had two computers mostly for that reason and was always struggling to stay coordinated with the two work places.

But working at home is not for everyone. A 9 to 5 job has its advantages if it's the type of work you can LEAVE at work. Real estate isn't and moreover bringing it home means the home itself is now on display so we find ourselves cleaning up more often than (especially me) one normally would. It's like having to be ready for company all the time.

Tele-commuting I guess is coming. Plenty of industries are looking at it and it certainly deserves a look from our perspective.