WELCOME

Happy September, y’all! I hope you’re getting into the swing of fall while still savoring all the last bits of summer!

I’m really excited to share today’s topic because we’re going to talk about professionalism. In the wake of a fellow agent being duct-taped to his seat, I’m going to get into what professionalism even looks like in a world where everybody has a camera and your personal identity is part of your professional brand. Join me as I channel my inner Carrie Bradshaw and break down how protecting our personal reputation is simply part of the cost of doing business!

STORYTIME WITH GLENNDA

“Of Course He’s a Real Estate Agent”

Let’s talk about the guy who had to be

on an American Airlines flight last week. Because this is the internet, it took one hot minute for people to figure out who he was, what he did for a living, and where he worked.

Well, guess what?

Turns out ol’ Mr. Duct McTapey had been in real estate for more than 20 years. Y’all… he had sold a lot of real estate, yet suddenly his past performance ceased to matter. His company fired him right quick. If you’re a client who Googles his name today or five years from today, the first thing that’ll come up is a picture of him duct-taped to an airplane seat.

Now, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a real estate agent caught on film. There was that Canadian agent who fought with a lady when she tried to pull into her own driveway because he didn’t want her car in the shot. We’ve also seen agents captured screaming slurs at strangers, getting into public confrontations, and posting things online that made their brokerages decide they didn’t want their names associated with them anymore.

Every time one of these stories goes viral, somebody inevitably posts the comment, “Why is it always a real estate agent?” Well, I’m about to have a Carrie Bradshaw moment because this got me thinking: Does real estate actually have a professionalism problem, or do we have a visibility problem?

Separation of Church and State? Not Anymore

People from every imaginable profession have gone viral for doing something stupid, like those folks at the Coldplay show. (If I’m ever caught in a viral moment, please let me have my roots done.) Here’s what I want y’all to understand: I don’t think this is specifically a real estate agent problem. But what’s different about real estate is that our identity is our business. Look at it like this—we spend our entire careers making ourselves easy to find. We put our faces on bus benches and water bottles and our names on our cars. We’ve got websites and Instagram accounts and TikTok accounts and Facebook pages, oh my. We’re out here spending USD to make damn sure that when somebody Googles “real estate agent in Atlanta,” they find us.

Well, guess what? That means they can find us when we’re behaving badly, too.

There’s no longer a separation of church and state when it comes to our personal identity and our professional brand. Social media put an end to that right quick. Because everybody with a phone can turn the worst five minutes of our lives into something millions of people can watch. (Every day we Gen Xers are grateful that weren’t iPhones in 1985, when we were outside throwing up after drinking too much hunch punch.) (Wait, was that too specific an example?) My point is, we can no longer count on our personal business being our private business. No, ma’am.

I learned that lesson myself years ago when I was still drinking. I’d been out one night and fell down and I had the terrible realization that one of my clients had seen me. I remember thinking, Oh, my stars, I can’t do this. I know too many people. I can’t behave like this in public because I don’t know who’s watching. And that was before everybody watching had an HD video camera in their pocket.

Does that mean we’ve got to be “on” every second of every day? No. Instead, it means we have to understand that what we do at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday night can affect what somebody thinks about doing business with us at 10:30 a.m. Monday morning. You can say, “But that was my personal time,” and you can be absolutely correct. Yet the person deciding whether to trust you with the sale of their $2 million house can also decide they don’t particularly care.

The Night I Became TikTok Famous for Something I Didn’t Do

I know firsthand how weird (and unfair) this can get. A while back, my gentleman friend and I went to dinner here in Atlanta. We sat at the bar and we were friendly with the people around us, because I do love striking up conversations. Then our food came and we ate. At no point did anybody introduce themselves as a follower or ask for a picture. We literally just had dinner and then went home.

A couple of weeks later, I started getting these strange comments on my social media, along the lines of, “Oh, let me scan your QR code because you’re TikTok famous.” “Don’t you know she’s TikTok famous?” There were hundreds of them, and I had no damn idea what anybody was talking about. Eventually, my videographer Denver found the origin video. A woman who worked at the restaurant had made a TikTok about a supposedly “TikTok-famous Atlanta real estate agent” with about 900,000 followers who came into her restaurant demanding special treatment and a free dinner and telling everybody how famous she was. (Does this sound even a tiny bit like anything I’d do?)

That server didn’t use my name, but she didn’t really have to. As Victoria pointed out to me, there weren’t exactly a whole lot of Atlanta real estate agents with 900,000 TikTok followers. People figured out who they thought she was talking about and they came after me with torches and pitchforks. There was only one problem with the story: it never happened.

I did not take this lying down.

