Today, I want to go back to the theme from last Friday, which I call, “Agents behaving badly.”  Like the late-1990’s sitcom of a familiar name, starring one of the most underrated cast members in the history of Saturday Night Live: Rob Schneider.

I’ll preface this by saying that my goal with these posts is not to come off as the most negative real estate agent in the city or to give our whole industry a bad name.  My goal is to bring to light the business practices that are so commonplace and alert readers to the fact that their agent might be doing exactly what I’m writing about in my blog!

Because you don’t know.  Most of the time you can’t know.

Some of my recent experiences have led me to ask myself, “Does this agent’s client know what he or she is doing?”  In many cases, I feel bad for the clients.  I really do.  But then I figure: they hired this agent in the first place, so who’s to blame?

I used to write things like, “Folks, I’m not going to turn this into an advertorial on why to hire an experienced agent,” but the more I write blogs like this, the more I realize that’s exactly what I should be doing.

There are 65,000 agents licensed by TRREB.

A colleague who teaches the real estate program at Humber College tells me that a third of the students announced on the first day, “I’m only getting my license so I can do my own deals and those of my family and friends,” but it’s those agents, among others, that are the agents behaving badly that I describe in my blog posts.  And all the while, these “friends and family” expect some sort of discount, but the buyers are never going to buy with these agents, because these agents can’t transact.

Let me tell you three stories, and then you tell me if I’m being harsh or if I’m actually doing the general public a gigantic favour by explaining why they need to choose their agent very, very carefully…

–

Pick up the phone and dial!

We brought out six listings this week.  The market is moving.  Things are busy.

Communication is key in this market right now and while some agents understand this, others do not.

On Wednesday night, I had a lovely conversation with an agent who works with her son and his team.  We chatted for twenty minutes about my listing, about his recent listing which we happened to offer on, about the market, and about, among other things, these very stories I’m telling today.  She and I have something called “rapport,” and it will help both of us if and when our teams transact.

That is what’s missing from real estate today.  Many agents simply don’t know how to speak.

Also on Wednesday evening, I was driving home and my phone buzzed with an email in my inbox.

The name of the sender was somebody I didn’t know and I might say it sounded spam-ish.

There was no subject line.

There was nothing in the body of the email.

There was an attachment.

Spam, right?

I thought so, but because the PDF was named with the letter “C” and string of numbers, it sounded like an MLS listing ID.  Since I was on my iPhone and not my laptop, I decided to open the attachment.

Do you know what the PDF attachment was?

It was an offer!

An offer.  Seriously.

An agent emailed me an offer without ever speaking to me.

This agent didn’t type anything in the subject line of the email.  It was empty.  The body of the email was empty too.  Not a single character.

Tell me I’m being guilty of forcing others to adhere to social norms, like a common salutation.  But seriously?  This was weird.

Upon realizing that this was an agent emailing an offer, it occurred to me that this agent had no email signature, like any professional would have.  Name, brokerage, email address, website, phone number, office number, etc.

So let’s regroup: an agent sents me an offer, with no notice, doesn’t call me, doesn’t register the offer through my office, doesn’t upload his Offer Registration Form through BrokerBay to register the offer, has no subject line in the email, zero content in the “body” of the email, and no email signature.

Now what?

Do I Google him?

The offer itself was quite poor.  The price was about 10-12% lower than what the property will sell for on offer night, but that’s not the big issue here.  You see, the offer had two conditions!  And this was a bully offer, folks!

For those who are new to TRB and don’t automatically see the problem with a conditional bully offer, this is a whole other topic.  But let’s just that in a red-hot seller’s market, where a property has 80 showings in a week and will likely get 10-15 offers on the scheduled offer night, a seller isn’t going to forego the offer night to sell conditionally for five business days.  It’s nonsensical.

But many buyer agents don’t know this, and what’s more is that when their buyer-clients say, “We want to make a conditional bully offer for just over the list price,” the agent doesn’t object.

I went about my business and figured that, eventually, this agent would reach out to me.

Guess when he called me?

Can you guess when?

Never.

He just disappeared into the ether.  Like he fell off the face of the earth.

And I can’t help but wonder, “What did he tell his buyer-client?”

