Slimy Realtors Made It Hard for Other Brokers
(post by Dee) This song is getting old. Everywhere I go, people have negative opinions about Realtors. Resistance to use them. They are lazy, shady, and don’t earn their commissions. “What do they do? I can do all of it myself. They will do anything to get your business, and don’t service clients. They are all crooks and greedy slime-balls!” They come late, don’t return phone calls, bring bad tenants, low offers… Aaaaaah!!! What the hell is going on? How am I supposed to earn a living when all the ones that came before me seem to have earned us poor reputation? From the very beginning I knew it was going to be un uphill battle. About a month after getting my real estate sales license, I told an old buddy from my gym that I was now selling and renting real estate. “YOU are a Broker” he asked in disbelief, with grimace on his face and a cringe in his voice. Holy crap! What did I get myself into?, I thought immediately. The best I could get out of some folks was that their Realtors were “all right”, sort of a necessary evil. Last week I mention all this to an apartment seeker. A well-mannered, soft spoken dude says: “Well, yeah, I don’t have a positive opinion about brokers. They are not my favorite people.” He tells me this straight up, like I am supposed to understand. WTF?! This business is an uphill battle. Before you even get to sell your services, you first have to convince the world that your profession is not a scam and a waste of their money. Fun, fun, fun!
Though of the day: Am I dedicated enough to deal with this crap?
Comment by laurie mindnich on 8 October 2008:
Dedication, at least in NY, is what it’s going to take if you want this attitude to be manageable. That, while concurrently putting your energy into fixing the problem- buyers are eventually sellers, and those buyers who found themselves unrepresented in NY, and on the short end of having bought a horrible market, are pissed.
How, as a new seller, can they possibly be OK with the real estate contingent, when there’s a vague feeling of having been “set up” to the extent that they didn’t have any representation in a purchase? Even though it may well have been available to them? No value in their initial transaction.
That this wasn’t the intention of the real estate community is irrelevant, if it is the perspective of home sellers/buyers.
Start representing the first link, so that when they move on the chain, they’ve had what to them is an ethical experience.