Are real estate agents a dime a dozen?  Maybe they are, but I’m reminded of something I learned many years ago in Alaska.  I had graduated from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks with a degree in economics, but I wanted to become a teacher.  I knew that teachers were a dime a dozen, and there were many applicants for every opening, so I asked my old high school principal, Gary Hebert, if there was room for another teacher.  His reply was full of wisdom.  He said, “Chuck, there’s always room for a good teacher.”

Real Estate Agents a Dime a Dozen?

I learned that rule applies to every profession.  I did teach high school business education for two years before deciding to go to law school and specialize in real estate.  As a teacher, I learned that many teachers are mediocre, some are less than mediocre, and a few are exceptional.  As a lawyer, I learned that many lawyers are mediocre, some are less than mediocre, and a few are exceptional.  Now as a full time real estate broker, I can say precisely the same thing about real estate agents.

Real Estate Agents – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Every profession has the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Sales pitches, bloviating, and hype on advertisements have gotten out of control, and people don’t know what to believe any more.  It takes a great deal of discernment and research to know how to find and select a great professional in any profession.

Who isn’t tired of annoying TV commercials after seeing them the 100th time, “My name is Doug and I am not an actor.  I have Mesothilioma.”  Are you tired as I am of the “Buy Gold Now” commercials, or how about the Viagra commercials?  Ridiculous and annoying!  But some commercials don’t even tell you what they do.  For example, a company called Insperity has a commercial in which their theme statement is, “Inspiring business performance, that’s what we do.”  Boy, when I saw that commercial I was desperate to hire them.  Not.

Real Estate Agents

Consumers are getting smart, or perhaps they’re just getting tired of the old tricks and gimmicks.  I’m a real estate agent, and this is a shameless plug, but I can tell you precisely what I will do for you.  There is no bloviating or hype or generic branding here.  As your buyer’s agent I help you negotiate the best possible price on the right home, and I help you handle all of the inspection and due diligence items all the way to closing.  That’s straight forward, right?  By the way, I represent you at no cost.  The sellers always pay my commission.  Isn’t that great?  I hope you’ll do your due diligence on Sequim real estate agents, and then I hope you’ll come back and consider hiring me as your buyer’s agent.

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Real estate marketing.  Where is the wisdom?  That is a question I have asked rhetorically in years past when I hear of foolish decisions or major blunders in real estate marketing or any part of a transaction.  I hate to see a real estate transaction killed because of inexperience or foolishness.  On a national scale, there are huge changes underway in real estate brokerage and in real estate marketing.  Most people are aware there are huge changes taking place in the real estate industry, but  the big franchises have made some huge blunders.  I found myself asking that question again, “Where is the wisdom?”

Real Estate Marketing

Consider a great leader of the real estate franchise movement, Gary Keller, the founder of Keller-Williams.  What a success story that company has been, until recently.  I picked up a copy of Gary’s book, Shift, and was surprised that the creative business genius was gone.  Here is the founder of the franchise rallying his troops to work harder and to hold more open houses.  He instructs his agents to take open houses to an entirely new level with colored balloons and mailings to 100 adjacent homes.  What?  Did I really read that?  Did Gary Keller really write that?

I stopped to look at the date on the book, because maybe it was published in the 1960s.  No, it is a new book.  Our own National Association of Realtors tells us that only 1% to 2% of homes sell at open houses, and I am certain that statistic is valid only in a healthy real estate market, not a recession.  Holding more open houses and taking them to new levels is not exactly wisdom shouting from the rooftops.  This is not advise that will help Realtors sell those homes, nor is it sage advise for homeowners who need to get their homes sold as quickly as possible.  This is not exactly the cutting edge of real estate marketing either.

Where is the wisdom?  Once you start asking this rhetorical question, you’ll find yourself asking it often.

Real Estate Marketing Gone Wild

Gary was a national hero to thousands of Realtors who got rich with their revenue sharing program.  I have always thought of Gary as a genius, but in my humble opinion (and I truly mean humble, because I could be wrong) Gary suffers from the same handicap that so many of the other franchise and bricks-and-mortar brokerages suffer from:  they are stuck in an outdated business model that serves their own financial welfare more than it serves consumers.  Consumers are done with old ways of doing business.  They want and demand change, and Realtors are leaving the franchises in large numbers in search of a new business model.

Homeowners who want to sell their homes, who need to sell their homes, don’t need platitudes.  Homeowners want the truth.  They want to know about effective real estate marketing.  They want to know from their Realtor what actually works to market a home effectively today.  They don’t want false promises, pie-in-the-sky claims, or gimmicks that Realtors use to get listings.