Is this how business is supposed to be done in 2022?  An agent randomly emails an offer with no communication or even a bread-crumb-trail of contact information, never reaches out to the listing agent, then just moves on?

Is this what “friends and family” want when they hire their part-time agent pal?

You can’t get a discount on a property you never buy, and in this market, these agents simply can’t transact since they have absolutely no clue what they’re doing.

I’ve never experienced anything quite like this.  The offer was very misguided, not only on price but specifically on those conditions which show me that the buyer and agent have no concept of the market we’re in.  But that’s not my issue.  I receive stupid offers all the time, it’s nothing new.

What I cannot get over is the agent’s lack of the most basic understanding of not only social norms and customs, but business practices as well.

–

“Hold the phone….and do not deposit that cheque!”

Another pre-emptive offer hit my inbox this week, but unlike the story above, where it would have required a search party to find the real estate agent, the agent in this example was TOO involved.

Let me explain…

I was with clients in the west end doing a thorough walkthrough of their High Park home as we prepare for listing next month.  The sellers, myself, Chris, and my stager, Lucie, spent an hour in the home, and when I left the house and checked my phone, all hell had broken loose.

The first email in my inbox had the subject line: “123 (blank) Street: Deposit Receipt.”

A deposit receipt was issued for my listing.  Huh?

Did I sell this property?

How long did I sleep last night?

I scrolled through my messages and I saw a text from an agent with a deposit cheque, and then another text with a deposit receipt, and it made no sense.

I flipped through my emails and found that this agent had emailed me a bully offer

To the agent’s credit, she did go and get a deposit cheque.  That’s good!

But the agent didn’t just send a photo of the bank draft, but rather she drove over to our head office and handed the bank draft to our receptionist at the front desk.

Our receptionist asked, “What property is this for?”

The agent responded, “This is for 123 (blank) Street.”

And then, as is the custom, our receptionist took a photocopy of the cheque and issued an official deposit receipt!

So now this agent was holding a deposit receipt for a property that she didn’t sell, and that her buyers didn’t buy, all via an offer that I hadn’t even seen yet.

But that’s not the most incredible part!  Because when I called my office to ask what the hell had happened, my receptionist told me that she had given the deposit to accounting.  As happy as I am with our new banking system that allows us to scan cheques to deposit them, that clearly wasn’t going to work in my favour today!

I called my office and got accounting on the phone.

“Do NOT deposit that cheque!” I told them.

I swear, our accounting team was just about to scan that cheque.  I tried to explain what had happened, but when something happens that has never happened before, it’s really, really tough to absorb.

I called the agent and she was pretty chill about the whole situation.  She told me about her clients, how wonderful they were, how much they loved the house, and all this before I could open my mouth to ask why she handed over a deposit cheque for a property that she hadn’t bought.

The offer itself wasn’t going work.  Funny that I say this, now, almost as an afterthought.  But it’s almost secondary when you consider the debacle I just described.

My poor receptionist!  She asked if it was her fault, and I said, “It’s not like you can ask everybody that drops off a deposit, ‘Can I confirm that you actually sold this property’ from now on, can you?”

I suppose there’s a first time for everything in this business, right?

–

“Why didn’t you pick up the phone?”

This story didn’t happen to me, but rather my friend.

No, I mean it.  I’m not saying “my friend” as in me, like when your Mom finds your weed and you say, “I was just holding that for my friend.”  This happened to a friend of mine at another brokerage who is still likely drowning her sorrows in Malbec.  Or Merlot.  Or Cabernet.  I’m pretty sure by the end of the night, she was just pouring everything into the same drinking jar…

A property was listed last week just east of the city and offers were set to be reviewed this week.

This property really represented land value, since everybody looking at it would be tearing it down, and since it was in such a special pocket and exclusive neighbourhood, all the shooters were going to come out for it.

My friend, who we’ll call “Farrah,” had a client that was jet-set on buying this house because his sister lived six doors away.  The property was listed for $1,688,000 and they were thinking it would sell around $2.3 Million in this crazy market, which meant they prepared themselves for $2.4M Million.

Offers were being reviewed at 12:00pm.  Farrah registered her offer first thing in the morning, but this brokerage was one that didn’t use BrokerBay, so subsequent offers weren’t paged out as they were registered.

When she submitted her offer, she understood that there were 9 offers.

