Fiduciary and Functional Duties

listing presentations and fiduciary duties I’ve been spending some time lately renewing my presentations for Buyers and Sellers. I’m a short-and-sweet presentation type of gal. My listing presentation, without discussing pricing, is about 8-10 minutes. There’s a brief introduction, a rundown of the plan and the why of the plan, and then my accountability systems. I’m pretty sure no one wants to hear me blather on and on for half an hour about marketing or my company or my personal achievements.

Anyway.

I scored a free copy of this book at the Inman Connect event in San Francisco, and there’s a chapter about fiduciary versus “functionary” tasks as an agent. Functionary tasks would be things like taking photos, making flyers, things that don’t require a fiduciary relationship. In the online world where information is so freely available, my value as an agent becomes more about interpretation and knowledge and expertise - it’s about my role as your fiduciary, not in my performing a couple of functions.

So I went back to my old listing presentation and classified everything in there as either a functional item or a fiduciary item, which was an eye-opening experience. There were so many fiduciary items in there disguised as functional items, but I wasn’t presenting them that way.

For example: We’re going to have professional photos taken.

Great. Any monkey can do that. What is unsaid is that I bring in my fiduciary duties, my skills, by knowing what attracts a Buyer to a house and making sure the photographer includes those things in his pictures. I’ve sat with buyers at a computer and looked at millions of pictures. All of that experience lets me know what pictures to have taken, what 10 to include online, what 3 to put on the flyer.

The point isn’t that we’ll get professional photos. The point is that I know what photos we want! That’s part of what makes me different from the agent who will whip out his point-and-shoot pocket camera, snap close-ups of the toilets, and call it a day.

So now I’ve got a lot of work to do! If I can get my now 20 minute long rough draft version pared down to 10, I’ll be a fantastic editor.