Rhonda Duffy

My question is simple here -

Do sellers believe that it is a listing agent's job to show the house to any buyer whether or not they have an agent?

I have been asking this of my sellers over the last few weeks and I get a "Yes!" And, it is followed up with "Isn't that the job of the agent?"

So whereas we may be fighting about procurring cause... as agents, the public absolutely thinks that they should and can call the listing agent to see the home and answer questions.

One of my sellers said that if the listing agent isn't going to show the house to buyers with an agent, that they should just say on their voicemail that if you want to see the house, call another agent. Why confuse the public they said?

One of my clients saw an 850K house with the listing agent and told them that they had their house listed with me but that they had not signed a buyer agreement but that they were going to use us. The agent blasted us and forgot to go back to ask again if they were still going to use us - I guess just thinking that after his blasting they would change their mind. He showed the home.

Then, my client wanted to make an offer on the home with me.

I called the broker and they said that they would pay nothing to us as they had shown the home and that they buyer said they were not working with anyone.

At the showing, the agent did not discuss buyer brokerage or who represents whom in the transaction. The agent did not follow up with the buyer. The agent did not give the buyer a seller's disclosure, comps or anything else, they did not disclose in the listing that they were paying less commission etc...

Now, we get paid nothing?

Sad thing is for the seller that the buyer got so pissed off from all of this including the unprofessional blasting that they decided not to buy the house!

That was a month ago - house is still on the market - another house now belongs to the buyer!

Cooperation gets homes sold and the listing agent of the 850K house would still be making over 24K on the listing side. But more importantly, the seller would not be suffering on the market. They had a buyer!

The rest of the story as told below... after many of you responded.

Okay so here is more to the story that I left out before - sorry, I didn't expect so many posts and action here...

The buyer/seller was our client for over 1 year selling a 1.5 million dollar home and downsizing to 850K. At the beginning of their listing we had a buyer's agency with them because they received an offer on their home. The offer did not work out, they did not move and the buyer agency expired. We discussed the buyer agency with them at expiration and they said that they were too heartbroken from the last offer that they would just wait to see homes when they got another offer.

On Sunday night (the day before Memorial day), a couple came by their home (without their agent) and caught them in the yard. They showed the home and the couple told them that they were going to bring their agent the next morning and in the meantime they were going to get an offer together.

My client panicked that night and starting looking at homes on the internet. My partner who they had been working with had called them earlier in the week and of course over a year of them being on the market they became friends. My partner told her that her daughter was graduating from high school over that weekend and that she had a whole bunch of family coming.

On Memorial Day, my client called our office and left a message that we did not pick up until around noon telling us that she was getting an offer. In the meantime, trying to be helpful because she knew my partner was busy, she called the listing agents of several homes and got this listing agent... that is where the story above comes in...

Thanks for your responses.

If banks can sell houses all day long with no seller's disclosures and buyers buy the homes all day long with no seller's disclosure, do you think that we can get away with not giving seller's disclosures?

In Georgia, the new contract has an option to include a seller's disclosure or not.

Think of all the gray areas that will be dissolved if the buyer has strict due diligence and there is no seller's disclosure.

Do you think sellers can get away with this?

After being involved in a few banters back and forth this weekend in a few posts, I just thought that I would ask you who have not been involved.

Does a buyer care who has the house listed or do they just want to find the right home for them?

I answer buyer calls all day on my listings and other agent's listings and I just don't see that they care who has the home listed. They never ask me is that a good agent? What is that company all about, etc...

They never ask me what commission the listing is paying and they don't ask me if the agent is a Realtor member of not or if the agent has been in the business very long.

Instead they ask about price, bedrooms, school district, basement or not and if it is a foreclosure.

What questions do you get asked?

Canadian Competition Board Interviews Me About Alternative Real Estate Choices

Out of the blue, I was contacted by the Canadian Bureau de la concurrence which is the The Canadian Competition Bureau. The Canadian Competition Bureau is the equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission or the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division in the United States. I was asked to be interviewed about minimum services in real estate just as I had been involved with the Georgia Real Estate Commissioner's Task force with the USDOJ. They wanted to know how my business model (Duffy Realty of Atlanta) works for both myself and for the client. They were very thorough and showed up with at least 4 pages of questions. The questions ranged from how I do things to how the customer responds in each instance. They came to my office for the interview and toured every department. Think of that, wow, they flew to Georgia to meet me - I really didn't think too much about this until afterwards. They said that they researched me on the Internet - amazing the resources out in the public today.

