At our office meeting today, our broker, Donna Evers, was going over our office sales figures - which were pretty amazing. Then we began to share our stories of what went into many of those transactions.
Which ones were multiple offers? What other challenges did we overcome to bring it all together. And one of the stories had a very strong message, especially for some of the younger agents in the office.
Once of my colleagues, and one of Evers' top agents (in more ways than one) does a huge amount of business. And she does it the old-fashioned way. No blogging, Facebook or Twitter. But she does a huge amount of networking with her center of influence, and she uses the telephone - the old-fashioned kind that sits on a cradle - a lot.
So Nancy was at her listing with her sellers and a good offer that she was urging them to accept. And they did. And she dutifully delivered it to the buyers' agent.
When she got home, something curious happened. She checked her email, et voila! There was another offer on the same house. The agent had just dropped it into her scanner and sent it. No contact. No phone calls. No nothing.
She hadn't called Nancy while she was preparing the offer - the obligatory schmooze call where you ask about time frame and stuff the is important to the sellers. So there was no clue whatsoever that this offer was coming in.
The lesson here?
- All of your colleagues may not be as wired as you are.
- When you have an offer, at least on a "normal" listing, pick up the phone and call the listing agent to let her know you are writing an offer.
- If you don't know the listing agent, a little schmooze doesn't hurt - relationships are important.
- If you are faxing or emailing it to her, get some kind of confirmation that she got it.
The second offer wasn't as good as the first one, but it could have been. What a relief! But if it had, it would have been a loss for the sellers. But it would have been a really big loss to the agent. This was a pretty big house with a pretty big brokerage fee attached to it.
Oh well. Easy come. Easy go.
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