A Listing Agent Focus

I suppose it’s a good thing that so many people are so bad at real estate. Without bad ideas, and bad moves, and horrible, life shattering real estate decisions, our great decisions would go mostly unnoticed. This year at the lake there has been no shortage of bad real estate decisions. Decisions that, when viewed through the foggy lens by which most study real estate, don’t look bad at all. Through this common lens they look, in fact, rather good. They look good because they are presented as wonderful lifestyle moves, and, even though your price paid is so much more than it should have been, “just imagine your children running across that grassy lakeside lawn!”. This is why bad real estate decisions at the lake always look like good ones, until someone like me has to rudely pull back the covers and unveil these market mistakes.

While the mistakes made are many, and they are as varied as a Wisconsin November, an easy one to pin point is the tendency of some buyers to specifically work only with listing agents. This is not the same as finding a listing that you absolutely must have and then calling the listing agent to discuss, because this is normal behavior. The abnormal behavior is possessed by those that intentionally seek out listing agents to work with on those listed properties, and then hop from property to property, agent to agent, seeing lots of things while absorbing lots of opinions and learning absolutely nothing.

I saw this happen over the summer several times. It plays out like this: Buyer calls on house that I have listed. I tell them why it is good, I tell them why it might be bad, and then I tell them that I burned my hand on my stove the night before but that I’m pretty sure I’m going to be okay. I do this because I can’t help myself, and I rarely stick to topic in writing, in person, or in life. So I tell them these things, they may laugh or they may cringe, but ultimately they set up a showing to see the house that I have listed, the one they called about. I ask, as is my way, if there is anything else in the market that they’d like to see. My thought in this is that I have a handle on the market that isn’t grasped by anyone else, and I think there’s a good chance I can help this buyer make a sound buying decision, and help them to fully understand the market as it actually exists, not just as they perceive it.

After my offer to view other things, this sort of buyer declines, and says that they have other things they are planning on seeing. I hear this, and then I quietly and internally mock their move, and then I meet them at the agreed upon time at the singular property that they called me about. They are usually running late, because they just came from another showing, with another listing agent, where they absorbed a hard sales pitch. When they do arrive, they’re in a hurry. A big, fat, hurry. They’re in a hurry because they have another listing agent waiting at another house, the other house that that other agent has listed, because, you know, this buyer is in the process of outsmarting the market by working only with these magical listing agents. The buyer tours the home, listens to nothing, and rushes away to the next appointment.

This buyer does one of two things. He either buys one of the homes that he hurriedly toured on that day, or he disappears from the market all together. He’ll tell his friends and his family that the timing wasn’t right to buy a home. He’ll tell them that the homes were all lame. Or, worse yet, he’ll tell them that Lake Geneva isn’t the place for him and that he’s planning to start looking at XYZ Lake somewhere else, somewhere anywhere but Lake Geneva. He’ll say these things, and he’ll act on them, but the simple truth is that this sort of buyer isn’t the sort that can make a smart buying decision. Why should the buying decision be smart when the chosen buying process has been filled with stupidity?

These are the sort of buyers that make mistakes, either inside our market, by buying the wrong house in the wrong neighborhood with the wrong sort of lake access, or he makes his mistake in another market. What sort of mistake could be made in another market? That’s a leading question, because any purchase decision of any sort in another market is a mistake. This buyer might just be prone to mistakes, but the truth is that if a buyer is looking for a vacation home in this affluent market then that buyer must have, at some point, avoided mistakes in other to become a player in this high octane scene. The buyer isn’t unwise, the buyer is just uninformed.

There are other mistakes, loads and loads of them, but this listing agent focus is a most egregious one, and it’s incredibly easy to avoid. And what’s the best way to avoid this? Just work with me. We’ll avoid it together. And then we’ll make tremendously intelligent decisions while we laugh amongst ourselves as we watch the others make the bad decisions.