From “zang”:
Assistant Arrested in Killing of Real Estate Agent-[NY Times]
“[the agent, her boss] ‘just kept yelling at her…'”
That’s just plain sad, and for the record we think it is awful, but we want to know if you’ve ever wanted to kill your Realtor (figuratively of course) for any particular reason. Such as, not answering your calls, not showing your house, not putting pictures on MLS, etc….
It is Friday after all. Let it out, then hug it out. And of course we’re not getting out of real estate. Don’t be silly.
–Why are Realtors so arrogant and such Assholes [theFrontSteps]
–Internet Marketing for Real Estate 101 [theFrontSteps]
What….
Congrats on the appearance in the article.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/11/09/carollloyd.DTL
[Editor’s note: Thanks. Of course not everything said was published, but I’ll take it.]
i wanted to kill my unsolicited buyer’s agent. she wouldn’t spend 600.00 on a real appraiser (that wasn’t owned by the bank) and it blew up the 2mm deal we had on the table. she was lame!
james, we want to hear the story.
it was in august, right at the beginning of the mortgage crisis. bush-league husband and wife realtor team from a firm that starts with a letter somewhere near the end of the alphabet. i don’t think i can or should say more. i was pissed, needless to say. wasted my time.
I wanted to kill our seller’s agents – and I still wont talk to her.
We bought with a 30 days free rent back. pretty standard for the market (at that time, blablabla)
5 days before the deadline. Phone call from the sellers… “we cannot move out, we have no money to go anywhere, it’s so expensive, we cant afford any place… please dont evict us… ” – at the end of the day, and four calls later going as far as the seller saying she’ll contact a tenant protection group to help her out…. we had it up to there.
OUR agents (the good ones) had been very strict: evict them before the deadline.
We tried to contact the seller’s agent (our agents tried too). She couldnt be reached – on vacation. Whoever was taking her calls said that the deals closed 26days ago, so their job was finished.
We finaly got our way buy BOOKING our own moving company on the said day, and saying we were moving in, them in, or out (and sincerely hoping they would be out) then the seller said she didnt know who to contact to move out. At that point. we had it. Had the seller’s agent be in SF instead of vacation (with our commision in her pocket?), I would have stormed in her office, grabed her by the **** and dumped her on the door steps, without possibility to leave without taking HER clients with her.
26days – we had NO money left, the seller had ALL our money in her pocket…
And the last comment we got were that it was so unfair to be evicted by heartless buyers, and that her agent didnt do a good job helping them. (yes, you read me right. SELLERS – the HOMEOWNERS – complaining they were evicted!)
-> I still have something against the seller’s agent AND the sellers were not happy either.
On the other hand, the seller’s agent did such a lazy and poor job that we got a good deal. So maybe we won afterall.
I don’t know Sophie. First, the listing agent didn’t work for you. She worked for the sellers. Second, who lied here? Who reneged on a contract? The sellers. The listing agent didn’t violate a contract. (I assume you had it in writing that they would vacate after 30 days.) Hey, maybe the timing for her going on vacation was bad form. However people do need to go on vacation.
Honestly, if it were my sellers, I don’t know what I could have done. They sign on the dotted line saying they’re gonna move out, and then they renege? Yet in the end, for you, it is the realtor who was at fault. Is there more to the story than that?
hey sophie,
where was the sellers agent from?
I have an anecdote. Before I became a realtor my brother and I flipped our second property together. I was going to tell you which one it is here but I just thought better of it.
Anyway, we had the bad luck of selling during the only hiccup the market has really seen in the past six years, late fall/early winter of ’02. And we had topped the $1M range when Valencia Corridor didn’t quite support that yet. To make a long story short it was a tough four months. All of our savings rode on the deal.
When we finally got into contract, true to form because it was such a headache, the deal took an extra 30 days to close. We could have gotten the liquidated damages but the deal was moving forward. It turned out that the buyers had failed to disclose that they needed to sell their own property first. We wound up picking up another month’s mortgage. We were so ticked off.