I called the woman and asked her what the hell was going on. She told me the story wasn’t about me and said she’d already told people that. To her credit, she did post another video explaining that it wasn’t Glennda Baker who’d behaved so badly. But the original video got millions of views. The explanation got a couple of thousand. Everyone remembers the headline on the front page, but no one recalls the retraction days later. That experience taught me that the internet isn’t a courtroom. Corrections don’t necessarily catch up with accusations. The thing is, once strangers decide that a story’s about you, you may not get a vote. That’s the part of this conversation that makes me uncomfortable, because I don’t believe everything about this new world is fair. I also don’t think fairness has much to do with it.

You Have to Protect the Brand

So back to Mr. McTapey: is fair for somebody to lose his livelihood because of one terrible incident in his personal life?

The answer is that it doesn’t matter because life isn’t fair. We can debate what happened before somebody turned on the camera and the exacerbating circumstances. We can talk about context. We can ask whether somebody was provoked/exhausted/drunk or having the worst day of his life after six hours of flight delays and another two hours trapped in a plane on a hot tarmac while he was, say, missing his daughter’s wedding. While context may illuminate his bad behavior, context has no power to erase it. Once that video exists, we don’t control what happens next.

That’s why I think agents have got to stop looking at professionalism as something that only applies while they’re working. When your name is your business, professionalism is part of protecting the asset you’ve spent your entire career building. Real estate agents are particularly vulnerable because clients are giving us access to their homes and to their finances. They’re trusting us with negotiations involving hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. We walk through their bedrooms and closets. We know them inside and out, whether they’re getting divorced, having babies, or dealing with lost jobs. We know when their houses are sitting empty. There’s so much trust on the line here, so our judgment and discretion matter.

Sometimes professionalism is as simple as remembering that the room you’re in isn’t your room. I speak the way I speak, and anybody who watches my videos knows I use some colorful language. But recently I was giving a presentation to about a hundred executives, and I had to remind myself: Glennda, this is a different room. These people may not sprinkle profanity through conversation the way you do. This has nothing to do with “authenticity” and everything to do with being a professional.

This Is the Cost of Doing Business

Do I love knowing that when I’m out in public somebody might recognize me? Not always. Sometimes I’ve just gotten out of a swimming pool and I’m looking a drowned rat at the nail salon, and somebody says, “I follow you on Instagram! Can we take a picture?” Would I occasionally prefer not to have photographic evidence of myself looking like something I’ve pulled out of the pool filter? Of course, but I’ve also made a lot of money because I built a brand on social media. I don’t get to take the upside of being recognizable and then act shocked that there’s a downside. This is the cost of doing business.

So, this is the conversation real estate agents need to have with themselves, whether we have 900,000 followers or 900. We’re living in 2026. We don’t have to think it’s fair that five minutes can become the defining Google result attached to our names. But we’ve got to understand that this is the world in which we’re conducting business.

Being a professional today means being cognizant that somebody may be watching us. And that somebody watching us today may be who’s deciding whether to hire us tomorrow. That applies to how we behave in person and how we behave online. Spoiler alert? It also extends to how we treat a waiter, a flight attendant, another agent, the person trying to pull into her own driveway, and the client whose house we’re lucky enough to be standing inside.

I’m not saying you have to be perfect 24 hours a day because I certainly haven’t. But it does mean that our behavior and our business no longer live in two completely separate worlds. I’m not here to lecture agents about being on church behavior every minute of every day. I just want us to be realistic about the bargain we’ve made. We’ve chosen a business where our names, faces, personalities and reputations are part of what we’re selling. We actively work to become recognizable. We spend a lot of time and effort getting people to know us, like us, and trust us. And once we’ve made ourselves the brand, protecting that brand becomes part of the job.

Maybe that’s not fair. Maybe there should still be a clean line between who we are at work and who we are everywhere else. But there isn’t. Not anymore. And we can spend a lot of time arguing about whether that’s right, or we can recognize it for what it is:

It’s the cost of doing business.

Today’s Words of Wisdom

GLENNDA BAKER & ASSOCIATES

The Family Home

There’s something about this home at 4961 Thornwood Trace NW home in Acworth that just feels made for family life!

This is the kind of house where everybody can have their own space without ever feeling disconnected. Maybe the kids are shooting hoops in the backyard while dinner’s going in the kitchen. Maybe it’s everyone piling into the great room around the fireplace or holiday dinners that spill from the dining room into the rest of the house. Or maybe it’s just that sunroom becoming the place you sneak away to with your coffee before everybody else wakes up. With four bedrooms, a bonus room, a big fenced yard for your children and four-legged kids, and all that wonderful flex space, this is a home that can grow and change right along with your family.