Hello

It's your biggest asset, you deserve better!

I will share an experience that I had over the last few weeks that wasn’t all positive. Most of my work revolves around vendor advocacy, however I also do some buyer advocacy work as well. I enjoy them both. It was as a buyers advocate that I inspected a house at a mid-week open house on a Wednesday. I wouldn’t say that it was a glamorous house, but it was a full block house in an expensive part of Bayside Melbourne.

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I was greeted by a young agent, and he was quite pleasant, he took my name and contact details. It was a property that I was sure that my client would like so when leaving I asked a few questions about the house. Unfortunately, the agent running the open house couldn’t answer any of them. I didn’t want to be hard on him as he was obviously new to real estate. He mentioned that he was the personal assistant of the listing agent and that the listing agent was at different open house for another one of his properties. I was told that the listing agent would be at the house for the Saturday open house and that he would get back to me to answer my queries before that. I thought no problem, after all you can’t be in 2 places at once.

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I didn’t hear back from the more experienced listing agent, but I thought that’s all right as I will re-visit the house with my client for the Saturday open house and I’ll get some answers then. So, my client and I got to the inspection about 5 minutes in. That day someone else was on the door taking names. Being a Saturday, it was really busy so I assumed that there would be another agent present, hopefully the listing agent as mentioned at the mid-week open house. As a vendor if you are likely to have more than 3-4 buyers to your open house you really should expect 2 agents at your property. When I started in 2004 most agents just handled each inspection on their own, but nowadays it’s really old-fashioned thinking to just have 1 agent at a weekend open house. I couldn’t find another agent at this property so I asked the agent taking names if the listing agent was on his way, as I was told that he would be there. The agent told me “Sorry, but the listing agents does not do Saturday open houses as he either calls his properties auctions or other agents auctions.”

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I was really disappointed for this vendor as he/she had obviously trusted this agent with their house to sell. It would appear the only time that the vendor will have his/her chosen agent at the house was to call the auction, on auction day. I’m quite sure that during the listing presentation that this agent would not have said that he wouldn’t be present at any of the open houses. On top of that the thing that really ticked me off was that inside the house I found a personal profile, magnet and a calendar with photos of the listing agent, as well as an advertisement for the agency’s rental department and nothing at all that actually related to the house that I was in.

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This situation can be commonplace in real estate. The better agents often have a personal assistant working with them at the open houses which is a really good way to service the vendor and sell their house. However, some of the highest producing agents won’t attend their own open houses. I guess if you do the math, you can work out why. On a Saturday an agent has time to attend around 8 open houses or about 5 auctions or say 2 auctions and 4 open houses. If that agent has 15 listings, he/she simply can’t attend them all. On top of that an agent will always give priority to calling an auction as they usually get paid between $400 and $1500 for that on top of their commissions.

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I guess the moral of my experience is that you need to lay the ground rules before signing up with an agent. There is nothing wrong with an agent using a good assistant but about 50% of salespeople in the real estate industry have less than 1 year of experience. I’m not saying that new salespeople shouldn’t be given a chance, but do you want them “practicing on your home”?

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Of course, we’d love you to contact us to help you find the best agent (and keep them accountable) when selling your house. Having said that if you do go it alone, please be sure to take the selection process very seriously and make sure that the person that you choose will be dealing with the buyers throughout the campaign. I looked up this agent and he is one of his franchises highest grossing commission salespeople. I also looked up the assistants and one of them had been credited with being the secondary agent on 11 sold properties while the other was yet to make a sale.

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In case you were wondering I did buy that property for my client at auction. I wasn’t surprised to see that I was the only person bidding on the day and we secured it after the auction had passed in for $45,000 under the reserve which was also $60,000 under my client’s maximum price on the day. So, I guess I have found an upside to this situation!!!