Ultimately, months later when I went over to the property go grab a few items we had forgotten in the move, I asked the buyer what had happened, and whether he would reimburse us for our extra cost. He told me, “Go ask the realtors. Both of those agents work for Prudential. They were in cahoots.”
They didn’t even work in the same office. It’s always the realtors’ fault in people’s minds though. In his mind he had somehow gotten rooked, maybe because he bought an at the time rather expensive property for the area. But he had lied to us and had violated a contract.
kenny, I agree somehow with you.
However, in that market at the time, realtors would do A LOT beyond their official duty (I often joke about the agents giving a moving truck for free).
IMO, it’s the agent RESPONSABILITY to READ all forms WITH their clients and EXPLAIN each of them before they sign. Specialy the terms of an offer you write OR receive. SFrealtors forms are great for that – and we just checked the rent back box. Standard stuff at the sellers request in the counteroffer.
That part for me is about counselling. And no, I was not mad at the seller’s agent before I got brushed of. I was not asking a lot, if only a polite phone call to her clients offering help if they needed to. Like “I’m just calling to check with you that your move is going smoothly. ” then drop a “Did you find a moving company? or would you got a referal for a great company I’ve used over and over?”. In 2 minutes or less, the seller’s agent could have made a smart and appreciated move.
I was not asking for more.. But just a little help. After all, she found them a painter, a stager…. Is that too much to ask her to recommand a moving company as well?
I simply compared to OUR seller’s agents only a few months apart.. who gave us a printed calendar of our time frame : move out by . painting week. staging from that date till that date .. along with a list of recommanded everything to help us vacate our property AND get it ready to sell.
James. She’s a long time SF realtor in a well known company. What made me the madder was the plain “dont bother me”. WE are the one who moved IN SF – so potential returning clients. By any standard, she had no obligation to help us, but could have been at least polite – such as returning our call or our agents’ call.
She should have called to check up on the move, agreed. Did the sellers plead ignorance? I.E., “Poor us. It’s a big scary world and we didn’t know we only had 30 days.” — I’m calling b.s. on that, if in fact that happened. Of course they friggin knew they had 30 days. That isn’t the sort of stuff people gloss over even if they are as dumb as a box of rocks.
kenny,
i can’t say i agree with your negative experience as complete bad luck or your realtors fault. you sound like you got in over your head and had to sell. were you honest about that with your realtor? kind of hard to blame them if you don’t disclose all the facts. maybe you did and that was the only offer you were going to get at the time. just a thought or two.
Some years ago I was selling my home near the beach in So. Cal. In the last couple of weeks before closing, I had serious sellers remorse and consulted a lawyer about stopping the deal. I also told my agent I wouldn’t cooperate in the final inspections and repairs, figuring if they couldn’t get inside, the contingencies wouldn’t be satisfied and therefore closing delayed until I could sort things out. My agent said the other side would certainly sue me for specific performance and after talking things over with my lawyer I did decide to go ahead and close the deal. In the meantime, MY agent, the one supposedly representing me, entered the house when I wasn’t home, with a key I didn’t know she’d made, and completed the inspections and minor repairs necessary to close the deal, all without my knowledge. Her ONLY concern was her commission and closing the deal. I called her broker to complain, and he backed her up, saying it’s standard practice to make an additional key, and she had the right to enter the house to complete the inspections. At that point, I didn’t want any more trouble, and was ready to move on, but is what this agent did right? I may not have wanted to kill her, but she sure as hell didn’t care about what her client was going through.
James, you only glossed over what I wrote.
I didn’t blame the realtors. The buyer did. Without reason.
As for us, we needed to sell, yeah. But it wasn’t because of financial reasons. I’m kicking myself now. The same property was worth 200K more a year later. Now it’s five years on. The place is worth probably 400K more than I sold it for. Ouch.
ok. i hear you. the realtor on their side didn’t put the contingency in the contract, that sounds illegal. you needed to sell and didn’t get any other offers. sounds like it all worked out though.