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The lies that Realtors tell
posted Wednesday, 8 March 2006
Here’s a national ad, copyright 2005, by the National Association of Realtors:
For sale by owner?
Not this owner.
If you’re totally comfortable giving up evenings, weekends and privacy to meet with potential buyers, by all means, sell your own home. But sooner or later, you’ll realize that you need someone who’s done this before, someone who adheres to a strict code of ethics. So, when selling your home, make sure you get an agent. And make sure that agent is a REALTOR®
What a complete crock!
If potential buyers are going to want to see your house on evenings and weekends, you can bet your boots it will bite into your schedule and privacy; real estate agent or no real estate agent. You’ll have strange people, accompanied by agents you never meet, snooping around inside your house while you’re at work. Inevitably, your dinner will be interrupted more than once by someone phoning from your agent’s office to say that Sally Soandso from SuchandSuch Realty is calling from her car, parked in your driveway. She has “highly qualified” buyers who need to see the house right now. In reality, Sally has just shown them some overpriced listing of her own, and on the way back to the office to try to “close” them on a sale, figures she can show them how much better a deal the other house is, compared to yours.
More aggravating will be the ones who schedule an appointment and never show. There’s a special corner in Hell waiting for them.
Soon, “your” agent will suggest holding an open house. She’ll schedule it for some Saturday or Sunday when you’d hoped to spend a quiet day at home, and you will have to dream up somewhere to kill a few hours, so as not to be in the way, or say something embarrassing.
Come the day of the open house, signs will spring up at every corner between your driveway and the nearest Interstate highway. At least one of them will get shoved into the flower bed of that neighbor who is always provoking your kids. The nearer to the house, the more balloons will be tied to the directional signs, until it looks like someone hijacked a kids’ birthday party from Chuck E. Cheese.
There will be a knock at the door, and you will hand over custody of your house to some salesperson you’ve never met before. “Sara asked me to cover her open house for her.”
You’ll drive to the nearest mall—the one you really hate, but you don’t want to waste gas—and walk around for three hours. No point in buying anything: the real estate agent has been bugging you to get rid of some of your clothing and shoes since Day One. So you hang out at the food court, get grossed out by the piercings on the kids who work there, eat one of those big cookies, have a cappuccino, and return home with a caffeine and sugar buzz, only to find Cindy the real estate agent left two hours early because nobody was coming by. As if that’s not bad enough, it started raining, and this dim bulb left all her directional signs, which look downright depressing now that the helium balloons are deflating.
Yup. You certainly want to shell out six or seven percent of your sale price for that kind of “professional” service.
We’ll deal with the fallacious notion that Realtors are professionals, and their pointless code-of-ethics some time soon.
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