"The Client Who Knew Too Much"

[Drago Stanimirovic]

There’s a particular kind of client who can be more difficult to work with than someone who knows absolutely nothing - that's the one who knows quite a lot.

He’s done his homework. He’s read the forums, watched the videos, talked to other investors, played with the calculators. Maybe he’s already done a couple of deals himself.

And usually, most of what he knows is correct.

That’s the problem. Because when you’re right 80 or 90 percent of the time, it becomes very easy to assume you’re right about the remaining 10 percent too.

And in this business, the devil lives comfortably in that 10 percent.

I see the same thing happening with AI now.

AI can be an incredibly useful tool. I use it myself. But it can also be dangerous for exactly the same reason: its answers can sound so complete, so reasonable and so confidently put together that you forget there may be one small detail that makes the entire answer useless in your particular situation.

You have to have walked the walk and talked the talk to recognize that detail.

The Internet can be even worse. Search for almost any real estate question and you'll find a hundred Reddit threads, forum posts and videos repeating roughly the same answer. After a while, repetition starts feeling like confirmation.

It isn't.

A hundred people repeating something doesn't make it true. "A hundred horses do not run faster than one", Socrates once said.

And there's another problem with online advice that I've always found interesting: some of the people most motivated to explain something are the people who have only recently learned it themselves.

They're excited about it, they're thinking about it constantly, they want to talk about it.

Meanwhile, the guy who's been doing it successfully for twenty years may not feel any particular need to write a two-thousand-word Reddit post about it.

There's a little Dunning-Kruger in all of us. When we've learned enough to understand something, but not enough to understand all the exceptions, we can become remarkably confident.

I've certainly done it myself: something looks familiar. You've seen this movie before. You know how it ends.

Until it doesn't.

That's why I've become suspicious of one sentence in particular: "I already know."

Beginners usually ask questions. People with enormous experience know exactly where the exceptions and traps are. It's that territory somewhere in between that can get expensive.

None of this means you shouldn't educate yourself. Quite the opposite. Read everything. Ask questions. Use AI. Talk to other investors. Learn as much as you possibly can. Just leave enough room in your head for the possibility that the thing everybody "knows" might not apply to the deal sitting in front of you.

Because knowledge is valuable. Knowing where your knowledge ends is worth even more. And the devil, as usual, is in the details.

(What's something you were absolutely certain you understood about real estate... until experience taught you otherwise?)