Real Estate Tales from a Dumpster Dive

Ever found yourself knee-deep in chaos, wondering how you got there? Join me, Lindsay Dreyer, as I recount the bizarre yet enlightening journey that starts with a shattered iMac screen and ends up with a dumpster dive.

It's a wild ride filled with humor and insight, drawing unexpected parallels between the unpredictable nature of real estate and the messiest of life’s moments. Through this adventure, I unravel the secrets of resilience, adaptability, and the zen-like calmness needed to thrive in real estate, all while highlighting the importance of embracing chaos instead of shying away from it.

Throughout this episode, I shine a light on the often-unseen scrappiness that defines successful real estate professionals. This episode is both a tribute and a rallying cry for real estate agents everywhere: keep your stories alive, stay determined, and relish the satisfaction of building a career you truly love amidst the challenges.

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Transcript

Lindsay Dreyer: 0:34

Hello there and welcome to the Happy Agent Co podcast. If it is your first time here, I am Lindsay Dreyer, a real estate coach, indie brokerage owner, and I have been selling real estate since 2004. And this podcast is where we talk about building a successful real estate career without losing your sanity or giving up your life or your keys. As you will soon hear, today I have a wild story for you. It is about a broken iMac, a dumpster dive, and how a ridiculous moment became a life lesson, about perseverance, determination and not giving up, and I think that this is such a valuable lesson to real estate life in general, but particularly when real estate gets tough. If you have ever felt like giving up when things get a little bit messy and I know I have, everyone does, we're all human this episode is for you. Let's set the scene. How did we get here? My iMac was pretty old and it was time for a computer upgrade, so I am maximizing tax deductions at the end of the year. Highly recommend you do this if you are self-employed, if there are any capital or big expenditures you are planning to make in the following year and you need to maximize your deductions expenditures you are planning to make in the following year and you need to maximize your deductions. Let's spend those coins, honey. So I got my new computer and I'm giving up the iMac. I will miss it. It served me well but I needed something a little bit faster.

Lindsay Dreyer: 2:10

But the iMac was still in really great condition and I was planning on bringing it home to my kiddos to use for homework and the likes. So I had it sitting in the floor of my office and have like a suite in a big office building. I come into my office after the long Thanksgiving break and I see my iMac on the floor with a cracked screen. Now I had set it tucked away like kind of off to the side. But I think when the cleaning person came through which no shade to the cleaning person, thank you for cleaning and taking out the garbage they accidentally stepped on the monitor because it looked like a big footprint, cracked the entire screen. So I plugged it in because I'm like I'm indetermined always, but I'm like I'm not going to let this. Like can I still use this? Can I really like, does it actually work? It absolutely still started, but the screen was so shattered it really was not usable anymore.

Lindsay Dreyer: 3:11

So I really had to come to peace with the fact that we were just going to have to throw away this iMac, which made me very sad inside because I want to repurpose it if we can. I think we have enough waste in this world to be really honest with you, I already felt just like so guilty about throwing this thing away. I don't know why I was just having a really hard time letting this go because it was kind of working but not ideally In real estate. I feel like this is like letting go of a client where it's like kind of working they might eventually buy a home but you just don't really like working with them or it's just not jiving but you really can't like let go. So I finally come to peace with the fact that I'm going to throw this thing away.

Lindsay Dreyer: 3:52

We're breaking up, just like I'd break up with a client, and I'm walking to the dumpster I'm like huffing this like 23 inch monitor, which essentially is a full computer down three flights of stairs because the elevator's broken in the building and I go out to the loading dock and I'm standing there at the loading dock just before throwing it in and I'm just like, okay, we're going to do this. I'm throwing this thing in the trash. I'm making it happen. Now the loading dock is about flush with the dumpster and this dumpster is like 9 feet tall, maybe 10 feet tall, and I throw the iMac in, I hear it crash down. It makes actually a pretty satisfying crunch, which I really enjoyed that part actually. And then after it I heard clink and I'm like, oh shit, I check my wrist and my keys are not there. Now I have a little wristlet that I keep my keys on and my keys had fallen into this massive dumpster.

Lindsay Dreyer: 4:58

So you know, as real estate agents we juggle multiple things. We're rushing, we're not double checking. I feel like that was my mistake. My brain was somewhere else, I was not being in the moment, I was not being mindful, I was rushing to go upstairs to get on a Zoom call and I wasn't double checking. And then I paid the price and I think this is something every real estate agent can relate to is like when we're in that go, go, go mode or like go, check in the boxes, one thing to the next, we sometimes can let our keys fall into the dumpster.

