Seller Beware - Protecting Sellers' Interest
This is an excellent blog by Debe Maxwell of Charlotte. She highlights a few examples of "what not to do when you list a house". I have to say there are some excellent agents in our area who do a fantastic job when they list homes. However, there are a few who could learn a few things form Debe's blog.
As mentioned below, one thing that bothers me the most is the lack of quality photos. It is very reasonable to hire a professional photographer to take photos that aren't blurry, too dark, too bring or irrelevant. Having good quality photos is a basic level of marketing for listings.
Let's make it easy for buyers to view the house online so they'll want to see more!
We MUST Go To Extremes to Protect Our Sellers' Best Interests
Do we go to the same extremes to protect our sellers that we do our buyers? We dig and dig and do more digging to be 100% sure that the property that our buyers are purchasing property with no hidden defects, no hidden freeways proposed to run through their backyard and even no hidden bugs!
But, are agents protecting their Sellers? I enjoy keeping my hands on both sides of the real estate transaction, representing both buyers AND sellers. THE most frustrating thing that I encounter in my business is dealing with listings that are represented by, let's call them 'ABSENT Listing Agents.'These absent agents are not just the ones who charge a small fee to list the seller's home in MLS but, FULL time agents who charge FULL price to represent their Sellers. Some of the MOST frustrating things that we all encounter are:
[] Slow or NO return phone calls--especially when I'm holding gold in my hands (A BUYER FOR THEIR SELLER'S HOME)!
[] Poor coaching/teaching of properly staging or presenting their homes for SELLING
[] Lack of proper (COMMISSION-REQUIRED) documents available for the Buyer
[] Not presenting Offers to the Sellers in a timely manner (or not at ALL!)
[] Not having Supra lockboxes on homes and having combo locks that DON'T work!
Yes, those things do affect both my buyers and me! We've all hashed these over and over again but, what about consideration for the SELLER. Here's my beef--While searching for a home for a buyer, I pulled all of the homes available in a particular area--specifically ONE neighborhood. What I found would be horribly distressing to any seller:
- Several were grossly misrepresented and some had very basic, bland, non-enthusiastic descriptions.
- One had the MAIN photo taken from the driver's seat of the car! The agent was so lazy that not only did he/she not bother to step out of the car but, they didn't even CROP the photo to get the car rear view mirror out of the picture!
- There's more...one home has been on the market for over 500 days and is priced at OVER twice the next-highest-priced home in the neighborhood! Now, if disclosure is important to this agent, there is no notation that the seller is an agent. Which brings me to the question--What are these Sellers drinking? They've been on the market for over a year with the SAME agent who has priced their home as though they would be happy to sell 20 years from now...not NOW! I know that some of you are going to think that probably the Seller just won't lower the price and it's not the agent's fault but, if you saw the lack of marketing on this home...
- I also received a referral who wants us to sell her home after over one year on the market with no showings in over TWO months! As it turns out, their agent has decided to leave the business and has obviously been contemplating this for some time as evidenced by the poor manner in which this home has been marketed and shown over the past few months.
WHO is protecting these poor Sellers? Both of these homes should have LONG since been sold. They are both great homes and they both should have been sold a year ago. Unfortunately we have no recourse for these Sellers as we are not allowed to contact them directly to let them know how poorly they're represented.Doesn't this just make you want to shout it out to the world--SELLER BEWARE?!
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