Where is the wisdom?  Today I think homeowners must take responsibility to recognize where wisdom is not, and pursue wisdom where it can be found.  In other words, the world has gotten so crazy, I think it takes wisdom to recognize wisdom.

Real Estate Marketing and Wisdom

If you have a home for sale, my recommendation is that you seek out a professional Realtor with wisdom, but realize that it takes wisdom to recognize wisdom.  And that is certainly true when it comes to real estate marketing.

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We have been taught in business that referrals are the most reliable way to find a professional, and we have been taught for decades that the best source of business is referrals from happy clients or friends or business acquaintances.  And that has been the teaching in the real estate brokerage business, at least it used to be.

Referrals are still an important source of business, and a referral from a credible person to a truly professional Realtor who knows what they are doing, has vast experience, is using effective marketing techniques, has integrity, and so on, would be an example of the rule that referrals are good.

But more and more referrals in the real estate business are turning out to be a curse rather than a blessing.  What do I mean?  There’s nothing like a true story to make the point.

I got a call from a gentleman who showed me his house many months ago.  He and his siblings had inherited the property, and it is a very special property.  He really believed in what I am doing in terms of marketing, and he appreciated my 20 years experience as a real estate attorney and my many years in real estate sales and how I am reaching buyers from outside our area on the Internet.  But heirs always have to work together in listing and selling a property, and while he may have felt I was the Realtor for the job, he had a couple of siblings from outside the are who had not met me, but who had received a referral to a “traditional real estate broker and agent.”  Understandably, they wanted to go with this credible referral.

After months of “nothingness,” all of the siblings agreed that their traditional agent was not the great referral they had thought or hoped.  The comment was that the agent put the listing in the MLS and then did virtually nothing.  I cannot tell you how many times I hear that same complaint, over and over again.  I would not write about this if so many people did not keep getting hurt (a delay of many months, especially past the selling season, can cost a seller a lot of money and stress).

What I do to market a property effectively is so much more, but that is beyond the scope of this short article.  The point here is that referrals are not necessarily reliable these days when it comes to real estate agents.  This story I’ve shared is not an isolated story.  There are many more stories just like this.

A gentleman called me to ask about a listing I had, which he had made an offer on through his own agent.  I immediately explained to him that I cannot talk to him as he is represented by his own buyer’s agent.  He was very kind and responded that his own agent was making a mess of things, including his own offer, and that was frustrating to him.  I told him I still must ethically ask him to work through his agent so long as his agent represented him.  Before we hung up, he volunteered that his agent was referred to him by a trusted friend.

While referrals to good real estate agents used to be a simple matter, it has dramatically changed as the real estate market has changed, as marketing has changed, as old media is collapsing, and as Realtors have had to re-invent themselves.  But the traditional brokerage is almost outmoded, which reminds me of print newspapers which are going out of business all over the country.  What is traditional real estate brokerage?  Here’s an interesting bullet list from one author.

• A real estate company that focuses on it’s brand more than the consumer.
• A real estate company that is highly leveraged with office space and expensive leases.
• A real estate company that hires agents blindly creating a revolving door that can damage the brand on which they are spending so much money.
• The real estate company that continues to make promises to it’s agents that it can’t deliver due to corporate bureacracy.
• The real estate company that decreases dollars spent on the consumer in an effort to maintain profit due to high overhead.
• The real estate company who is “trapped in the box” with no ability to truly see “outside of it.”
• The real estate company that defends a 6% commission while providing less service than it did 10 years ago.
• The real estate company that claims to embrace change all the while avoiding it like the plague.
• The real estate company that talks the talk but resists walking the walk.

Fascinating list, isn’t it?  This comes from an article entitled The Traditional Real Estate Brokerage Model is Broken.

Conclusion:  Accepting a referral to a real estate agent from someone today is not much better than picking a name out of the yellow pages (wait, who even uses the yellow pages anymore?), unless . . . the person referring you to that Realtor can speak from a deep foundation of knowledge about that Realtor’s experience and knowledge AND about their effective marketing techniques.  If they cannot do that, you are better off, in my humble opinion, doing your own due diligence to find the best Realtor you can find.

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Sequim and Port Angeles Real Estate (branch office of eXp Realty) is hiring new agents who want to be trained and mentored to be top producers.

