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Showing ALL the listings - Not just your own!

By
Real Estate Agent with Advantage Realty #1

We are often puzzled by how little the general public appears to know about how the  real estate business works. Many buyers seems to believe that any particular agent will only show them his or her own listings or at best; all office listings. It also appears that many sellers believe that their listing agent should be the one to sell their home, not a cooperating agent.

We do not know how other agents work but here's what we do:

Example: A younger couple calls us to help them find a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom, 2 car garage home for under $150,000 in Sun'n'Lake of Sebring. Yes, our own listings come to mind first. That's because we know them better than any other listing within our office and within our MLS. If we do have a listing that matches the buyer's criteria and we believe could be of interest, it goes on the mental list. Next are our office listings. We know these listings from caravans and from talking to the agents in our office. Again, if there are office listings that matches buyer criteria, the go on the mental list as well. Thirdly, we check the entire MLS. Our search reveals 30 listings that match the buyer's initial criteria. We invite the buyer's to meet us at our office so we can go over some more details and try to narrow down the search a bit more. After we have weeded out homes that are not of interest to the buyer, we grab our list of finalists and start making phone calls to arrange for showing appointments. If  our own listings or office listings are among the finalists, that's great. If not, then it doesn't make a difference either. Why? Because it doesn't matter to the buyer whether their next home was listed by ERA or Remax or ABC Realty. Therefore, it doesn't matter to us! Yep, it's that simple!

A few months ago we worked with a young couple that made an offer on one of our listings. Because it was a short sale and because their living arrangements were really just temporary, they decided to abandon their offer and find a "regular" home for sale that could close faster. Honestly, we felt early on that those buyers weren't likely to wait through the short sale process and we knew they needed a quicker solution. They were surprised when we didn't mind showing them other homes. They were surprised that we showed them all the homes their previous agent for whatever reason refused to show them.

Just yesterday, we received a call from a buyer who had an offer in with another agent on one of our short sales. Because they couldn't match the bank's counter offer, they decided to let it go and find another home. Because we are in the business of selling homes, we gave the buyer's agent a list of similar homes we had listed within the same neigbhorhood. The buyer didn't know about any of these listings until they called us up yesterday. We will show them ANY listing that meets their criteria and it won't matter to us which sign is in the front yard. It's not about us, it's about the client. Always!

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