Selling Agents

I should state this before I get into it: If you are seeing this via my Facebook, you are NOT part of the problem, you are not what I'm disliking here. Otherwise, I wouldn't have accepted your friend request.

I used to work in the title insurance industry.  I worked in the customer service department, and my primary job was creating flyers and postcards for real estate agents.

I'm naturally a very cynical man, but this job made me very cynical in specific directions:  Real Estate Agents in particular.

What I didn't know at that point - and didn't bother to learn - was that there really are two types of agent.  There are Seller's Agents and Buyer's Agents.  The Buyer's Agents are trying to find a home for their clients.  The Seller's Agents are trying to help their clients offload their houses.

The agents would bring me terrible photos of these absolute shitholes and expect me to make it look good - and sometimes I could. But all too often, the house just ... wasn't good. And I couldn't make it look good.

I learned all the lingo.  Even today, when I'm looking at listings, I'm seeing the same terminology that makes me cringe. "This house is convenient to Freeways, Shopping, Transit," for example, means "This house is under the overpass. There is a bus stop right in front of the house, and you can visit the Salvation Army that is less than a block away. You will never sleep due to the road noise because traffic in front of the house is non-stop."

"Step-saver Kitchen," means "You can fit yourself in there. Probably. Provided you don't want to actually move around at all."  "Newly updated," means "We slapped a fresh coat of paint on the interior." "Renovated" means "We gutted it and put walls where walls have no business being." "Remodeled" means "We took the renovation and made it MORE renovated!"

By the end of my years doing that, I could just about write ad copy in my sleep.

The worst part of the job, though, wasn't trying to write ad copy for these "houses."  It wasn't trying to make rat-infested pestholes look appealing. It was dealing with the agents who had accepted the responsibility for selling them.

You know how people view used car salesmen?  I have a dimmer view of most of the seller's agents.

Two days ago, I saw a Form 17 for the first time in close to a decade. It just reminded me of a co-worker at the Title Company who was selling her house. The realtor asked her about crime in the area, and she started to answer.  He stopped her. "If I know," he said, "I have to disclose it."  Here's the secret about the Form 17: You only need to disclose what you know about. If a seller can conceivably play dumb, they often will play dumb.

The form we saw said "Windows to be replaced," and, when we viewed the house again a few days later, some of the windows had been replaced - but not all of them. And they hadn't planned to replace all of them, either.

I know that with the economy being what it is, it's next to impossible to make a living strictly as a Buyer's Agent. The agent we're working with, for example, is awesome.  She's really neat and very enthusiastic. And she does work as a Seller's Agent, too. Mostly for folks she helped into those homes in the first place.

It's the Seller's Agent's job to play along with the seller as much as possible.

And encourage other folks to buy the home by making it look good.

I'm okay with that.  But when the seller's agent starts to suggest ways to fulfill the letter of the rules while leaving the spirit of them behind ... well ... it felt really deceptive, and by the end I really didn't want to be a part of it.

And now I'm not.

And that's probably a good thing.