Tales from the Trenches Pt 1 of many, many more to come!
September 4th, 2006 . by Mike KellyCurrently we have near 2800 active listings on the market in Sonoma County. This is a lot! We’ve gone from 2.9 months on the market to over 7. So the competition is intense. If you are a Seller you need your house to be spit-shined clean, staged, with a welcoming, smiling face. Imagine now, much to my chagrin, I call a seller to show their property and I get an incredibly rude, hostile answering machine. I’m trying to make an appointment to show their property to a qualified, motivated buyer. I get a message stating, in a major attitude voice, “Hello, if you are calling us and we don’t know you, we don’t want to know you! Please hang up and dont’ bother us again. If we do know you then leave a message!”. Now what’s wrong with this message? Besides everything? Well, if you’re a Realtor you may just hang up and redial thinking, “I must have mis-dialed”. But then you get the same message and start thinking, “Geez, do I want to show this property and put up with this attitude during the negociations and escrow?”. I think the Seller is getting off on the wrong foot with the real estate community!
I called the listing agent and told her about it. I do that.If I’m offended or put-off by a Seller’s actions I’ll relay this to the listing agent. Why? I’m trying to protect the field. This is a golfing terms. In tournament play if you see a fellow player committ a rules infraction (cheat!) you call him or her on it because in a tournament situation your inaction might allow this guy to beat a fellow competitor. So by calling the infraction you protect the entire field of competitors. And that’s the way In feel about my real estate practice. I hope there are other Realtors who are protecting the field everyday. So I called the listing agent to protect her and her own clients–those Sellers with rude answering machines!!
How should the answering machine message sound like? “Hi, you’ve reach the Andeson household. We are out now but to all those great Realtors wishing to show our home, leave a message, we’ve got the home spic and span for you and your sellers and have left some cookies for you and them on the counter. Please take your time and enjoy our home. And thanks for taking the time to consider our home for your real estate purchse”. Little different huh? Now this very well could be the Realtor/agents fault for not giving Sellers guidelines and then making sure they are applied. Many, Many Realtors never relate to the Seller how the home showing process works.
Another item which gets my goat is the front door. Where does the Buyer enter your home when it’s being shown? No, we don’t use the garage door opener to get into the house!! You the Seller have probably not used your front door in weeks. Many don’t.They enter and leave in their cars and go out the kitchen door, into the gargage and then out the driveway. Take a hard look at your front door. Make it inviting, clean the cobwebs, plant new color, repaint, put in a new door! Whatever it takes to bring a welcoming attitude to your home will mean big bucks in return. You’ll sell it sooner, with less hassles and for more money. Besides, pain in the butt Realtors like me will tell all their Realtor friends about the real nice house where the Sellers are superfriendly and easy to work with. Attitude equals Altitude in this market!
Hi Mike,
I thought I would give you another view on the “trenches” — buying in another state. First, thanks for the referral to an agent in Idaho. The big question of “how do I find someone to do business with in an area where I know no one?” was answered by you when you referred us to the Keller Williams office there.
But that was just the beginning of our venture — long-distance buying. Emailing was our initial form of communication. It gave us an opportunity to clearly spell out what we were looking for. (And save it in an Outlook Express folder to review again later.)
After some preliminary emails we “met” on the phone. This gave a voice and personality to our relationship. We searched the MLS, narrowing down properties and that provided our realtor with a direction to go in. She previewed them for us, took additional photos (We did NOT even consider properties if there were no photos.) for us and gave us feedback to see if the properties matched our criteria. Phone calls became a bit more frequent.
One important thing, we’ve found, in dealing with a realtor from a distance is that it is not your typical relationship. We aren’t inclined at all to see a house on the MLS and call her up about it. (It could be midnight, too, when we go online before bedtime! Too late to call!) Not like a resident would who could drive by a place and call their agent for more info. Instead we sit at the computer, see something, have no idea about where it is beyond Mapquest, don’t know if it is a neighborhood we would like (that could be eliminated in a drive-by). So we note the address, keep looking and send an email that might ask about several properties at a time. Since realtors LIVE with their cell phones and talking to clients this way or face-to-face, I think this was hard for her too.
It is hard shopping for a house in a distant place. The buyer, us, got frustrated because we thought we were doing all the work of suggesting houses for her to preview. The realtor was previewing houses to see if they were for us and not telling us of them or sending us info anyways to see if she was on the right track. If she had communicated that to us it would have eased our concerns about how good a job she was doing. If we had lived in town she would have called us or mentioned it later. As we do not have that close proximity, she needed to learn to transfer her phone call skills to emails.
Traveling to see the properties fixed this awkwardness. What a whirlwind weekend trip. I wish, now that I am home, that I had “bothered” her to go back and look at the desired homes one more time - so that is another piece of advice — don’t hesitate to go back again. And take lots of photos! Now I need to ask her to go back and measure a couple of rooms!
Well, that’s it for now. Will report in again soon, as our house here sells and we negotiate to buy another from a distance!
Karen