Have you ever called somebody, and upon them answering the phone, you start talking and just go, go, go, until suddenly, they interject and say, “Sorry, I”m on the other line, can I call you back?”

How embarrassing!  Right?  Had you known they were waiting to cut you loose, you wouldn’t have rambled on and on!  But that person didn’t want to be rude and just interrupt you, so they let you say your piece.

On Saturday morning, I received a text message from a client that said, “David, can you please call me when you have a moment?”

Good timing, I thought, since I had to call her, and inform her that the property she wanted to see had sold the night before after only five hours on the market.

But when she answered the phone, I didn’t have a chance to tell her about the sale before she began, “We were thinking about this house, and it really, really checks a lot of boxes, we’re super excited…” and continued to describe her emotions for a home that she would never be able to see, let alone purchase.

“Gotta stop you right there,” I chimed in.  “The house sold last night.”

Then silence.

Those silences are quite common right nowadays.  They last about six seconds, during which time the person first re-hears what I said, then processes it, then realizes the repercussions, and only then provides an exasperation of some sort.

“Well that fucking sucks,” my client said, although I’m double-checking my memory back to see if she swore, and I’d better be sure, because she reads this blog.

The situation deserved a swear-word.  In fact, it deserved more than just one.

This house came onto the market on Friday in the late afternoon, and by the time my client and I had touched base about it, little did we know, it had already sold.  There were showings on this property for every half-hour time slot until the 9pm cut-off, and a buyer had made an offer sight-unseen.  Can’t get a showing?  No problem!   Just buy the house from looking at the photos.  It’s only two-million dollars!

As I wrote last week, bully offers are quite prevalent in our market right now, and you’d almost have to expect that any decent house is going to attract a pre-emptive bid.  Will that house or condo actually sell before offer night?  Good question, and it’s one you have to ask yourself as a buyer if you don’t want to lose out.

However, and this is a big ‘however,’ if you’re a buyer out there, you also need to know that your agent knows how to participate in this really tough market climate.  At the risk of throwing an overwhelming majority of the real estate industry under the bus (for a change…) I’d like to divulge that a lot of buyer agents out there have absolutely no clue what they’re doing.

I currently have two listings, each of which will end up with over one-hundred showings, and each of these listings has solicited about thirty inquiries either by email or on the phone.  Call me a jerk for saying this, but I can tell within ten seconds of speaking to an agent whether or not they have any hope of buying this property with their clients.  It’s a tough market, folks.  I can’t possibly explain this for those of you who aren’t involved and are just looking.  But really, truly, this is as tough a market for buyers right now as ANY I have ever seen.  So when a buyer agent calls me and asks where the garbage chute is located, I’m sorry, but I know this agent won’t be in the running…

Last week, I had a few interesting phone calls as far as bully offers are concerned.

You, the readers, who are likely not as jaded and cynical as I am, might side with the person on the other end of the line, but that’s fine.  You’re just a more optimistic, kinder, better person than I am, and you like to give people the benefit of the doubt.

But I don’t.  I can’t.  I simply do not have the time.

I’m a real estate agent and my loyalties are to the seller.  It’s not within my purview to teach uneducated agents how the industry works.

An agent called me late on Wednesday night and said, “We saw your listing at XX Street, we want to do a bully offer.”

I said, “Great,” and then waited for a response, but none came.  Just silence.

Eventually, the silence was filled by an almost comical, “Sooooo…….?”

You know where this is going, right?  I feel like I’ve written this exact blog post before.  In fact, I know I have.

“So, bring me something, and I’m happy to present it to the seller,” I told the other agent.

That’s when a pronounced sigh could be heard on the other end of the line, although I don’t think it was directed at me, but rather just an admission on behalf of this agent that she didn’t really know what to do next.

“I don’t work this area,” she told me in a rare moment of honesty.  “I’ve never done a bully offer before.  I’m hoping you can give me some guidance.”

