Real Estate Rant

I haven’t posted for a while as I’ve been working night and day for the last 6 months. I’ve mainly been renting homes. I like rentals as they pay quickly, and although they are much lower commissions, I am now renting 6-8 homes per month which equals about 1 sales transaction commission-wise. At least I can survive.

The Economy drove me back into Residential Real Estate (not to mention the fraud in the Bulk REO/Note arena), and having been immersed in it for 6 months I remember why I left in 2004 and practiced commercial for so many years.

I have noticed that most of the Realtors I engage are very poor. They don’t return calls or emails in a timely manner, have very poor communication skills (meaning they can’t duplicate) and often make errors. Maybe I am just an ass, but almost on a daily basis I have to repeat myself several times, over several communications, just to be duplicated. Or worse I’ll send an email, text and voicemail, the other agent won’t bother to look at any of them, and then when we speak they are oblivious. Why have all this technology for communication and not use it? Or better yet, I’ll give the exact data needed in an email and they will respond to the email asking for the data. I then have to respond by saying “READ THE EMAIL!” It gets truly exasperating as it happens daily and by most agents I deal with. I can honestly say that more than 75% of the work I do is fixing others errors, or having to redo or re-communicate something that I already did or said several times.

I routinely get told I’m the “best agent” my clients have ever worked with. I’m not trying to toot my own horn here but I understand what they mean. Most agents I deal with are just horrible. And I don’t do anything that special. I simply communicate often and in a timely manner. That’s all people really want anyway. I even find it amazing since sometimes (depending on the day and how exasperated I have become dealing with this) I am quite “foul-mooded”. Yet my clients LOVE me. I’m blunt, direct, honest, sometimes a rude ass, but communicate immediately. I guess this is better than the alternative, so they love me (or at least tolerate my moods).

Why am I saying all this? Well aside from just wanting to rant, there is a point. If every agent simply decided they would have a firm policy to return calls, texts and or emails in a timely manner, to read texts and emails or write down what we spoke about, or simply DO WHAT THEY SAID THEY'D DO they would eliminate a large portion of their OWN frustration (not to mention mine).

I left residential real estate partly because of this phenomenon, that most residential agents I encountered were clueless unprofessional amateurs. I now find myself immersed in it. So my options are:

a. Scream, rant and rave, and give myself a stomach ache
b. “Kill” them
c. Try and help them

I've done "a" to no avail (except the stomach ache), "b" is still socially unacceptable, so for now I chose “c”.