I’ve been going to the same barber now for four years.

I met him just before the pandemic and, honestly, I wouldn’t go anywhere else.

While my “OG” barber, Leo, cut my hair for thirty years, from my first haircut through Leo’s retirement around 2012 or 2013, I started going to another classic Italian barber thereafter.

At the time, I prioritized expediency over quality.  These guys described themselves as “the kings of the five-minute haircut,” only as my wife explained, it showed!

But all I was concerned about was my time.

I could head over, get in, get out, and get back to the office quickly!

Leo was great.  I loved Leo.  But when I was in high school, I’d leave class at the end of the day and rush over to his shop in Sunnybrook Plaza, and if I dilly-dallied in the halls or by the lockers, I’d get to Leo’s and find three other kids already waiting!  That meant I’d be there for ninety minutes, waiting!

When I was younger and I went for a haircut with my dad and my brother, it was a production.  We would wait, often for an hour or more, then after Neil and I got our haircuts, my dad would enter the chair for an epic haircut, shave, massage, and nap.  The whole production took three hours.

So in my early-thirties, it was speed that mattered most.

And that’s why I went to the “guys” who could cut my hair quickly and efficiently and get me back to work before even I knew I was gone.

But then one day, you see the error of your ways.

You come back to the office to an absolute uproar of laughter and ridicule.

Sadly, despite your prioritizing time over quality, you realize that you can’t go around looking like this:

Then a friend of yours says, “You should go to Bayview and see my pal, Yusif.  He’s incredible.”

So you do.

And after the very first trip to his shop, you realize you should have started doing this a long time ago.

I will admit: I’m not price sensitive here.  Whether a haircut is $25 or $50, I don’t care.  It’s a 100% difference but I look at the absolute cost, not the relative cost.

But when you add it all up, it’s truly a case of “you get what you pay for.”

I was never one to think of a haircut as “an experience,” but as I get older, perhaps the idea of getting a fantastic haircut in a beautiful shop a bit slower, versus a shitty haircut in a run-down shop quickly, seems to become much more appealing.

I was having this conversation with Yusif the other day.  He said that, from time to time, a guy would poke his head in the door and ask, “How much do you charge?”  Yusif would tell the man, and then he’d scoff and say, “I think I’ll go up the street.”

But “up the street” isn’t the same service, experience, or end result.

I told this to Yusif and he said, “But it’s just like your business too.  In fact, it’s like every business.”

Touché.

Some people just don’t see it that way.

A cheaper haircut will result in you going home to shower, or at the very least, going out to the sidewalk and frantically rubbing your scalp to get all the small hairs to fall to the ground and not into your shirt collar, thereby making you itch for the rest of the day.  Most guys know what it’s like to head back to the office and use a lint roller to get those prickly hairs off your neck…

A cheaper haircut doesn’t use lather and a straight razor on the sideburns, behind the ears, and at the back of the neck, thereby making it cleaner but also making sure it doesn’t grow back as quickly.

A cheaper haircut doesn’t provide after-shave, hair tonic, grooming spray, moisture mist, paste, mousse, gel, or putty, among other things.  Although they might douse your neck with white powder…

I cheaper haircut uses nothing but clippers, and you can’t cut every person’s hair the same way.  A barber who doesn’t use scissors isn’t a barber.  Hard stop.

Oh, and might I add: being able to book a time for your haircut from your phone holds value.  No more heading over to the shop and praying that there aren’t six guys sitting inside, reading a newspaper from last month, all waiting their turn.

But what do I know?

Some people don’t see a difference.

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this then perhaps you too might not see a difference either.

All businesses and all industries can fall within the analogy of a good haircut versus a bad one, and real estate is no different.

There are good real estate agents and bad real estate agents.  There are good listings and bad listings.  There is good marketing and bad marketing.  And there is good strategy and bad strategy.

But the common theme in all of this is that it’s the consumer that made the initial decision to hire the agents involved.

As with any bad product or service, it’s the consumer that gets the ball rolling.  Whether a person decides to buy a sandwich off a sketchy food truck instead of going across the street to a deli, or whether a person decides to fly Sunwing or Swoop instead of United or Air Canada, the decision always rests with the consumer.

Let me show you a property that is now, amazingly, on its tenth listing:

Even more amazing is that if you go back and look at when the owners bought this property, you can see a great example of how the market is always susceptible to volatility.

This house was listed on August 29th, 2020 for $1,089,000 and remained on the market for 93 days until the listing was terminated on December 1st, 2020.

Conceivably, this house could have been purchased for, what, say, $1,050,000?  Being on the market for 93 days at $1,089,000, there probably weren’t any takers at that price.

And yet only four months later, the house sold for $1,200,000 in competition.  That’s a 14.2% increase in value in four months.

That merely sets the table for what comes next.

Let’s look at all ten of these listings in greater detail than what is shown above, since the “List Price,” for example, doesn’t show how the prices have changed within that listing, and there are also multiple firings of listing agents too…

Listing #1:

The property is listed for $1,429,999 on March 25th, 2022.

