When people are picking a listing agent to sell their home they can fall victim to any number of self-imposed myths or outright lies perpetuated by the agents they talk to. When I hear about these it really gets my dander up. Of course, in reality, I don’t have dander. Dander is “loose scales formed on the skin and shed from the coat or feathers of various animals” so I’m not entirely sure how I can get mine up. But any way, many of these conversations are inane. Here are some of my favorite examples.
“I don’t discount my commission because if I did I wouldn’t work as hard selling your property”. Some sellers already subscribe to a variation of this lie themselves: “I don’t want to negotiate the commission down because then they won’t be motivated to sell my house”.
This is utter nonsense. The reason a real estate agent won’t discount is because they are sitting fat and happy with lots of referral business with people who are willing to pay full commission. They’ve got a strong network that they have been very effective at leveraging to get more business. Furthermore, many of these same agents will take referrals from other agents or take Internet referrals from their broker and forfeit up to 30% of their commission in each case. So, obviously they don’t have an issue with earning less under the right circumstances. If you want a deal, move on to someone else.
Also, if a real estate agent takes a listing at a reduced commission don’t believe for a minute that they are going to work less diligently on it. First, if they took the listing they must have decided it was worth it. Second, if they are the kind of agent that would take a listing and then neglect it you were going to have trouble with them anyway. Third, if their degree of attention was proportional to the commission rate then perhaps you should pay them 15% and get lots of attention, right? After all, there is no reason to believe that you coincidentally get the optimal amount of attention at 6%.
“I will look for buyers in _____________” or “I have a lot of buyers for this type of house” or “My office works with a lot of buyers for houses like this”. This falls under the heading of the listing agent delivers buyers. Many sellers already believe this without a listing agent having to tell tall tales of their prowess with buyers.
More nonsense. The fact of the matter is that the listing agent is usually not the one that delivers buyers. It’s the buyers’ agents that deliver buyers. The listing agent gets the listing in front of the buyers and their agents and positions the house in the most favorable light for them. For instance, I just pulled over 600 sales of single family homes in Lincoln Park over a more than 2 year period from the MLS. In less than 15% of the cases did the listing agent produce the buyer. The other 85% of the time it was a buyer’s agent.
One other thing. If a potential listing agent is talking about delivering the buyers herself or through her office I would get very worried. That might be a red flag that she is trying to get both sides of the commission and might pursue that strategy to the detriment of exposing your house to other agents. I have heard conversations where this appears to be an explicit strategy.
“My list-to-sell ratio is___” or “My average time on market is______”. You’re supposed to be impressed with a high list-to-sell ratio or a short market time. However, how do you know the agent isn’t giving the houses away? That would certainly make both of these numbers look favorable. I’m not suggesting you ignore these numbers entirely, but you should be aware of the limitations of these numbers and take them with a chunk of rock salt.
As always, when dealing with those slippery real estate agents caveat emptor.