01 · Inspection & disclosure
The report the seller hoped you would soften.
Your buyer’s inspection flags a material defect. The listing side asks whether the write-up could be “less alarming,” or suggests the item is already known so it need not travel. Honesty to the client is not optional. Georgia license law and the NAR Code of Ethics both treat concealment of a known material fact as a problem — not a negotiation tactic.
You can still be pastoral about timing and tone. You cannot edit the truth out of the file. If you are the listing agent, the same rule runs the other way: you do not hide what you know in order to keep a deal together.
For the table: what, exactly, goes in writing to your client — and what do you refuse to “take off the table”?
02 · Dual / designated agency
Two clients. One house. One brokerage.
A seller you already represent has a house. A buyer who called you wants that house. Georgia allows designated agency with informed consent; dual agency is a different animal. Either way, confidentiality does not magically survive because everyone is “family in the Lord.”
The teaching point is not which box to check. It is whether you can still give undivided counsel — price, repairs, walk-away — once you are in the middle. If you cannot, send the buyer to another licensee. Faith does not replace a written agency disclosure.
For the table: when do you designate, when do you decline, and how do you explain the difference without selling past the conflict?
03 · Sunday & the file
The only showing window is Sunday afternoon.
An out-of-town buyer can see the house only on Sunday. You keep the Lord’s Day. Both can be true. The ethical miss is pretending the client’s clock is a spiritual test — or pretending your rest is more important than a duty you already accepted.
Practical options: another agent in the office writes the showing; you offer Saturday late and Monday first thing, in writing; you refer the buyer if you cannot cover the window. What you do not do is go dark and call it faithfulness after you already took the client.
For the table: how do you state your Sunday practice before the first showing — so the client is never surprised on a deadline?
04 · Fair housing
The neighborhood question you cannot answer that way.
A buyer asks which streets have “more Christian families,” or which schools “our kind of people” use. Steering is illegal. Religion of residents is not a search filter. You do not draw a faith map of who lives where, even if the question came from a place of sincere belief.
You may talk about a church as an amenity the same way you talk about a park — address, public hours, the buyer’s own research. You may not select, exclude, or rank housing based on the faith of the people already there. Equal Housing Opportunity is not a footnote. It is the work.
For the table: what is the exact sentence you use when a client asks you to pick a neighborhood by religion?