There is an offer date of March 31st.

Offer day passes.  The price is increased by $450,000 to $1,880,000.

The commission is increased from 2.5% to 3.0%.

The listing is terminated on April 27th, 2022.

–

Listing #2:

The property is listed for $1,199,000 on April 27th, 2022.

There is an offer date of May 4th, 2022.

The property is sold conditional on inspection.

The listing is terminated on May 7th, 2022.

–

Listing #3:

The property is listed for $1,199,000 on May 6th, 2022.

There is an offer date of May 16th, 2022.

The listing is updated to say “Offers Any Time” on May 18th, but the price is not changed.

The listing is terminated on May 20th, 2022.

–

Listing #4:

New listing agent – the second.

The property is listed for $1,349,000 on May 26th, 2022.

The commission is 3.0%.

There is an offer date of June 3rd, 2022.

The offer date is changed to June 6th.

The offer date passes.

The listing is not updated for thirty days, remaining at $1,349,000 with a June 6th offer date, well into July.

The listing is terminated on July 7th, 2022.

–

Listing #5:

The property is listed for $1,600,000 on July 7th, 2022.

The commission is 3.0%.

The listing is terminated on August 2nd, 2022.

–

Listing #6:

The property is listed for $1,449,000 on August 3rd, 2022.

The commission is 3.0% on MLS but the Brokerage Remarks say, “35 Commission” which is a typo, or isn’t it?  Does that mean 3.5% commission?  It’s never updated.

The listing is terminated on August 15th, 2022.

–

Listing #7:

New listing agent – the third.

The property is listed for $1,190,000 on September 26th, 2022.

There is an offer date of October 3rd, 2022.

The offer date passes.

The listing is not updated for three weeks, and the price remains at $1,190,000 with a September 26th offer date, well into October.

The price is increased to $1,498,000 on October 24th, 2022.

The listing expires on November 27th, 2022.

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Listing #8:

New listing agent – the fourth.

The property is listed for $1,788,000 on March 29th, 2023.

The listing is terminated on May 24th, 2023.

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Listing #9:

New listing agent – sort of.  The first listing agent, back in 2022, joins forces with the current listing agent, making this the fifth iteration of listing agent(s).

The property is listed for $1,488,888 on June 2nd, 2023.

There is an offer date of June 9th, 2023.

The offer date is changed to June 12th, 2023.

The offer date passes.

The listing is not updated and the property remains for sale for $1,488,888 with a June 12th offer date, until the listing is terminated.

The listing is terminated on June 29th, 2023.

–

Listing #10:

The property is listed for $1,728,000 on July 4th, 2023.

The brokerage remarks note that the property is “Priced To Sell.”

–

Phew!

How in the world can we digest this?

Where to we start to analyze?

Well, I would ask this to begin: do you blame the seller or do you blame the four listing agents?  Er, four-and-a-half?

We could make an argument either way, but ultimately, I believe that the reasons this property haven’t sold all start from the point of origin.

As a consumer, you have to formulate some sort of plan when purchasing a good or service; in this case: the services of a listing agent.

Looking at the ten listings above, it doesn’t seem as if there was every any sort of end game.  There was a “plan” of sorts, but it was like planning to swim out in to the middle of the sea, and then let the plan end right then and there.

The most fascinating part of this listing is the price expectations.

They went from a target in the $1,800,000+ range in April of 2022, after the market had peaked, down to the $1,500,000 range in the fall of 2022.  At one point, they were listed at $1,498,000, with zero action over the course of a month, meaning that perhaps this house could have been had in the mid-$1.4M range.

But then in March of 2023, they re-list for almost $1.8 Million.

It’s like they never learned their lesson.

Instead of saying, “Oh goodie, the market has recovered!  Let’s get this onto the market around our last price of $1.5M,” they instead decided to be greedy and increase their target by $300,000+.

Then they played multiple pricing games, as they did, unsuccessfully, in 2022, and wasted away March, April, May, and June in a prime market.

So here they sit now in the slow(er) summer market, priced $230,000 above where they were in 2022, when they also failed to sell.

This listing is an absolute mess.

But it’s not accidental.  It’s also not intentional.  It’s somewhere in between.

Foolishness, inexperience, naivety, greed, and poor decision-making can’t be entirely blamed for accidents, but also can’t be combined and passed off as intent either.

So is this a case of a consumer making a poor decision to go to a poor barber, or is this more like watching a barber give a bad haircut?

Neither.

If we continue the analogy, it’s really like a consumer going into a series of poor barber shops, and each time, telling the barber exactly how to cut hair.  The barber is at fault for listening but the consumer is more at fault for thinking he or she should be instructing the barber on what to do.

That analogy just got really complicated.

Geez.  Remember during the pandemic when we cut our own hair?

It should come as absolutely no surprise that some of us did this…

🙂

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The TRREB stats are taking much longer than usual, as the diehard TRB readers may have guessed from the timing of today’s blog post.

I expect them to come out on Thursday or Friday, but alas, too late for this week’s schedule!

Have a great weekend, and we’ll talk stats on Monday!