Lindsay Dreyer: 5:34

So I remember just having that initial panic and overwhelm and I was like, oh shoot, what am I going to do? I was standing there staring, like staring into the dumpster, looking at my keys, sitting at the bottom, thinking this cannot be happening. I know that we have all been in this situation where we have been like juggling five listings we have three showing appointments, we have a client who's not getting back to us about something and where we're all just standing there being like, oh my gosh, my life feels like a total dumpster fire. So I sat there and collected myself and really thought about what my options were. I could either stand there feeling defeated or I could roll up my sleeves and do the uncomfortable and messy work. And I think you guys know where this is going, because I am a determined person. I am not giving up, not doing it.

Lindsay Dreyer: 6:37

I decide I am going to go dumpster diving, which I have not done actually in my life, and I feel like I missed out, maybe on a character building activity. So I remember looking in first thought, okay, is there anything absolutely disgusting in there or anything that's going to hurt me? And I looked in and luckily it was only like it had been recently emptied. There are only like a few bags of trash and then some cardboard boxes. So I'm like, all right, I think I'm good'm good, I can jump in now. The bottom did have that like layer of funk, I will be totally honest. There's like wetness and grossness and I'm like, all right, I have my snow boots on because we it was like 28 degrees, we had just gotten seven inches of snow. So I luckily had the right attire footwear for this dumpster dive situation and I just looked up at the sky and started laughing. I am laughing at the ridiculousness of this all and I think that we oftentimes do this in real estate, where it is not glamorous it is not HGTV, everyone thinks it is but we deal with tough situations all the time.

Lindsay Dreyer: 7:51

We deal with managing difficult clients and it's not glamorous but it is necessary, just like getting my keys was absolutely necessary. So I am standing down, get off the loading dock, come down to street level with the dumpster and I'm assessing the access points. There's two sides and it's like those two sliding door sides. Now the hole, as you guys probably are envisioning, it's like two feet by two feet and it's about four feet off the ground and I am only a five foot three human. I am like all right, I got to do this and thank goodness for yoga and going to the gym, because I luckily had the upper body strength and the agility to climb and contort myself into that small square and jump into the dumpster.

Lindsay Dreyer: 8:49

Now, when you're in there, it is a very interesting situation. So this one there was like one top lid closed, one open, so it's kind of like a skylight. You know, luckily we have a little bit of a skylight situation, so it's not totally dark, but it is creepy in there Like I had a little bit of claustrophobia I wouldn't say it was my favorite and I go over, grab my keys with the minimal amount of fingers because it was sitting in disgusting filth. I fling them out the door because I'm like gross, I don't want to touch these. They land on the ground in the snow, and then I assess how to get out of this dumpster. So I kind of pop myself back up and it was a little more awkward on the way out than the way in. There's like no padding, obviously, and so I had to kind of like sit on the little like edge and that thing was so sharp and pointy, it hurt so bad. And then I jump out and land and take a huge sigh of relief because the mission accomplished, I Tom Cruise to that shit and I got those freaking keys.

Lindsay Dreyer: 10:02

And honestly, this is what we do in real estate. It is not always pretty, but we get it done and that is what success looks like Like. We are the Tom Cruises of real estate. We are mission accomplished. I know we have all found ourselves in situations where everything feels like a dumpster fire. I actually don't think there's a career where there is more dumpster fires, like it just literally is dumpster fire land Deals falling apart, clients ghosting you, paper paperwork you can't track down. I mean, there's just like so many things, so many moving parts, that of course something's going to go wrong. It's like Murphy's law.

Lindsay Dreyer: 10:45

But I really believe that success comes to those who are determined to make it work. You're determined to get clients. You are determined to service those clients the best you can. You are determined to find them a home or sell their home. You are determined to make that closing process as seamless as possible and we do this throughout the mess, even when things are messy. We are getting it done and we are determined and we should be proud of that fact. Like we need to give ourselves a pat on the back more often, because being a good real estate agent is being a incredibly successful problem solver. Like you are a ninja. Like if I was stuck in a jungle, I would want real estate agents with me because they are going to know how to make a house out of vines. They may not even know how to gut a fish, but they're going to just figure it out, because that's what real estate agents are about we just figure it out. We figure it out because we got to make it happen. We got to eat and I love that scrappiness and that determination in real estate agents. I have three things that I learned from my dumpster diving experience and here are my takeaways for you.

