The Golden Rule Applies to Realtors Too

If you've represented buyers at all in the past couple of years, you have probably experienced the frustration of trying to negotiate an offer on a short sale or a foreclosure. If they are listed at shockingly low prices, they have no doubt produced dozens of offers and you struggle to get some kind of honest answer about your offer from the listing agent. Many times you can't even find out if they received your offer or if you will be receiving a counter offer, and then the property goes pending in the MLS and your buyer questions whether you even sent their offer in. You lose your buyer because they think you're a lousy agent, and you feel like a failure even if you've been calling the other agent 5 times every day. Another consequence is that the buyer begins to believe that the only way to win one of these bidding wars is to go directly to the listing agent. The stories and fantasies go on and on, but the ultimate result is that we as agents begin to feel like pawns in a losing game.

As the listing agent on a property that generated 80 offers, I had a little taste of what some of these foreclosure specialists experience: we had at least 100 calls a day on the property, plus at least 60 buyers asked me to represent them. We had several hundred people visit the property, which caused several neighbors to call and complain. It was a scene, and it was a bit overwhelming.

Then I thought how I had felt when my buyer had made an offer on a property and we couldn't get a straight answer from the listing agent and eventually the property went pending in the MLS with no call from the listing agent at all. So I decided that I would treat everyone the way I would have liked to have been treated if I had brought an offer. I called or emailed everyone who had submitted an offer that we had it and would be presenting it to the seller the next day. Then, after the seller had made her decision, I wrote a thank you letter that told the agents what had happened and thanked them for their efforts, and we faxed or emailed that. It took some time and effort on my (and my assistant's) part, but I felt that I owed the agents who had spent the time and effort to write and submit their offers the same courtesy.

The reaction I received was interesting. Quite a number of agents were obviously surprised that I took that time to acknowledge them, and I was even mentioned in an office meeting (not at my own office) as an example of professionalism. Well, I'm honored and glad that my efforts were noticed, but my point in writing this is that this should be the way we treat each other all the time. My real estate coach, Steve Shull, once said that we need to stop criticizing our fellow agents and give each other more respect. If we really tried to help each other more, stopped criticizing each other's shortcomings and try harder to make the real estate transaction smooth for our clients, we would improve the level of professionalism tenfold. I'm certainly not perfect, I have my cranky times, I get annoyed with other agents, but I have a standard in my own real estate practice that I try to keep, "we treat other agents as well as if they were clients." We owe each other that. Just imagine how much smoother our days would be if we all did treat each other that well.