After last week’s post about the top-five real estate related movies, I got a whole slew of emails from people telling me how exciting that was to read.

Is it the top-ten lists that people crave?  Or my incessant ramblings about non-real-estate-related topics?

Here is another Top-Ten list.

These are the top ten daily nuances that bother me about real estate…

#10: Lockboxes

If you’ve ever been out looking at properties with a Realtor, you know what I’m talking about.  Most of the time, the key to the condo or house is in a lockbox, and the Realtors get a page with a location of the lockbox and it’s combination.  Sounds simple?  It’s not.  I can’t tell you how many combined hours I’ve spent looking for lockboxes.  “LBX on door.”  What does this mean?  Which door?  The front door to the building?  The door to the unit?  “Key on Railing.”  WHAT RAILING?  Agents put lockboxes on the back of newspaper boxes out front of the building, on fences across the street, on the back door to the building, or in the underground parking!  And in the winter—-don’t get me started!  Why do people think that in -20 degree weather, putting a lockbox on a railing outside will not cause any problems?  “Does anybody have a cup of hot water?”

#9: Miscommunication

Real estate offices handle hundreds of appointments each day, and they’re bound to make a mistake.  But often, it can get you into trouble.  Last fall, I received this confirmation on my Blackberry: “APPT CONF. 123 Divadale TMR 9:30AM LBX 2234 ALM CODE.”  Decipher these hieroglyphics and you’ll see that my appointment was confirmed for 123 Divadale tomorrow at 9:30AM, and the lockbox code followed.  However, I was unsure as to whether the alarm code was the same, since they gave only ONE code.  Luckily, this was an inspection and not a showing, so my clients were not present.  I opened the front door, the alarm started buzzing, and I entered 2-2-3-4.  The alarm continued to buzz.  I tried again, and within 60 seconds, the alarm sounded at full volume, and five minutes later, the police arrived.  I smiled, and told them “Don’t worry, I’m the Realtor who is showing this house.”  They responded, “Where are your clients?”  I told them that I was actually just inspecting the house as I’d be showing it tomorrow.  They looked at eachother, then told me to provide my ID and business card.  I told them it was in my car, and they said “HOLD IT RIGHT THERE.”  I guess it’s inconceivable that somebody could show up at a house with a vaccuum and a host of cleaning products and pretend to be the cleaning-lady in case they got caught breaking in, so these cops were just doing their due dilligence.  In any event, if you book thirty appointments a week, one or two may get messed up in the process…

#7: Double-Bookings

Sometimes, you show up for a viewing and there is another agent there at the same time—a double booking.  It happens, especially on a popular property.  But what really gets me is when the agent inside refuses to let you and your clients inside at the same time.  Come on!  Are they afraid we are going to say negative things about the property and their own clients will hear?  If you’re in sales, you should be able to overcome that, if it ever did happen.  Another thing that gets me is when the agent inside the property is holding the key, and they are on their way out of the house/condo, then they ask you for your business card in exchange for the key.  This is their way of checking to see that you are, in fact, a Realtor.  A few weeks ago, this happened to me.  A young agent (wearing jeans!) asked for my business card.  I said I didn’t have one.  He replied, “You don’t?”  I said, “No, I’m not in real estate.  I just put on this shirt and tie today, and hired this professional actor here to pretend to be my client.  Then we followed you guys around all day so we could con our way into the unit after you and throw a party.”  He looks at me, and says, “Really?”  “NO, NOT REALLY!  GIMME THE DAMN KEY!”  That’s how that one ended…

#6: “Pickup key at 123 Adelaide East”

Majority of the time, the keys are either in a lockbox, or at the concierge/security in a condominium.  But once every so often, you get a page that reads “APPT CONF. Pickup key @ 123 Fake Street.”  Maybe the building has no concierge, and they don’t allow lockboxes.  Whatever the reason, I once booked an appointment for a downtown condo and they wanted me to pickup the key in Scarborough.  Suffice it to say, I cancelled that showing.  Even last week I booked an showing at 109 Front Street, and they paged me to pickup the key at Brad Lamb Realty on King Street West near Bathurst.  The problem is that 90% of the time, you are not showing one unit but rather manyunits, and you move from condo to condo or house to house.  To take a side-trip five KM on the other side of downtown during daytime traffic is just not an option.  So why to the Realtors leave keys for pickup at their offices?  Laziness?  Indifference?  I don’t know.  But as Damon Wayans said on In Living Color: “Homey don’t play that.”  And neither will I.

