What Happened to Ethics in Real Estate?

I love real estate! I have been a full-time real estate broker for 30 years. I am one of the lucky ones, or so it seems to some agents. I spent my career building a reputation for being honest and trustworthy. I have a core base of fabulous clients who recommend me to their friends, kids and relatives. Real estate is my passion. So you can imagine how disheartened I am about the state of the real estate industry. Not just the fact that the price of a great house has plummeted or that so many people have lost their homes to foreclosure; it is the nature of the business itself that I am now worried about. 

It has been said that he who controls the information wins. And in real estate, agents no longer control the information. I have to admit that we were scared of the Internet when we first lost control of the information to buyers. But in the end, it became an asset instead of a liability. It has helped us spend less time driving people around only to discover that they don't like the house after seeing it. It still happens, but not as much as it use to.. So what am I complaining about?

It use to be that when an agent listed a house, the seller's contact number would be listed in the FMLS and when a buyers agent wanted to show the house, then the buyer's agent would call the seller to make an appointment; the seller wanting to sell their house always made it easy for the buyers agent to show their house.

Now comes the greedy agent: trying to appear that they are giving good service to the seller by not allowing the buyers agents to call the sellers directly to make an appointment. Instead, the buyers agent has to call the listing agent to make an appointment and the sellers agent will then call the sellers to make the appointment and then call the buyers agent back. Huh? Whew, that made me dizzy! Why does this make sense to anyone? The flaw in the plan is this: the sellers agent, themselves.

They are almost never available, they won't call back in a timely manner and in most cases it is the next day before they call you back and your buyer is now so frustrated that they don't want to to see the house. Some agents won't call you after 7 p.m. or before 9 a.m. and mostly they never call on Saturdays or Sundays. I am not even going to go into the agents who can't text.

To sum this up: If you are listing your house with an agent, don't fall for that mess. The agent is only trying to give themselves a reason to talk to the seller and they are trying to control the information. Sellers want constant dialogue with their agent, so this makes sense to the listing agent, but it is a big problem in this industry and it is not helping you sell your house.  

However, I give you this caveat: The above does not pertain to all agents, but if your house is not being shown, then test the theory.  Ask an agent to call your listing agent and see what happens.