Logbook · mercado
What good service does, and what the market unlearned
After three decades in this market, I watched service turn into script and haste. I write about what was lost, and about the decision to rebuild it from scratch.
I started in this market as a broker, and I am proud of it. It was on the street, serving people, that I learned what no training teaches: that selling a high-end property is, above all, an act of trust. That is why it pains me to see what service has become in much of the market. It became script, it became haste, it became the client treated as a means to a commission. And the high-end buyer feels that from miles away.
What good service really does
Good service does not begin by showing a property. It begins by listening. Understanding how a person lives, what they fear, what they do not even know they need, comes before any visit. Good service has patience for the client’s time, not for the target’s time. It has the honesty to say “this property is not for you”, even when it is in the inventory and the sale would be easy. And it has the repertoire to sustain a conversation worthy of the estate at stake, instead of reciting memorized arguments.
This is not friendliness. It is craft. And craft is lost when no one tends to it.
Why the market unlearned it
The market unlearned it for a simple reason: the incentive. When the professional is measured only by volume, the client becomes a number, and the number is in a hurry. The turnover of the teams does the rest; with each change, the buyer starts telling their story again to a stranger. The result is a sector full of competent people treating badly those who have everything to be treated well. It is not malice. It is a system that rewards the wrong thing.
What excellence looks like up close
Excellence in service is not sophistication of speech, it is attention to details no one asked for. It is remembering that the client mentioned, in passing, that they work from home, and so showing them the quietest apartment before the most beautiful one. It is warning of a problem in the building that the sale would hide, because long-term trust is worth more than today’s commission. It is knowing when to be quiet and let the person feel the space, instead of filling every second with an argument. None of this appears in a sales training, because none of it is technique: it is respect, and respect is not taught in an afternoon. It is taught with time, with example, and with a house that decides, on purpose, to measure the professional by how they care, and not only by how much they sell.
The decision to rebuild
When we came together to build Fragata, this was one of the first things we decided not to inherit. Instead of improving service at the margin, we chose to remake it from scratch, with a figure that Brazil’s high end did not have: an advisor who stays on the buyer’s side, from beginning to end, whose interest is the client’s decision, not the closing. Rita Figueiredo embodies this on the legal side; Pablo Cruz designed the technology that supports this promise without turning it into a call center. Each one brought a piece, and the common piece is the same: respect for those who trust the house.
What remains true
After thirty years, I still believe in the sentence I began with: to be a broker, in the best sense of the word, is to be the guardian of an important decision in someone’s life. What changed was not the value of the craft, it was the care with it. Technology helps, structure helps, but in the end there is always a person on the other side of the table who needs to feel they are being heard, and not worked.
The market unlearned this because it stopped caring. Our bet, simple to say and hard to do, is to care again, and to prove that serving well, in the very high end, is not one more luxury. It is the minimum.