#5: Part-time Staff

Every real estate office in the city has this problem.  At my office, our day staff is amazing.  Our head receptionist has been here for over twenty years, and is the sweetest old lady.  Our other girls are amazing, and their work is flawless.  But once 5PM hits, they leave, and the children come in.  Yes, hire a bunch of after-school, grade-ten girls to hold down the fort of a multi-million-dollar operation.  We have gone through about two dozen of these skilled-labourers since I’ve been at this office, and about 95% of them are the same.  They play on Facebook while reading Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and feel so hard-done-by when they have to answer the phone.  I once came upstairs at 6:30PM to the sound of “Riding Dirty” by Chamillionaire  on the radio and found a sideways-hat-wearing skater-kid sitting in the head receptionist chair.  The young girl that was working that night did her best impression of an adult and said, “Ohhh…David, this is my boyfriend, Bryce.”  I said, “Hi Bryce.  Get the F*ck out of here.”  From 5PM to 8PM across the city, we real estate agents are at the mercy of teenage girls…

#4: “To Co-Operating Broker: 2.5% – $150 Markting Fee”

For those that don’t know, a ‘typical’ real estate commission is 5.0%, of which 2.5% goes to the listing (selling) agent and 2.5% goes to the co-operating (buying) agent.  If the commission is 4.0%, the co-operating broker stillgets 2.5%, and the selling agent now would get only 1.5%.  If the co-operating broker is going to get any less than 2.5%, he’ll just show and sell one of the hundreds of other properties out there that offers 2.5%!  In any event, so many of the properties on TorontoMLS offer a commission of “2.5% – $150 marketing fee” and I just don’t understand why.  Is $150 really that much in the grand scheme of things?  Let’s take an example of a standard $549,000 house.  The commission payable to the co-operating agent would be $13,725.  So minus the $150, and it’s “only” $13,575.   A simple question: what is the point?  Why do agents do this?  Why don’t they pay for their own “marketing fees” with their own huge commissions?  Is $150 really that much to them?  I’ve seen $50 marketing fees subtracted from commissions on million-dollar houses!  It’s just silly…

#3: Junkmail

Now that I live in a condo, I check my mailbox about once a week.  And every week, it is filled to the brim with flyers for pizza, grocery stores, gyms, and real estate agents.  Now don’t get me wrong, I advertise….from time to time.  But even though I’m in this industry, I still get frustrated when I open my mailbox and get flyers from twenty different Realtors.  When I was living in a house in Leaside, it was not uncommon to get 5-6 flyers from Realtors in the same day!  A friend of mine lives in Lawrence Park, and he told me that one day he got five flyers from Realtors.  I told him that wasn’t uncommon, and he replied “Nuh-no…I got five flyers from Realtors….at your company!”  Wow, that’s really pushing it eh?  Five flyers in one day, all from agents at the same company.  You can only sell your property once, yet you get about two hundred flyers each year from Realtors, on average.  Yes, I see the irony here, that I work in real estate and I’m complaining about the junkmail…

#2: “Property has been leased”

Time is money, et cetera, et cetera.  I waste precious minutes a day and hours a week calling to schedule appointments for properties that have already been sold or leased.  The formula is the same every time: I have a list of properties I’d like to show to my client tomorrow starting at 5PM, so today I’ll make appointments for these properties and space them out between 5PM and 7:30PM.  I have eight properties I’d like to show my client.  In the case of properties for lease I would estimate that over 60% of the time, you call the company that has listed the property, and they say “I’m sorry, but that property has been leased.”  Depending on my mood that day, I may or may not yell into the phone: “THEN GET IT OFF MLS!!”  It’s so frustrating, but what’s even worse is that I KNOW agents intentionally leave properties on MLS after they have been leased so they can solicit calls/leads off the public-MLS (www.mls.ca) which is linked to our MLS system.  Yes, it’s a dirty business sometimes.  I had a case a few months ago where my client was desperate to see this bungalow in Scarborough.  Every time I called to make an appointment, they would say “No showings at this time.”  I called the agent over and over with no return-call, and finally I called the BROKER!  To my surprise, the broker couldn’t have cared less.  Two months went by, with the “FOR SALE” sign on the lawn, and they wouldn’t allow me to show the property.  So I anonymously reported both the agent and the broker to the Toronto Real Estate Board.  They subsequently took the sign down the following week…

#1: No Photo Available

How many times do we log onto TorontoMLS and see a brand new property on the market….with no picture.  I mean, forget NINE pictures, which is the maximum you can upload, and the most common way of doing it, but what about ZERO?  What is this Realtor doing?  And more importantly: why would anybody hire this person?  Usually, it’s the same agents or brokerages that do this.  Perhaps this is a discount real estate company and you get what you pay for.  But how do you sell a product without providing information about that product?  More common, is for a listing to have a profile picture, 95% of the time it’s the outside of the house, which is fine, but in terms of condos, the outside of the building will not impact our decision.  We need interior pictures of the UNIT that we’ll be buying/selling!  How can you provide ONE photo of the building and then ZERO photos of the unit?  Why to Realtors think that when they do this, people will rush to show their property?  How do I know that this unit doesn’t have a chalk-outline of a body on the kitchen floor and graffiti on the walls?  Show me the product!  Give me photos!  How hard is it to go and view the property?  The issue here is that many out-of-town Realtors get listings in downtown Toronto.  An agent from Ajax might just find a stock photo of the building, and upload the listing without EVER going to see the unit in person, thus no photos!  How lazy is that?  If you are a consumer, and you are paying this agent 5% to sell your unit, what are you getting for your money?  It never fails to amaze me how consumers believe they save money going with a discount agent or a friend of a friend from out of Toronto, and in the end it can cost them tens of thousands of dollars when selling their house or condo…