Lindsay Dreyer: 12:09

Just like I had to shift gears and climb into that dumpster, adaptability is such an important piece of being successful in the real estate business Knowing when to pivot when things don't go as planned. Knowing how to solve the problems on the fly so important. Being a quick thinker. Thinker, you need to be able to have things be thrown at you and be able to hit them out of the park, get a home run and just make it happen. Example of this is like I know we've all probably had situations like this, final walkthroughs, where the HVAC isn't working, it's not kicking on and we have to go into hyperdrive. We're calling around to all the HVAC contractors. We're trying to get somebody out there as soon as possible. We're bribing them with our homemade cookies. We're like look, I promise I'll send every client to you from this day forward if you just come out here and please fix this thing. We get it done and we are adaptable. We are so good at rolling with the punches and making things happen just in any circumstance.

Lindsay Dreyer: 13:28

The other thing is resilience. Most successful real estate agents do not avoid the challenges. They just face them head on. And not only that, they don't let it disturb their peace, they don't let it derail their day. They are able to stay calm, self-regulate and not let their nervous system go awry, like when a problem arises. They're like okay, I'm going to calmly deal with this, I'm going to have a peaceful power about me. And that's the thing. No one can make good decisions or deal with a crisis effectively if they're in fight or flight mode. It just does not work. So if you aren't someone who can get the news and then immediately self-regulate, if you get nothing out of this podcast. Absolutely take the time and moment to regulate your nervous system before you deal with a problem. Even with this dumpster thing and my dumpster diving experience, I took a beat to take three deep breaths because I wasn't going to be able to attack the dumpster dive situation effectively if I was in a fight or flight mode. So if you are able to self-regulate and the quicker you can get into self-regulation and calm your nervous system, the more resilient you will be and the better you will be at your real estate career.

Lindsay Dreyer: 14:55

And lastly, just laugh when it feels like too much. I love to find the humor, and laughing with other people just makes it feel so much better. So I posted this on my Instagram stories and I just loved having other people think it was ridiculous and funny too. Having that laugh with other people is really therapeutic. I think that if I can laugh about diving into a dumpster now, you can absolutely laugh about the nightmare listing where everything goes wrong. Honestly, there's one from like gosh. It's probably like 10 years ago I had this listing that literally everything was going wrong. We had a snake infestation, we had a snake infestation. We had a rat infestation. Well, actually it was the rats first which caused the snakes. We had a flood and I am not kidding you, it was like the 10 plagues of Egypt. I was just waiting for lice and what other things were going on? Luckily that went to closing again. And what other things were going on? Luckily they went to closing Again.

Lindsay Dreyer: 15:56

Resilience and adaptability. We just kept solving those problems. But I do remember having to haul a dead rat out of that basement in a trash bag, because it was just I mean, it just had to be done right, like I'm not gonna hire somebody to just like grab a rat, like I gotta do it. So those are my takeaways for you. Successful real estate agents have to be adaptable, they have to be resilient and, above all, you have to have a sense of humor. If you can't laugh about it, this job is going to just really suck. For you, being a real estate agent is not going to be very fun.

Lindsay Dreyer: 16:31

Bonus points if you reflect on these moments and how you overcame them and write them down. I do not, and I wish, I, wish, wish, wish, wish, wish, over my 20 years of being in real estate, that I wrote these stories down because I would have an incredible book. So my advice to you, if you're listening to this right now, start writing these stories down. It could be notes in your phone, it could be a Google Doc, whatever, but I promise you you will love reading about them. It will make you feel like a total badass, and it will also be so great for the book that you write someday, and I really can't wait to read it.

Lindsay Dreyer: 17:13

So, whether it's retrieving keys or salvaging a deal, what matters most is that you refuse to give up. You are determined to make it happen, and I know real estate is not an easy career to be in I have been in it for a very long time but the rewards can be great when you make it work for you and building a career that you love and that really fits who you are as a person. It's so rewarding, and I want that for every single one of you. So that is it for this episode of Happy Agent Co. I hope to see you next time and to stay happy. Thank you, thank you.