FoilsbyFlowers

Hello! Please message me to get on my cancellation list.
I will do my best to accommodate your schedule for a color by coming in early or staying late, but my normal 8 hour schedule is fully booked at this moment.
I still have haircut, extension and toning openings. I hope everyone is having a good Labor Day weekend! 🤍

People assume real estate is about houses. It is not. It is about people, and people carry emotion into every step of a transaction, sometimes several emotions at once, sometimes emotions that are pulling in opposite directions. I did not fully understand this until a single question forced me to sit with it. An 83 year old man asked me how I sleep at night doing what I do, and I did not have an answer for him that day. This is my attempt to answer it honestly, and to talk about something the real estate world does not discuss nearly enough.

Why a REALTOR(R) would write about feelings at all?

On paper, my job is simple. A client hires me to sell a property. I market it, I negotiate, I coordinate the details, and I get it to the closing table. That description is accurate and completely incomplete at the same time. Behind almost every listing there is a reason someone is selling, and those reasons are rarely neutral. A death in the family. A divorce. A job loss. A parent moving into care. Financial pressure that a family did not see coming. When you serve buyers, sellers, and people in distressed situations across West Michigan, you learn quickly that the paperwork is the easy part. The people are the real work.

The transaction that changed how I see the job:

I was hired to sell a home where an owner had fallen on hard times and had no real choice but to sell. There was a tenant living there, an older man renting month to month, who had been in that home for over 50 years. He never missed a payment. He raised his children under that roof. His wife passed away in that house, and he had quietly assumed he would too. When I walked the property with him, he showed me the fresh spot in the yard where he had buried his 13 year old dog the week before, his closest companion. Then he looked at me and asked how I could sleep at night. It was the first time anyone had ever put it to me that plainly, and it stopped me cold.

I lost sleep that night, and I kept losing it. I realized my client had hired me in part because the situation was too emotionally heavy for them to face directly. They could not be the one to deliver that news. Meanwhile I had inherited the grief of a tenant who genuinely believed he would live out his remaining years in that home. Two people, two very different kinds of pain, and me standing in the middle of it holding a listing agreement.

Client and customer are not the same, and that matters:

Here is where the mechanics of the job actually gave me clarity. In Michigan, a REALTOR(R) who represents a client owes that client full fiduciary duty. My loyalty, my advocacy, my confidentiality, my best negotiation, all of it belongs to the person I represent. That is not a soft rule and it is not negotiable. The seller was my client and I worked for the seller's best interest, period.

Everyone else involved in a transaction is a customer. I do not owe a customer the same duties I owe a client, and I want to be clear that I never pretended otherwise. But customers have rights too, and beyond those rights there is a simple standard I try to hold myself to. I want to know that I ethically did everything possible to treat every human being in my orbit with honesty and decency, even when no rule, policy, or law required me to.

Representing my client fully and treating a customer humanely are not in conflict. That distinction is what let me move forward instead of freezing.

The choice I actually had:

I sat with it and realized I had two honest options. I could do the job I was hired to do, or I could release my client and walk away from the transaction entirely. Walking away would not stop the sale. This home was going to sell with or without me. The owner had no other viable path, and I had already looked into alternatives for both sides. The tenant could not purchase the asset himself. The math simply did not work.

So the real question was not whether it would happen. It was who would be standing there when it did. If I quit, the next agent could close this deal without ever meeting the tenant, without ever hearing his story, without ever knowing there was a story. Maybe they would care as much as I did. Maybe they would shield themselves from the whole human weight of it and just process the file. I decided I would rather be the person in the room. I felt, genuinely, that I was the right one to see this through.

What caring looked like in practice:

I asked to meet with the tenant again. I told him his question had been replaying in my head and that I finally had an answer. I explained that the job was simple but the circumstances around it had become extremely complicated, and that I never imagined being pulled into something like this. I told him the sale was going to happen regardless, that I had already searched for another way and could not find one, and that I understood he had aimed his fear at me because I looked like the threat to the life he had planned. Then I made him a promise. I would do everything in my power to help him land somewhere good, if he allowed.

I reached out to shake his hand and instead got a hug and a burst of tears. This man was deeply alone. He had outlived most of the people he loved, even his own children. He did not want a fight. He wanted someone on his side long enough to actually understand him, even though he could not say that out loud. I sold the home. I helped him with his next steps, I moved his belongings myself, and I set up his new apartment so it felt right. We stayed in touch. He told me he drove past the old house whenever he felt low, and that seeing a young family making new memories in the same spot where he made his own brought him unexpected peace. We kept that friendship until the day he passed.

The rule I operate by now:

What I expected to be a routine real estate transaction became something that reshaped how I understand this work. The paperwork was never the point. The point is the people standing on both sides of it. I represent my client fully and fight for their outcome, and at the same time I treat every customer like a human being who deserves honesty and, when I can offer it, real help. Do right by your client. Do right by your customers.

If you are staring down a sale that feels heavier than a normal one, a pre-foreclosure, a family situation, a home full of decades of memories, know that you do not have to carry it alone or pretend the emotion is not there. I am happy to sit down, walk through your options, and help you find a path with as much dignity as the situation allows. No pressure, just a conversation whenever you are ready.

👻 I am fully booked for the month of September and October for colors! We do have a cancellation list for when a color cancels we can give you a call for our first available ! 🩷 message me if you are wanting on the list I do get cancellations often

Only 3 color openings for October!!! Schedule your colors now!!

My next color opening’s are over a month out, schedule your October color now! 🎃👻🍂
- Friday October 2nd at 10am
- Thursday October 8th at 11am (taken)
- Saturday October 24th at 12:30 (taken)
- Monday October 26th at 3:30 (taken)
- Tuesday October 27th at 12 (taken)
- Thursday October 29th at 2/3pm (taken)
- Friday October 30th at 10
- Saturday October 31st at 12:30 (taken)
If you are needing in and do not see a date available please message me and I will do my best to accommodate your schedule and put you on the waitlist for sooner appointment for when people cancel. Thank you!💖

💜💙🩷

I am fully booked for September but have cancellations often so message me if you’re wanting in and I can put you on the waitlist.
I am going on a vacation in October so get your Halloween hair scheduled 🥰

Living in full color 💚💜🩷💙
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On beautiful Stephani Danielle

Your sign to get extensions 😍
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Salon fresh 💋
Schedule your September hair appointment, spots are going quickly! 🤍
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When in doubt, add purple 💜
On the beautiful Kylee Seifert
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