March 6, 2007
A Parade of Real Estate Agents
Okay, the term “Real Estate Agent” is a mouthful, so I’m going to shorten to “Realtor” for the purposes of this post, even though I generally avoid that word because it’s apparently copyrighted by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and generally requires that little trademark symbol to be written correctly. That little symbol is a pain and I’m just going to capitalize the first letter and hope that suffices.
Anyway, the point of this post is to share a little bit about my interactions with Realtors over the course of the sale
process. There were generally two types of Realtors that I came into contact with over the past few months: 1) the type that actually had buyer clients who were interested in seeing my property, or 2) the type that used the pretense of previewing my property as an excuse to give the hard sell about why I should list with them. Unfortunately, neither interaction was ever positive. The Realtors that had shown my house to buyers were generally aloof and reluctant to discuss their clients’ reactions to the property, the neighborhood, the price, etc. This boggled my mind since I thought they ought to be happy to be showing such a nice house with the prospect of a 3% commission. I know that this isn’t much more than a 2.5% commission when you’re dealing with a mid-$300k property, but my impression was that times are tough for real estate agents and every dollar helps. A friend later clued me in to the theory that Realtors are generally unhappy about representing buyers in a FSBO situation because “they have to do all the work and don’t have the benefit of another experienced real estate agent at the other side of the transaction.” I had never considered this before, but it does seem to make sense within the traditional perception (as promoted by the NAR) of how difficult real estate transactions are. In reality, executing the sale wasn’t difficult at all once a qualified buyer was in the picture (and I have experience on both sides of the process now), so I think the value added by Realtors in this regard is generally over-sold by those within the industry. This discussion could easily fill several posts of its own, so I’ll just drop it for now except to say that I don’t see how there could be that much work involved as long as both sides have competent attorneys (which generally cost a fraction of what Realtors charge, I might add).
The second type of Realtor I encountered was even worse than the first. There were 10 or 12 agents who insisted on walking through the property with me under the guise of educating themselves about the house before showing it to their clients. Not a single one of these Realtors ever returned with a potential buyer — they were just using the walk-through as an opportunity to convince me to sign a listing agreement with them. This was really infuriating because once the renovations were complete I didn’t have any reason to be at the property except for when I was showing it to potential buyers or doing routine upkeep. I wasted several afternoons on appointments that were nothing more than protracted sales pitches from hungry Realtors.
My favorite example of this strategy was when I was tag-teamed by two very colorful characters from one of the larger real estate offices in the area. Realtor A was the charming “local” who had lived in the neighborhood for many, many years and oh my goodness she just knew every house inside and out oh la la la there’s no way I’d ever find anyone who could do a better job than her, while her partner, Realtor B, was clearly a top-producer in the office who had a lofty title and was probably there just to add clout to their pitch. They came about six weeks after I first put my house on the market and went into an exceptionally lengthy sales pitch about their experience and talent at the end of the walk-through. Realtor B actually had the listing agreement tucked under his arm the entire time and kept peppering me with glossy promotional materials and a variety of very cheesy lines. They spent a great deal of time talking about how their office really kicks ass and regularly wins this award and that award blah blah blah and by this point I was ready to vomit. They had wasted a large part of my afternoon and I was pretty ticked off when I asked: “If your office is so great and your agents sell so many homes in this neighborhood, how come not a single Realtor from your office has ever brought a potential buyer to my property?” I opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of business cards from Realtors with other agencies at this point to emphasize how many buyers had been through the house. Their response was that my house had been on their radar for a long time and they were just so busy with other deals that they hadn’t gotten around to this property yet. Whatever. I managed to be polite for a few more minutes before showing them out.
I think my original intent was to discuss how I chose the Realtor I actually ended up hiring, but this post has gotten pretty long so I’ll save that for another time.
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in my yard to facilitate the sale of my flip. I’m sure everybody already knows that I’m referring to St. Joseph and the notion that burying a statuette of the earthly father of Jesus will bring you good fortune when selling your house. I had never heard of this until she brought it up, but a quick Google scan confirmed that this is indeed a very common practice. 
only a handful came through. Also, CoREI is still in its infancy, so I’m sure it will grow fat with submissions as the word gets out and the leftovers slowly disappear. In the meantime, here are the links to this week’s top picks.