A Beach Front View and a Chicago Real Estate Professionals Inability to Relate (to a Frozen Lockbox)
Empathy, as I understand it, is my ability to feel somebody else’s pain.
More often than not I am adept at feeling empathy. But earlier today I came face to face with an instance where I simply couldn’t do it.
It came in the form of an email from an agent who works at my Chicago brokerage, @properties. How, she asked, could she get into a frozen lockbox. (A lockbox is akin to a combination lock that you locked your high school locker with except that this one has a “belly” that securely holds keys to allow a real estate agent to show a property.)
Bear in mind that I have had more than my fair share of encounters with recalcitrant lockboxes in my day as one of Chicago’s preferred real estate professionals. And the truth of the matter is that when I know I am showing a Chicago home or condo and there’s a lockbox involved and the temperature is sub-freezing I take the precaution of boiling water and putting it in a thermos and taking also a plastic container to immerse the iceblocked contraption to thaw it out to ensure that my client is able to see the property.
But as I read the email today I simply had no response.
It’s not that I can’t relate with the inquiring agent. Heck, I have been in her blue-toed shoes schlepping around icy Chicago streets to show condos with outstanding views and single family homes with gourmet kitchens (that we see after we remove our salt-stained boots at the front door).
But today, as soft sand caressed my bare feet in the manner of a natural foot scrub some several hours flight south of Chicago an email about a frozen lockbox was like reading ancient Greek. I just didn’t get it.
Mind you, I had no bone to pick with the chilled Chicago real estate professional and I was glad to see later in the day that she had resolved her issue (with no help from me). But simply due to my slightly altered perspective – I was warm (as in very warm) and she was not – I was unable to relate.
Some might ask how and why was I aware that such an email had dented my in-box? Even though my good friend and colleague Mitch Aronson is assisting several of my clients in my absence (and amid my momentary lack of empathy) I had several items that were percolating on the front burner that I needed to tend to:
- My client’s West Loop condo purchase is in attorney review having been negotiated last Wednesday evening, the night before I left
- I needed to hear back from the lender for a condo-buying client who is set to close on a purchase this week (the closing was to have occurred a week ago)
- I had just run comps for a couple considering an East Village single family and curious about other single family homes available in this Chicago neighborhood
- I had to arrange a showing of an off-market North Center single family home with an agent astute enough to inquire if we might be available to see.
So in between instances of gargantuan swallows of salt water as I crab-walked with Lucas and Jackson I kept tabs on the six spinning plates, hopeful that anybody reading this terse post will show empathy for my momentary lapse of empathy.
That, I suppose, is ironic.
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