Go ahead and get mad now...
It doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree... You'll probably be mad about this, so go ahead and get fired up.
The vast majority of real estate agents are honest, ethical and hard-working. But there are some that don't hit all of those points... either by choice or by circumstance. And those people need to be rooted out. Their behavior needs to be corrected or they need to find another line of work.
One very easy way that incompetent or unethical agents show themselves in in the presentation of offers.
§ 10-6A-5. Duties and responsibilities of broker engaged by seller
(a) A broker engaged by a seller shall:
(2) Promote the interests of the seller by:
(B) Timely presenting all offers to and from the seller, even when the property is subject to a contract of sale;I added the bold, and this is a passage from the Georgia Code defining Real Estate Brokerage. Please note what this DOESN'T say. It doesn't say:
- Present offers after we think sufficient time has passed to hope that there will be other offers.
- Present offers after we make sure that we don't have a buyer of our own to present.
- Present offers after making sure that the buyer jumps through a pantload of hoops first.
- Present the offer we like.
If there is a shortcoming to the rules, they aren't specific. Any lawyer and most brokers will know that there isn't a definition to "timely"... It is left to the court to decide during a lawsuit. And the lawsuit is tough because we don't know when the offer is presented to the seller.
Heck, in many cases we don't know IF the offer was presented to the seller.
There needs to be a mechanism...
Every offer should get two written acknowledgements.
- Acknowledgement of receipt by the seller's agent, showing when it was recieved and when it was forwarded.
- Acknowledgement of receipt by the seller, showing disposition if it isn't accepted.
These reciepts should be emailed (or faxed for those in the "fax age") immediately upon acknowledgement, and sending the receipt should be the noted time. This would prevent the selling agent from fudging the times or dates "by mistake".
Part of the reason for this is that institutional sellers are notorious for ignoring the deadlines on offers. And their agents have become just as notorious. Those are also especially prone to ILLEGALLY refuse to present offers without requiring buyers to complete extra steps.
Sellers can require that a buyer pass certain tests, such as pre-qualifying with a specific lender (although they cannot be forced to use that lender), but for the purposes of the offer, any agent or broker refusing to present the offer is breaking the law. The same goes for "lender packages" and other superfluous paperwork or requirements.
I have told seller clients flat out that I am bound by law to present every offer. They obviously don't have to accept any offer... but they are going to see it. And despite having sellers on other continents or vacationing, the longest it took me to get a client an offer was one and a half business days. (He was 75, didn't use email, and had moved to Italy. I had to send the offer to the local US Consulate for him to pick up.) I had an answer within 3 business days... Sorry, but dealing with a "monster mega bank" shouldn't be harder... they have a department.
And this whole business of requiring buyers to complete pre-qualifications is out of hand. With the large number of REOs that are getting multiple offers, a buyer might have to get pre-qualified several times before getting an offer accepted. All of these credit pulls aren't great for the buyer... Not to mention that his personal information is with not just one, but maybe five or six different lenders.
The bottom line is that WE (real estate professionals) need to clean house or lawmakers are going to do it for us. And since they don't know or understand the business, there will be a LOAD of unintended consequences.
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