You Teach People How to Treat You. Your Clients Are No Exception.

Setting boundaries with clients doesn’t mean providing less service. It means creating clear expectations, knowing the difference between urgent and simply incoming, and protecting enough of your own time to build a career you can actually enjoy.

I have told my two daughters for years, “You teach people how to treat you.”

It turns out that applies to real estate clients, too.

Over the years, I’ve generally tried to make myself available to clients between about 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. That certainly didn’t mean I was working twelve-hour days. It was simply the window when clients knew they could reasonably expect to reach me.

Within those hours, I tried to carve out blocks of time for myself, too. An afternoon off. A couple of hours to run errands. Meeting my friends for an early morning kayak paddle on a nearby lake. And when business was slower, I tried to take advantage of it rather than sitting at my desk waiting for the phone to ring.

Did it always work perfectly? Absolutely not.

Real estate doesn’t always cooperate with the schedule you’ve carefully established for yourself. Offers come in late. Deadlines loom. Inspections uncover surprises. Something happens at 7:58 p.m. that genuinely cannot wait until morning.

There are times when you need to answer the phone.

But there are also a whole lot of times when you don’t.

For a long time, I was too available. Part of that was because I wanted to provide exceptional service. But if I’m being completely truthful, part of it was fear.

What if someone called and I didn’t answer? What if they called another agent? What if I lost a client because I wasn’t available at that exact moment?

And sometimes, that happened.

But I also learned to ask myself whether losing that particular client was always such a terrible thing. If someone is so impatient that they immediately move on to another agent because you didn’t answer a non-urgent call or text right away, you may have just dodged a bullet.

That’s the part we don’t always acknowledge when we talk about setting boundaries. Occasionally, someone really will call someone else. But not every potential client is a good fit, and not every piece of business is worth giving up your boundaries to keep.

I eventually realized that I couldn’t build an entire career around the fear that someone, somewhere, might choose another agent if I didn’t respond immediately. That’s not customer service. That’s being on call.

Here’s the tricky thing about being endlessly available: People get used to it.

If you regularly respond to texts at 10:30 at night, you’ve taught your clients that 10:30 is an acceptable time to text you and expect a response. If you answer non-urgent calls during every dinner, you’ve taught them that you’re available during dinner. If you immediately respond during the afternoon you promised yourself you’d take off, you’ve taught them (and you) that your time off isn’t really time off.

Most clients aren’t intentionally taking advantage of you. They’re simply responding to the expectations you’ve created.

You teach people how to treat you.

One of the most useful things you can learn as an agent is the difference between urgent and incoming.

They aren’t the same thing.

A contract deadline? Urgent. An offer that needs to be presented? Urgent. A situation that could materially affect your client’s transaction if you wait until tomorrow? Pick up the phone.

A question at 10:17 p.m. about whether the guest bathroom fixtures you saw on Tuesday in the fourth house were brushed nickel or chrome?

That can probably wait until the morning.

The longer you’re in the business, the better you’ll become at knowing the difference.

Real estate is unusual because so much of the work happens when other people aren’t working. Evenings and weekends come with the territory. There will be busy stretches when your schedule gets completely turned upside down.

But there will also be quieter stretches. Take them.

If Tuesday afternoon is slow, maybe that becomes your Saturday. If you worked all weekend, give yourself some breathing room on Monday. Your time off doesn’t have to look like everyone else’s to count.

And it doesn’t have to be an entire day.

One of the benefits of real estate is flexibility. But you only get that benefit if you actually use the flexibility.

Decide when you’re generally available. Communicate it. Make exceptions when circumstances genuinely warrant them. And then give yourself permission to stop working.

Have dinner without watching your phone. Take an afternoon off. Go somewhere on a Tuesday simply because you can.

And when you do take time off, try to actually take it off, rather than spending the entire time checking your phone every seven minutes just in case civilization has collapsed while you were celebrating your 60th birthday with your family at the beach.

I speak from experience on that one.

You can be an excellent, responsive, highly successful real estate agent without being available every minute of every day. In fact, if you want to do this work for any length of time, I would argue that you have to find a rhythm you can actually live with.

Your clients deserve a responsive agent.

And you deserve a life.

Those two things can coexist.

Believing in what's possible,

Gwen Holloway
Founder, The Sage Agent™

p.s. Ready to learn how to turn decades of life experience into a thriving real estate business? Join the waitlist for The Sage Agent™ Signature Course, created specifically for women 50+ who want to build a relationship-based business that feels authentic, sustainable, and true to who they are.