There was no communication from the listing agent until 6:00pm.  That’s six hours after offers were supposed to be reviewed.

At 6:00pm, Farrah received an email from the listing agent that was obviously a group email, but to who?  How many agents?

The email essentially said:

Offers are in.
You are in the top tier.  In the mix.
Improve your offer if you would like.
Wrapping up shortly.  If you improve please include 10pm irrev.

Farah called the listing agent and asked what the process was going to be.

The listing agent sounded exasperated, distracted, and not exactly in control.  He said that there was “a room full of decision-makers” and that they would put their heads together and figure out how to move forward.

Farrah asked, “So I’m in the top tier.  How many is that?”

She figured that out of 9 offers, maybe it was three?  Maybe two, but maybe four?

“The top half,” the listing agent said.  “You’re in the top half.”

Telling half the agents that they’re in the mix could be accurate, or not.  But either way, Farrah figured that meant four or five.

But then the listing agent said, “You know there are 23 offers, right?”

Farrah just about choked.

The last communication from the listing side said there were 9 offers.

Farrah is like me; she’s pragmatic, rational, and can play the game.  So she didn’t bother to express her displeasure with the shit-show that the listing agent was running, but rather tried to stay on his good side.

“My clients are going to improve,” Farrah said.  “How much time do I have?” Farrah asked.

The listing agent said, “Just make sure your irrevocable is 10:00pm and make sure you communicate with me.  Let me know what’s happening.”

Farrah agreed, asked the listing agent to do the same, and went off to call her client.

Within fifteen minutes, Farrah had revised her $2,400,000 offer to $2,520,000 and sent it to the listing agent.  This was all before 8:00pm.

A couple of minutes later, the listing agent called Farrah and said, “Oh, Farrah, I’m so sorry.  I think I screwed up.”

Never a good start to a discussion, right?

“We panicked,” the listing agent said.  “We had so many offers, and some were expired, some were expiring, and we just panicked.  We accepted one,” she said.

Farrah was distraught.  But she didn’t know what the sellers had accepted, so she said to the listing agent, “Well, I sure hope it’s more than $2,520,000!”

But it wasn’t.

The long pause in the phone call said so.

“Oh, Farrah,” the listing agent said.  “I messed this up.  I’m so sorry, it’s just that we, well, we may not have accepted the highest offer, but it’s a good offer.  They’re happy.  I mean, they just panicked.  They weren’t prepared.”

Farrah was sick when the listing agent told her that the property sold for $2,420,000.

But how in the world would she explain this to her clients?  How could anybody?

I know what you’re thinking: did the listing agent double-end the transaction?

No, she didn’t.  That’s the crazy thing!  She just seemed to randomly decide to stop her offer process in its tracks, and even though offers were being resubmitted with a 10pm irrevocable time, and that she was waiting on another four, five, or six agents to resubmit, she and the sellers just signed one!

Any one!

Any offer will do!

Farrah tried to reason with the listing agent, explaining that it’s a seller’s market, and the seller and the listing agent have all the leverage, and that they had 23 offers on the property; there was no reason to panic, no reason to feel pressure, and no reason to rush.

But what was done, was done.

Farrah’s buyer-client will not be building his dream-home six doors down from his sister.

And the listing agent’s seller-clients gave up $100,000.  Or more, because who knows what the other bidders may have submitted in the next two hours.

–

So, be honest, folks.

Tell me if you think these stories are misguided on my part.  Tell me if you think I’m not helping anybody by telling these tales.

Because I think I am helping.  I’m talking about what really goes on in real estate.  I’m telling stories that nobody else will tell.  I’m not pretending that “everything is okay” nor am I going to tow the industry line and act like there are 65,000 licensed agents with the same skill set and level of professionalism.

I understand that consumers want choice in any market for products or services and I know that many buyers and sellers think they have it all figured out.

But I can’t possibly stress this enough: your choice of buyer agent or seller agent can have a dramatic effect on what you purchase, if you ever purchase, and how much you sell your home for.

Stories like the three I’ve just told – which took place in a two-day span, are becoming more and more common.

Really, truly, give some thought to which real estate professional’s hands you want to place your lives into.

As you’ve seen above, not everybody’s hands can carry the weight of this crazy real estate maket…