Patrick Foley

I hate to rant, but I have had some really poor service when going out to eat lately.

Now I must admit, I probably eat out for meals more than most. I probably go to a sit down restaurant for 7 - 10 meals each week (I know that's terrible from both a health and financial point of view). Lately, it just seems to me that service has really suffered, which I don't understand. With the supposed "death" of the consumer, restaurants should be polishing their service to keep existing clientele.

One particular place, that many of you are probably familiar with, is PF Changs. The last three times I have been there, it has taken 5 - 10 minutes for my table to even be greeted by our waiter. The first time this happened, I thought, well it must have been a fluke. The second time, the waitress made no apology, and the overall service was just terrible. She even went as far as to walk away from our table while boxing up our food to go and talk to a co-worker at the bar for over 5 minutes. RUDE! When I told the manager about the service, and how apathetic the waitress was, I just got an apathetic response, not even an apology. Not to be deterred by bad service, as I really like PF Changs' food, I went again last week. Same old story, and I requested to speak to a manager. The manager was very apologetic and sat down to talk for a few minutes. He ended up bringing us an appetizer (in addition to the one I had already ordered) and took $25.00 off our bill. He also told me to ask for him the next time we come in. Finally, some redemption, though it shouldn't be like that in the first place.

Two weeks ago I was at a downtown steakhouse (I'll let them remain nameless since it's a first offense). We made reservations for 8:00, arrived, and were told that it would be a few minutes. We weren't sat until 8:30. The meal was great, though the waitress seemed a bit inexperienced. When it game to dessert though, there was a bit of a SNAFU, so I again requested to speak with the manager about that, and the delay in the beginning. He was very kind, told me to mention him when we made reservations next time, and comped our dessert.

I really don't complain just to get something comped (though it usually does work out that way), but it really bugs me when the service is bad, especially when it has become so customary to leave a 20% tip. If I am paying for the service, I expect it to be good.

I've just gone through and finished up my MCE for my license renewal this week, and I must say, the company I used was GREAT! I used them previously for some other courses, but forgot what an amazing experience it was.

First of all, the courses are only $99, and they're all online, which allows you to skip out on a couple of days (often times a weekend) of boring classroom time. The $99 covered the Legal, Ethics, and actualy course itself, which is a pretty good deal.

Being online, I was able to go at my own pace, and finish up rather quickly. There wasn't even a FINAL EXAM for the main course (there was for the Legal and Ethics updates). I couldn't believe it!

The company makes available the PDF version of the course, so you can print it all out for future reference (no textbook required for these courses, which saves you even more money), and the best part of all (for me) was that they actually have commercial focused courses. So for those of you that primarily practice residential real estate, you might try a crack at one of these commercial courses to diversify your business in the future.

The company name is AbsoluteCE, and they can be found at www.absolutece.com. They aren't paying me to pitch them to you, I was just really pleased with their class. One last thing, they get your courses sent to TREC very quickly. I finished a course on Sunday, and it was in the TREC database yesterday afternoon. It doesn't get much better than that!

One of the tough things about being a commercial real estate agent is that so many tools, especially online tools, are geared towards the community of residential agents. Active Rain is no exception. I was looking at the list of Texas Commercial Real Estate Agents today, and noticed that I was the top agent, of course there are only 88 of us for the entire state! That seems ridiculous to me, given the size of the commercial market in Texas. This thriving community certainly has a lot to offer, not only to real estate professionals, but to (potential) clients as well.

I was initially attracted to AR through an article in a magazine, either Texas Realtor or the national publication. Again, these publications are generally chock full of residential articles, and very rarely ever cover commercial. I flip through them on occasion if it's unusually quiet in the office, but most commercial guys I know don't even bother. Could that be why they haven't been exposed to AR?

I would encourage those of us that specialize in commercial to encourage our coworkers to join, and contribute. For the rest of you, if you know a commercial agent, encourage them to take a look. Certainly if anyone has any ideas on how we can attract more commercial agents to AR, please comment.

I love to seek feedback through Active Rain, in fact, a great deal of my blog posts are ones that ask questions. So here it is again: what has your experience been with using professional photographers? The reason that I ask is because I uploaded a new profile picture today, one that was taken by a professional. Everyone in our office had professional pictures taken a couple of months back, and I finally decided to use some of them (one here on AR). For those of you that have used photographers for personal pictures, listing pictures, etc..., what has your experience been? Has it been worth the money?