Apparently, the Canadian MLS boards have very strict rules about what you can and can not do as agent members regarding listings. The MLS boards there are owned by the Realtor Associations just like they are in the U.S. This was odd to me as we as agents and brokers should be regulated by the U.S. and state laws, not the MLS boards who simply supply the tools. I don't know how this has gotten so backwards. Well at least the DOJ is doing something about it now.

Anyway, all went well. They said that my real estate model would conform to the current rules of the Canadian MLS boards because we handle every aspect of the contract and we coach our clients on the selling side and that we appear to be as much of full service as any other full service company that they have in Canada or that they have researched in the U.S., although all of their interviews are confidential. We talked mainly about the selling side and briefly touched on the buying side and the buyer cash bonus that we give to our clients.

Thank you Canada for thinking of your consumers too! I personally appreciate all the work that the DOJ has done to protect consumers in the U.S. And I know that my clients appreciate it too. Saving over one billion dollars in listing commissions while getting a successful transaction done at the same time has really helped a lot of my clients with their personal transaction and help them uliminate their own personal recession.

We received this on Homefeedback about a listing that Steve Haas, a local real estate agent in Atlanta had shown. We actually send the feedback about showings to our clients. Keep in mind that Steve wrote this directly to my homeowner who is a licensee of my business model! Steve has bad timing too and seems to suffer from the old foot in the mouth syndrome that I get myself into sometimes.

His "feedback" that he left under Additional Comments about the house: You being a discount broker, I only show your properties when a client specifically requests to see one. My personal opinion from the past 10 years is that you charge 3% + junk fees and provide the buyer with zero guidance once listed.For an additional 2% sellers could have a fiduciary agent who can be held accountable and provide local insight and knowledge throuh the entire transaction including negotiations and marketing dollars.Website states how many homes you have sold but I would be curious about how many listings are pulled after having no success in selling. Trust me I am not bitter, I am just giving you my feedback as requested

My response: Steve:
Thanks for your "feedback" that you sent to my client regarding their home. In trusting you that you are not bitter, I want to get some clarification on a few things so that I can seriously consider your thoughts and see if I can make some improvement to my business, which I take is what you are attempting to give me as feedback.

I looked up fiduciary agent to make sure that I was not missing something in my clarification of it. This is what I found in the dictionary and in real estate law.

" A fiduciary is someone who has undertaken to act for and on behalf of another in a particular matter in circumstances which give rise to a relationship of trust and confidence."
A fiduciary duty is the highest standard of care at either equity or law. A fiduciary is expected to be extremely loyal to the person to whom they owe the duty (the "principal"): they must not put their personal interests before the duty, and must not profit from their position as a fiduciary, unless the principal consents. The fiduciary relationship is highlighted by good faith, loyalty and trust, and the word itself originally comes from the Latin fides, meaning faith, and fiducia.
When a fiduciary duty is imposed, equity requires a stricter standard of behavior than the comparable tortious duty of care at common law. It is said the fiduciary has a duty not to be in a situation where personal interests and fiduciary duty conflict, a duty not to be in a situation where their fiduciary duty conflicts with another fiduciary duty, and a duty not to profit from their fiduciary position without express knowledge and consent. A fiduciary cannot have a conflict of interest. It has been said that fiduciaries must conduct themselves "at a level higher than that trodden by the crowd" and that "[t]he distinguishing or overriding duty of a fiduciary is the obligation of undivided loyalty."

Your first statement in your note states: "You being a discount broker, I only show your properties when a client specifically requests to see one." Looking at the definition of a fiduciary agent as stated above, how does that fit the description of someone who is extremely loyal to the client and does not put their personal interest before a client? I know that when you are working for a client, the job of the agent is to find the best home for the client, no matter who has the house listed, and whether or not you like the person or concept that has the house listed. I take it by your passion in writing me that you work on behalf of your clients, yet your comments are putting your own personal interests of not liking discount brokers before your client's as you are not promoting discount broker's listings to your clients unless asked.

My other concern is that you are a Realtor member bound by the ethics of that association. One of the ethics is that you will not falsely state things about competitors. It seems by your stated conversations with your friends that you guys are just spouting information that you made up, and did not research specifically about me and my business. That is dangerous and a violation of competition law, and on a lesser note, the Realtor ethics. And, I know that you have not spent much time learning about my business model at Duffy Realty because if you had, you would know that we don't charge 3% + junk fees. We charge $500 plus .0034, just like all 10,000 of my listings have paid. Some have elected to rent a lockbox and get a virtual tour, but that is about all. No big secret here. No disclosures needed about hidden costs. These are the costs.

