Why I hate lazy realtors
Thursday 8th May, 2008I know, a category so large as realtors
has plenty of fine hard working people sweating out their hard earned commissions.
It's just I haven't met many of them,
and the nice ones I met were friends already, so nice by definition.
But I realize just how superficial this comment must look to someon on the other side of the fence, so I spent some time on the forum of the italian relators community and guess what, they are complaining all the time about clients who ask impossible prices for their property, or clients who don't want to pay the commission once the deal is done, clients that cut you off calling the prospect directly and so on.
I guess it all starts at how imperfect the market is for real estate - very local, very fragmented, very based on disorganized databases of unstructured information.
I am right now both a seller and immediately afterwards I will be a buyer, and looking at the market prices of the properties I am/will be involved with, I will be worth about 50k euro in commissions over 6 to 9 months with an immaculate credit rating. In other words, I could be good business.
So what does it take to win over a client like me? I was hoping you'd ask, giving me the opportunity to describe...
Gianni's ideal Real Estate agent
I am starting from the general belief that work should be compensated - the more value it adds, the more it should be paid. The issue then becomes HOW a realtor can add value to the transaction, make it happen quicker, more professionally, at the right (market) price.
No shop
I could never understand why do most realtors need a store? Why do I need to pay for your store rent when all you have there some amateurial pictures, a layout and a very rough description.
Make me desire the product
In most cases, the only true informative service a realtor provides is the organization of a site visit. Which I could easily organize on my own with a simple phone call - prompting me to ask myself why do I need to pay tens of thousands for that.
How do you make me desire it? Well, there are many ways:
This is not even a market in any modern sense: realtors have a very small stock of properties for sale in the immediate vicinity of where their store is. As a consequence, if the prospective buyer is on the market - as it is my case - for a house which could be anywhere is a list of perhaps 15-20 villages, I have to take the trouble of physically visiting 30-40 tiny realtors asking them the same questions over and over again; no wonder then I feel I am doing all the work - I am ! How will you convince me to pay you your commission if I feel I have done all the work?
If however properties were listed in a unique marketplace, sellers would pay for sophisticated pre-sales services enhancing the marketability of their property and therefore its value. They would be assured that their property would be visible by ALL the prospective buyers, but how well it will sell would depend also on how effective the promotion is in catching th eye of the prospective buyers.
And this would require in turn the pre-sales services of The value add would be obvious: the better the service, the more money you make and - consequently - more commission I'd be willing to pay to use the services of the more sophisticated realtors - come to think about it, why should they get all paid the same commission? Are we some kind of communist economy where retribution is independent of merit and quality of work?
But I realize just how superficial this comment must look to someon on the other side of the fence, so I spent some time on the forum of the italian relators community and guess what, they are complaining all the time about clients who ask impossible prices for their property, or clients who don't want to pay the commission once the deal is done, clients that cut you off calling the prospect directly and so on.
I guess it all starts at how imperfect the market is for real estate - very local, very fragmented, very based on disorganized databases of unstructured information.
I am right now both a seller and immediately afterwards I will be a buyer, and looking at the market prices of the properties I am/will be involved with, I will be worth about 50k euro in commissions over 6 to 9 months with an immaculate credit rating. In other words, I could be good business.
So what does it take to win over a client like me? I was hoping you'd ask, giving me the opportunity to describe...
Gianni's ideal Real Estate agent
I am starting from the general belief that work should be compensated - the more value it adds, the more it should be paid. The issue then becomes HOW a realtor can add value to the transaction, make it happen quicker, more professionally, at the right (market) price.
No shop
I could never understand why do most realtors need a store? Why do I need to pay for your store rent when all you have there some amateurial pictures, a layout and a very rough description.
Make me desire the product
In most cases, the only true informative service a realtor provides is the organization of a site visit. Which I could easily organize on my own with a simple phone call - prompting me to ask myself why do I need to pay tens of thousands for that.
How do you make me desire it? Well, there are many ways:
- lots of pictures: why the restrain? digital pics cost friggin' nothing, why when I inquire about a 750k euro house I receive three or four pictures? I'd send a hundred !! Why not a digital movie (equally free)? Why not a nice (and free) slideshow?
- long, detailed descriptions;
even better, a full 3D model enabling a virtual visit by the prospective
buyer. This full model of our summer house in St Raphael was created in
about 2 hours with Sweet
Home 3D, a cool and very easy
to use freeware software. The resulting model can be viewed as a flat image
as you are doing now or, if you install the software, navigated and visited
at leisure.
- tell me about where it is. As
the adage says, the three most important characteristics of a property
are location, location and location and it is nowadays very easy to show
the precise location of a property: see for example this
same house in Google Maps
This is not even a market in any modern sense: realtors have a very small stock of properties for sale in the immediate vicinity of where their store is. As a consequence, if the prospective buyer is on the market - as it is my case - for a house which could be anywhere is a list of perhaps 15-20 villages, I have to take the trouble of physically visiting 30-40 tiny realtors asking them the same questions over and over again; no wonder then I feel I am doing all the work - I am ! How will you convince me to pay you your commission if I feel I have done all the work?
If however properties were listed in a unique marketplace, sellers would pay for sophisticated pre-sales services enhancing the marketability of their property and therefore its value. They would be assured that their property would be visible by ALL the prospective buyers, but how well it will sell would depend also on how effective the promotion is in catching th eye of the prospective buyers.
And this would require in turn the pre-sales services of The value add would be obvious: the better the service, the more money you make and - consequently - more commission I'd be willing to pay to use the services of the more sophisticated realtors - come to think about it, why should they get all paid the same commission? Are we some kind of communist economy where retribution is independent of merit and quality of work?
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