This is where you, the readers, often suggest that either, a) I should help this agent, because it’s what a good person would do, or b) I need to work on behalf of my seller, and that means coaching this buyer agent through a process she’s not familiar with in order to produce an offer.

The truth is: I know from experience that this agent is not going to have the winning ticket, so there’s no point in doing her job for her, even if it meant “working on behalf of my client.”  I had already received two bully offers on the listing at this point, both of which were not offers my seller was going to entertain.  So did I really need to guide this agent’s hand to produce a third?

“You need to discuss this with your manager,” I told the agent.  “Call your manager, and he or she can walk you through the process.”

Amazingly, she said, “We don’t really have a manager; there’s nobody I can really ask about this sort of stuff.  We’re more of an online, sort of work-at-home firm,” she explained.  And that’s surely a topic for another day: how the business models in real estate are helping to breed agents who have no clue what they’re doing, but I’ll stop short of making this into an advertisement for a traditional brokerage model.

So, I decided perhaps I could turn this into a teachable moment after all, and I said, “Well, then that tells you all you need to know about your firm, doesn’t it?  There are a lot of other business models out there, and you might benefit from looking into a brokerage with on-site management, new agent training, mentorship, ongoing learning, and more.”  And then, I told her I had to take another call, which was true, and that I would look at an offer if she brought one.

Call me callous, if you want.  But then I’ll tell you to quit your job and go work for Greenpeace.

Part of the reason I took this path was because, only moments earlier, I had taken a similar call, and I spent a considerable amount more time on this one…

Imagine the exact same preamble as the call I just described, only this time, the agent asked me, “What do I need to do?”

Being a little fresher, and feeling a little nicer, I decided I would play.  Not wasting any time, I got directly to the point and said, “You need four things: a bank draft, an unconditional offer, a price that my seller simply cannot turn down, and a long enough irrevocable period that I don’t piss off the other sixty agents who have shown the property.”

What happened next was a systematic, point-by-point breakdown of the advice I had offered, but that also served as a systematic, point-by-point explanation of why this agent, and many like him, are unprepared to work in this market.

“Well, I can’t get a deposit cheque for you,” he said.  “It’s 7:30pm and the banks are going to close soon.”

I wanted to explain to him that if he was a good agent, he’d have already told his clients to get a bank draft in advance.  That’s what good agents do.  But I didn’t have time, because he continued…

“And I can’t bring you an unconditional offer because, obviously, we would need our clients’ lawyer to look at the status certificate, and to be honest, I don’t know that they’re comfortable moving forward without their bank approving this sale.”

Again, I wanted to suggest that a good agent may already be familiar with this building and the finances, and/or have downloaded a copy of the status certificate from MLS, where I always upload it.  I would also have added that there’s no such thing as “a bank approving the sale,” which is just jargon.  Banks don’t even do pre-approvals anymore.  They just tell you what you can afford, and they never send out appraisers until after you’ve purchased.

But again, he was on a roll…

“As for the price, I would need some direction from you on this, as my client doesn’t want to overpay.”

This was amazing for so many reasons.  First of all, since when is it my job to tell another agent’s client what to offer?  Secondly, why would I help the buyer avoid over-paying?  Why is this on me?  Aren’t I in the exact opposite position?  My cynical side says that a buyer with this particular agent is never going to overpay, since that buyer will never be successful with an offer in this market.

Then he completed the quad-fecta by telling me…

“We’d give you like, an hour for this offer.  We don’t want to risk anybody else coming in and competing.”

Of course!  Ignore the scales and the direction each side is tipping, why don’t you?

This is so prevalent in today’s market!  Buyer agents act like they have more than just a leg to stand on; many think they’re atop the goddam CN Tower.  I had an agent tell me on Sunday, “We may not come back on offer night, you know,” after he sent in a pre-emptive that wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

We don’t want to risk anybody else coming in and competing.  Well of course you don’t!  But you don’t have that luxury in this market, and you don’t have any leverage to avoid that scenario.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that this agent did have a bank draft in hand, and his offer was unconditional, and the price was way, way beyond anything in the realm of possibilities in this crazy 2021 market (which can’t be defined, since it’s seemingly infinite…), then, and only then could I consider entertaining a one-hour irrevocable, but I would have to personally call every single agent that showed the property, after emailing them all first.

