Any Realitors Out There?

I'm very curious of your opinion. We are currently trying to sell a home through a local realitor. We signed a 6-month contract which is now over. If you're a realitor please answer these simple questions:

1. How often do you discuss matters with your clients?

2. Are people "preapproved" for prices?

3. Do you think 6 months is giving you long enough to try and sell a house?

It's extremely frustrating. I realize laws are different from state to state; but, I also am thinking that common sense is common sense no matter what the laws are.

By the way, just for the record let me say this: Don't ever ever ever have a "friend" as your realitor.

**sighing**

Thank you!!
"T"

Sledder, I am not a realtor, but I have heard that about having a friend as a realtor. I'm sorry you are having a rough time with selling your house. good luck to you.

T....I was an agent once...and I know what frustrations you are going through. First...some listing agreements have a "self-renew" cluse that unless you notify the agent in writting a certain number of days before the end of the 6 month listing...it automatically renews for another 6 months.

A good agent will "pre approve" a client...but that is not binding as the Mortgage comapny has the final OK on approval...but they should know about how much a client can afford in a house before showing them a property.

An agent whould touch base with their home ower every week or so...and discuss why the house isn't selling...what the owner can do to make it more attractive to a client. revue the market for that area.

This is just my opinion now...as rules change ....Jo

I also was a licensed Realtor (in NY). Jo makes a couple of excellent points regarding frequency of contact and pre-qualification of potential buyers. A couple other things to note might be the methods of advertising and certainly use of the multiple listing service in the area.
If you are priced in the right range you should be getting offers and counter offers. If you are getting no action,either you are way too high or the ad methods are all wrong. Financing options, particularly making available owner financing, will also enhance sales.
6 months is a reasonable time for a listing. The obvious way to determine if it is the realtor at fault is to change Realtors. Go for IT! And good luck!

Sledder,

I've been in and out of the real estate business for 10 years, but not as a realtor. I handle marketing for BIG volume agents.

Did you get many showings on your house? If not, that's a pretty good sign that you are overpriced. If you did get showings, your agent should have followed up with the prospective buyers to find out why they didn't make an offer. That would give you some helpful feedback. Some common reasons for buyers not making an offer are: price, floor plan, dirty house, needs too much updating, etc.

If you didn't get any information like that, find another realtor. Look in the newspaper and find the agents with the most listings...give several of them a call. INTERVIEW them and find out what they'll do to sell your house.

Once you sign another listing agreement...ask your agent for a copy of the listing as it appears in the MLS system. One reason we got our house for the price we did is because MLS showed it as being 1623 sq ft. At the asking price of $107,000, that would have to be an amazing house in this neighborhood. :) Well, it was actually 1823 sq ft. The realtor never corrected the listing in MLS, so the house never sold. Just be sure all of your information is accurate.

Last, but not least, tell your agent when you're interviewing what your expectations are of him/her. If they don't do what they say they will, contact they're broker and tell them. If you don't get satisfaction, bug the daylights out of both of them day and night until your needs are met.

Hope this helps.



This message was edited Friday, Oct 18th 11:46 AM

You guys all had the same answers and info we figured on. The realitor (probably soon to be ex-friend) will be notified by our attorney that they are no longer under contract. They never followed up on any showings of the house, never gave suggestions on what to help..never anything. But in choosing the new realitor we've did our homework. This has not been a pleasant experience at all. Extremely frustrating. If anyone is going through this let us know. We'll try to help so no one else goes through this.

Thanks for the opinions and suggestions. It's truly appreciated. "T"

Sledder, you're describing the same circumstances that we experienced this year, from January through June. We had a realtor (friend and neighbor) list our property and we were extremely disappointed with the results.

When the 6 months was up, we unceremoniously took the sign down and that was that. We haven't spoken to him since May (almost 2 months before the contract expired).

He did almost no advertising for us (and when he did, it was only after we talked to him for over an hour, lecturing him on how to do his job). He didn't utilize the nice aerial shots that I supplied him with for the listing, but rather fell back on ancient pictures from before we bought the place and cleaned it up (thus the pictures looked like an unkempt farm, vs. the nice place it is now that we've worked so hard at it).

Nevertheless, we stuck through the 6 months, because I am a man of my word, and I did agree to 6 months with him. But when those 6 months were up, I haven't even thought of talking to him again, and likely won't. He still hasn't come to get the sign that he was using in our yard.

We've interviewed 5 or 6 listing agents already, and many of them are quite impressive. Smiln32's suggestions above are good, and basically what we did.

Our house is currently off the market. When will it go back up? I dunno. I guess when it goes back on the market, we can look at the date and then we'll know.

Dave

I should add that after each time that we pressured him to advertise, we'd get a flurry of interested parties, and a few showings (some of them showing real promise!) but he never followed up with them.

When I asked what their followup responses were, he dodged the question. Clearly, he had never followed up.

dave

We had the opposite experience: the hard-charging non-acquaintance realtor bungled our first home selling experience so badly we ended up being sued in small claims court by the would-be buyers. (It was NOT pretty.)

Three years later, we finally worked up the courage to try to sell the house again. A dear friend from church showed our house once, and sold it as a pocket listing, saving us thousands of dollars in commission and totally eliminating the hassle of having our house on the market for any length of time.

When we sold the next house (a fairly large, custom-built home), we turned to the same friend/realtor. She busted her tail to sell it, holding realtor open house tours, following up after every showing and giving us all the feedback she received, meeting with us once a month to go over the stats (number of showings, number of new comparable homes on the market, number of comps that sold, list vs. sales prices, etc.) Once the house was under contract, she handled lining up contractors to perform the work we agreed to do prior to closing.

It's no wonder she was one of the top-selling realtors for her company that year, if she did that for all her clients. I can't praise her efforts enough. Just wish she'd move to Tennessee so when we get ready to sell this house, we could list it with her!

In all honesty, she may have spoiled us, but I expect no less from the next realtor we hire, and we'll spell out our expectations at the outset.

And where's my mom when I need her around here? She used to be a realtor... :)

GV...your friend sounds like a top notch sales person...this is JUST the type of service one should be able to expect...and receive from their agent. Jo

GV, I'm jealous. (not in a mean way) And Dave, I know exactly what you mean. This realtor used my DH's pics for what little advertising she did. Get this, they even had the wrong house pictured for 3 of the 6 months. I guess I was raised that if you say you're going to do a job, you do it. You don't come up with every excuse in the book, you simply do it. We didn't expect her to tell us every single time someone "showed" the house. But if someone looked at it a second time to us that deemed a call. Apparently we were wrong.

I'm not going to go on and on here; but, I sure hope this new realtor works out better. We don't have any choice on whether to sell or not to sell. We have to sell.

Again, thanks for the help. "T"

Terry,

We had the same experience down here, but I think it had a whole lot more to do with God than our agent. He worked it all out for us. :)

Our agent is a friend of the family and sweet as they come (also been in real estate for 13 years). The listing expired two days before we walked through it, so we saved our part of the commission as she "charged" us nothing. She only charged the sellers 3%, too. Helped a bunch.

Sledder, If you lived closer to Texas I would ask you if we had the same realitor/friend! LOL
We still live in the house that was up for sale 1 1/2 years ago. We decided we would rather stay in the house than go through that mess again.
TL