1. Training and mentoring at entirely new levels
2. Broker is a 20-year real estate attorney (ret.), successful Realtor and top producer, author of two books and thousands of articles
3. Cutting edge technology and Internet marketing
4. Part of the most powerful virtual Internet brokerage in the U.S.
5. 80%-20% commission splits
6. Potential to earn residual commissions
7. Work out of your home office with low overhead
8. Current office in Port Angeles and soon in Sequim
9. Online 24/7 training by top professionals around the country
10. Virtual network with tremendous benefits
11. Only training a limited number of agents with potential to become full time top producers

Contact:

Chuck Marunde, J.D. via email (chuckmarunde@gmail.com) with a copy of your resume and a cover email explaining what you are doing now and why you want to interview for this position.  Commission only.

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Who is this Sequim Realtor?  He was a Captain in the USAF during the first Kuwait war and stationed at Nellis AFB near Las Vegas.  He loved running 15 miles across the desert at 100 degrees, and became a lover of nature photography.  He left the Air Force to work in Prison Ministry, and then moved to Sequim where he finished his career as a lawyer.  He raised three boys and a girl, and two of his boys became professional athletes.  Today he is a Realtor and author, and claims to be an Internet geek.  Who is this skinny geeky looking guy?

He is Chuck Marunde.  “I look a lot different now, mostly because I don’t have all that hair.  Frankly, I’m glad, because I save a lot of money on shampoo.  Those glasses I wore  sure were huge, too.”

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Sounds like the title to a tantalizing new mystery book, doesn’t it?   A book like that might  be chock full of suspense with the characters  experiencing emotions ranging from  confusion to  frustration and a maybe even a dash of irritation.

Too bad that what I’m talking about here isn’t fiction.   For far too many home sellers, this mystery is all too real and common.   Every day in our market sellers are wondering “What happened to my REALTOR?”

Nancy and I handle a lot of sellers who have had their listings expire from the MLS for one reason or another.   Sometimes it’s price, and other times it’s lack of attention from the listing agent.   Here’s a prime example:

Last summer we visited with a seller that had his home on the market for one year with another agency.   His listing had expired and he was interviewing new agents.    A really good move on his part – sellers should talk to as many potential agents as possible to find a good fit for both them and the agent.   A few days after we talked, he called to tell us that he had chosen another agent but that it was a close call.

His house has now been on the market for over 560 days.   When I pulled up the listing history in the MLS, I noticed that the listing had only been touched once over the past year – and that was to extend the listing agreement. In our MLS, agents input prospects to receive listings as they come on the market – the catch is that if your listing is there BEFORE the prospect is entered by the  another agent, the prospect doesn’t receive your listing.   So for approximately 10 months, his listing has sat there unattended and has not been populated into the listing cart of ANY prospect after he was listed.

It’s actually sad, isn’t it?

The number one complaint I hear from sellers who have had their listing expire is “My REALTOR ® stuck a sign in the yard and disappeared.   I would have lowered my price if they had taken the time to do a market update every few months.   I never heard any feedback from showings, and in the 100 degree summer my house was being marketed with a picture of it with snow on the ground.   What gives?“

I believe that there are some agents out there that think the work stops when you get the listing agreement signed.   That’s just not the case.

The gentleman in my example above took all the right steps, he interviewed multiple agents and he didn’t pick his agent based solely on price.   So how can Edwardsville and Glen Carbon home sellers avoid becoming the main character in a bad mystery novel?   Arm yourself with these 10 questions for any agent you interview.

1.   How often will you communicate with me?   How will you communciate with me?   (If you prefer a call and your agent prefers e-mail, hash that out now.   Communication is the foundation for a great team, and you and your agent are a team).

2.   How long do you normally take to return a phone call?

3.   How long do you normally take to respond to an e-mail?

4.   Will you provide me with market updates that compare my house to ones that have closed as well as my active competition?

5.   When the seasons change, will you update your marketing materials?

6.   Will you set me up in the MLS to receive automatic e-mails when something new comes on the market that my home will be in competition with?

7.   Can I deal with you personally when I have a problem, or do I have to go through your assistant?

8.   Will you provide me with a monthly status update about where my home is being advertised?

9.   Even if you can’t reach the other agent for showing feedback, would you please still call me and at least let me know that?

10.   Will you change MLS descriptions every few months to give my listing a fresh look?

If you receive an unsatisfactory answer to any of these questions, move on to the next agent.   The seller-agent relationship is not like an employer-employee relationship… it truly is a team effort and you must find an agent that matches your style for your home sale to be a success.

Questions about selling your home?   Stop by Sacred Grounds Cafe in Edwardsville every Tuesday from 12 – 1 to have them answered.   We’ll be there talking all things real estate – and we’ll even buy the latte.

[This article contributed by Realtor Kristina Pratt.]

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