But none of that happened, since this guy was talking nonsense all along.

“I can’t work with a pre-emptive offer in one hour; the other agents who showed this property would eat me for lunch,” I told him.

“Well, that’s your problem,” he said, simply ensuring I would never look for his face in a crowd of buyer agents on offer night.

Now, aside from the idea that I refuse to sully my relationship with sixty buyer agents, which sounds self-serving in the immediate short-term, but goes a long way for every other buyer and seller client I work with in the long-run, let’s talk about this idea of who’s problem it is.

My problem, so says this other agent.

My problem.

Only, it’s not my problem.  I have no problem.  I have, not a care in the world!

For, you see, I have a listing.  That’s what I have.

And those other agents all have buyers.

I work with both buyers and sellers, FYI.  But I’m merely proving a point in this instance.

Sixty buyer agents out there, and only one will get the sale of this property.   And yet, agents like the one I’m describing above say things like, “That’s your problem,” not realizing who has the upper hand here.  They’re absolutely oblivious!

I sold a house last week and I spent five full days kissing the listing agent’s ass.  Two phone calls per day, without fail.  Talking business, talking life, talking marriage and kids.  And on offer night, when I had the second-highest offer, who do you think he looked for?

All over the city right now, there are buyer agents who are running around like chickens with their heads cut off.  They don’t know which way is up, and which way is down.  They don’t know how to work with bully offers, and when they attempt to present them, they actually make their situation worse by getting in their own way.

Far be it for me to tell any buyer or buyer agent how to structure their own offering, but if you want to be successful with a bully offer, there are prerequisites.  Complain about the process, complain about the market, complain about prices, but don’t complain about what works and what doesn’t.  I didn’t invent this.  I’m merely trying to tell you how long to make your cord when you bungee-jump off that bridge, so I’m shocked when people fault me for it.

If you’re a buyer, you simply have to look at things from the seller’s perspective before you act, otherwise you’re dreaming.

As I asked another agent today during yet another teachable moment, “Do you think we won’t see this price again on offer night?  Do you think there’s no chance we see this price?  Like, none?  Because if there is a chance, or better yet, a certainty, then why would we accept this bully offer?”

I further explained that even if our downside was, say, $10,000, our upside on offer night could be $100,000.  He and his buyers simply must consider this before they submit their bully offer, unless their plan is simply to run around the city making lowball bully offers to see if they catch anybody napping, which is really the only justification for the naivety that’s displayed out there right now.

Every time I write a blog post like this, readers comment and say, “David, why do you care?  What are you complaining for?  Doesn’t the presence of poor agents make your job easier?  Would you be where you are today if not for all these agents?”

Great questions, and very true.  All of it.

But believe it or not, I have a heart, and I feel awful for all the buyers out there with inadequate representation.  They will simply never buy.  They can’t.  Their agents won’t let them.

I’m sorry, but when an agent sends me a text message saying, “What is your email address?” I’m pretty confident that this agent won’t have the winning bid on offer night.  For the record – every agent’s email address is prominently featured on the MLS listing, but there’s also this thing called Google.  The questions I receive, and the discussions I have, consistently leave me feeling bad for buyers out there.

And the worst part is: the buyers never know.  They just keep reading the headlines about the hot market, and they lick their wounds, and lament how tough it is.

But do those buyers know that their agents have no idea how bully offers work in today’s market?

How could they?

But like anything else, it’s up to the consumer of a good or service to determine the product, brand, or service-provider, whether they’re buying running shoes online or taking their car into an auto-body shop to be repaired.  They may never know if they actually received value for their time and money, whether that value is absolute or relative.

It pains me to see buyers out there today having a tough time, because so much of it is avoidable.

And come Mid-May, how many of them will still be out there, pounding the pavement?