May. 24, 2007 - More Has Been Revealed

As I was working on an offer for a couple of my investers the phone rang.  Imagine my suprise when the caller turned out to be Deborah Arends from Re/Max Northwest.  You remember Deborah, she's that alomost famous REALTOR® from Seattle who I wrote about last week in You Knew This Was Coming.  I called her in hope of getting her side of the story before I ranted on the CBS hit piece on REALTORS® and the six percent commision, but she was understandably busy after having just been on national television and all.  I e-mailed her a link to my piece after I posted it because I wanted to be sure she knew she was in my blog.

As it turns out, Deborah told me that she was interviewed for about ten hours over a two day period.  Let's see now, ten hours, minus the sixty seconds of footage they used on the show, wow!  That means that she had nine hours and fifty nine minutes of stuff to talk about that never made it to the air.  I knew that CBS was editing everything to weight the story in favor of the flat fee listing Redfin, but I am sure that in nine hours and fifty nine minutes of film that sits on the cutting room floor there must be a lot of positive stuff about Deborah's way of doing business.  As I said in my previous post, she was truely a sacrificial lamb that took one for the team.

She thanked me for my defense and indicated that the notoriety that comes with being nationaly televised hasn't really hurt her.  In fact she is as busy as ever and doing well.  It was really nice talking with her, I'm glad she called.  One of the benefits of being almost famous and on the way up is that other almost famous people return your calls.

That's the way it is in the real world folks.  A good REALTOR® is going to thrive just because they are good.  The rest will fall by the wayside.  When that happens, unlike CBS, those of us that are thriving will try not to step on them.  

As always, if you have found yourself receiving my blog postings via e-mail, it is because I have either blogged about you personally, blogged about something I know is of interest to you, or I consider you to be a person of deep thinking and intellect and I would love to have you occasionally commenting on my blog. If you would like to be removed from the list simply send me an e-mail saying so.

Apr. 30, 2007 - Bought And Soldout

Back on the 18th of April I posted It's Only A Matter Of Time in which I talked about a new show which was coming to HGTV.  There is no sense in me rehashing the whole thing here because you can just click right over and read it for yourself.  I will say that if it was brought to my attention because I blog then I guess they would expect me to review it.  I tried to do that on the HGTV message board this morning and instead of posting my comments, a window popped up saying that there were some trigger words in my post so it would need to be reviewed by the monitor.  As of right now it still hasn't been put on the board and so I will simplypost a link on the board sending people here where I will proceed to do my review.  Something tells me they might have made a mistake in censoring me over there because I can be even more candid here.

I was hoping that this new show "Bought and Sold" would help to bring about some sanity in a world where amatures want to try their hand at playing agent.  There is a loud contigent of agent haters out there singing the praises of going FSBO, citing the lack of service people are getting for their commission dollars.  The people at HGTV touted the fact that this would be a show that put "the real in realty with a first ever look behind the scenes at everything agents do to make their clients happy from listing to signing the deed".  I felt a real glimmer of hope that now people would really see what an agent goes through in helping them to live their dreams.  I couldn't wait to see the show.

Enter Vanessa Pollok, a model/actress turned real estate agent.  It seems that Vanessa has some buyer clients she has been working with for close to a year with no results.  They have made one offer on a house which came to naught.  A new listing has hit the market which Vanessa (who is not the listing agent) is sure that this couple will like.  Like it they do.  They absolutely fall in love with it and want to write an offer.  Vanessa is a very happy real estate agent.  It seems that not only is Vanessa going to write an offer for these nice first time home buyers, but she has another showing of the same house scheduled for later that afternoon with a different set of buyer clients.

Back at the office the clients say they would like to offer $395,000 for this $399,000 listing.  Vanessa cautions them that they had already lost out on one house, are they sure $395,000 is where they want to be.  Sitting at home on my couch, knowing that she is showing the house again that afternoon, I can see Vanessa's fiduciary duty to these folks flying right out the window.  I scream at the TV screen but these unfortune people can not hear me.  Any way they decide to up the offer to full list price.

Vanessa writes the offer and apologizes for having to rush off, but she has another appointment.  Her clients, looking like deer in the headlights, say that that's ok, they will go and await her call on the sellers decicion.  I suspect they must have felt pretty confident, what with having just written a full priced, no contingency, offer though.  I am also surprised when Vanessa does not take a minute to stop at the fax machine to submit the offer, which she did tell the listing agent she was writing.

Nope, Vanessa scurries off to pick up her second set of buyer clients.  She shows them one house which they are not to impressed with.  Then she pulls up in front of the second house, which is exactly the house she had just written the offer on that is still in her briefcase.  At this point she says she needs to disclose that this house does have an offer on it but we can still see it if you like, and by the way, in case you would like to write an offer on it too, I will have to have another agent in my office write it for you.  It is here that I realize that Vanessa must believe that her only fiduciary duty is to herself.  She must have missed the part in real estate licensing school about an agent needing to be loyal to their client. 

Good old Vanessa does show the second buyers a third property, but they too were so dazzled by the one that had an offer on it that they wanted to write an offer on it too.  Vanessa turns them over to another agent in her office so they can mull it over.  The second set of buyers put a "house to sell" contingency on their offer of $409,000 and it wasn't really clear from the program, but I am going by the assumtion that Vanessa must have been the listing agent on their coop apartment because they were really her clients on the buy.

Now I need to be fair here.  Vanessa did not know what the amount of the second offer was, she only knew that an offer had been written.  Woops, don't let me forget to point out that we are now in the next day and the sellers agent still hasn't seen any offers, that might be important to ome of you readers.  Now Vanessa proceeds to call her first clients and tell them that there is another offer on the table and they need to come up with their highest and best offer.  They do up their offer to $415,000 and they do get the house.

There may be something seriously wrong with the way I think.  It looks to me like Vanessa caused her first time home buyer clients to pay $16,000 more then they needed to pay for this house.  In fact, I don't know her market, but the original $395,000 offer looked pretty good to me, so maybe she cost these people $20,000 by effectively creating a bidding war between her own clients, both of which she was supposed to be looking out for.

I only hope that these poor buyers did not catch their own TV debut.  I especially hope they were not surrounded by family and friends hoping to get a warm fuzzy feeling from everybody seeing them on television.  These poor people were bought and soldout.

Is this really what "the real in realty" is?  Is this really what "agents do to make their clients happy"?  Not in my business it isn't.

This is the kind of stuff that turns people into agent haters.  This is the kind of stuff that causes people to seek out FSBOs thinking that an unrepresented seller will probably treat then better than a real estate agent will.  This is the kind of thing that makes people say that all real estate agents care about is how much money they get at the closing table.  Fortunately there are many good agents out there that do care about their clients but unfortunately this is the kind of garbage that made it to television.  I knew HGTV was making a mistake by not putting me on. 

As always, if you have found yourself receiving my blog postings via e-mail, it is because I have either blogged about you personally, blogged about something I know is of interest to you, or I consider you to be a person of deep thinking and intellect and I would love to have you occasionally commenting on my blog. If you would like to be removed from the list simply send me an e-mail saying so.