The seller is in charge of setting the commission that they want to pay a buyer's agent and most of them elect a 4% commission. This fee of $500.00 includes 70 points of marketing, most of which I pay a lot of money to medias to advertise my client's listing on. However, something that I don't think you are aware of, we do coach our clients 45 hours per week and have a contract negotiator on staff, in office, 7 days a week for 80+ hours. As a result of our expert in every department instead of a one-man show, we (Duffy and our seller clients) have sold over 7,000 listings in 7 years.

I pay $28,000 a year to add my clients to Realtor.com as a showcase listing because my clients and I believe it brings attention to their home - the ultimate statement of marketing. I then spend additional hundreds of thousands of dollars in website fees to add my homes to almost every home related site in the industry. These include Frontdoor, Zillow, Yahoo, Edgeio and more. My website alone receives over 1.5 million hits per month and most of those hits are buyers. Of course to manifest that type of hits, you know there is a cost of money and time involved.

I also promote my listings with directional signs, yard signs and heavy radio and TV advertising. As a matter of fact, my accountant just reported that I spent over $600,000 doing just that last year alone! I have spent millions of dollars and thousands of dollars over the last 7 years educating the public about houses for sale and real estate in general. That is something that most agents wouldn't dare spend their own personal resources doing. The reason that I believe agents won't spend their money and time is that a homeowner may not cooperate by lowering their price repeatedly and they may decide not to sell at all. I get that. I have heard that from agents like you and your friends at cocktail parties. I just disagree with the thinking.

My listings are posted on for sale by owner sites because there are 4 types of buyers out there and some just don't like agents. But more importantly, I give them rights to help me market their home to friends, family and neighbors and if an agent is not involved, they don't pay the buyer agent fee which happens at least one-third of the time. As a result many of my homeowners are much more involved in the process than other stagnant homeowners. For example, your 3 listings that you have encouraged to drop their price $50,000 dollars to almost $100,000 after they have expired over and over. What magic do you have to offer them? They have lost almost 15% of their equity and probably have exhausted all of yours and their ideas and still have not sold their home.

To you a price reduction means hundreds of dollars in a lowered commission. To the homeowner it means thousands of dollars and over 10% to 15% of their equity in price reductions alone. So the question is, how has your coaching of the Atlanta market helped them? They are still for sale and most likely won't like the offer that they get on their home because they are not only paying you 2.5% more to market their home than they would pay me and they have taken a significant price reduction.

Marketing is not the only place that my service beats yours. I have a 500-page customer website that helps my clients make rational decisions that they won't regret. When they want to lower their price we give them the pros and cons and teach them how to yield the highest spread of buyer searches by using the internet strategies that many agents, including yourself have not spent the money or time to learn. You see something I know for sure is that once a price is lowered, we can not take that action back. My thousands of hours of learning the internet has shown me that homes are archived in websites and that is very dangerous to a homeowner who has regret.

I understand your comment about the Atlanta market but I also know that neither you nor I have magic that we perform to get listings sold. We also don't make the ultimate decision about what a homeowner is willing to sell their home for and take as profit or a loss. So, whether a market is good or bad, our jobs are not rocket science, it really is simply a science of marketing in a shotgun, consistent approach. I think I go way beyond the call of duty to do this. As a matter of fact, one of my clients said today that I do far more than agents who charge far more.

One other comment that I am trying to wrap my head around is that you say another agent (or concept I think you mean) would be held accountable for the sale of the home. Do you mean that you pay your clients for their loss of time or money if you don't sell their home? Or if they decide that they want to go higher in price after you lose your listing and they are archived at that price? How exactly are you held accountable? Isn't the whole concept of the way that traditional brokerage is handled is based on some sell, some don't so you have to charge more to everyone based on the fact that you don't get paid on some?

As I revisited and re-read what a fiduciary relationship means I feel that my model is closer to the relationship that you were talking about than your model. You see our motives align with the seller. We have been paid for our marketing and can allow the seller to dictate their own strategy with our help. We are not in a rush to get to the lowest price possible and to exhaust all hope of selling so that we can move on to a "good" property with a motivated seller. We aren't asking our sellers to lower their price to their rock bottom costing them 10 to 15% of their equity and then taking a huge commission. We actually are loyal and giving them all the pros and cons with no bias to our outcome. I am just not sure if the other real estate models can say the same.

Thanks for the debate Steve. Maybe we can meet one day and really have a long conversation.
My goal in this message back to you is for you to see that I don't do my business model for the easy way out, I do it because I too, like you, believe in what I do for my clients. I appreciate that you have passion for what you do, that is what makes us care about the profession of real estate and I am proud to say that we have met.

Rhonda Duffy