Don’t Be That Agent! This is a funny video about the ridiculous things some real estate agents say to one another during the buying process!
Speaker 1: What is Don’t Be That Agent?
Speaker 2: So Don’t Be That… So we have a support group that meets every Thursday and right now we’re doing it, because of the COVID, we’re doing it via Zoom and we have a session. We go over highs and lows of the week, we have an open question, but then we have a section, it’s like David Letterman, where we say, “Don’t be that agent” and we go over things that happened during the week, our interactions with other agents. Sometimes we are that “Don’t Be That Agent.” You say, “Look, I really messed up, don’t be that agent.” So it’s not an Us versus Them, we’re not making fun of the carrier… We make fun of carrier agents a lot, actually they make fun of us, but it’s not always Us versus Them.
Sometimes we make mistakes and we share amongst the group and we tell everybody. I just wanted to give you a couple examples of “Don’t Be That Agent” that happened this week and maybe some people will get a chuckle out of it, maybe not.
An agent called me this week and he said he was a land agent. I said, “Alright, okay.” Because he was a land agent, he doesn’t do MLS. I’m like, “Really?” So I looked him up and he has one land listing, and he’s had one land sale in the last year. So he really is a land agent because he sold a land and he has a land listing. But the real reason he isn’t on MLS is because he’s not making enough money to pay a $1,000 a year to be on MLS.
I don’t think it was wise to call me and tell me, “I’m not on MLS because I’m a land agent.” The majority of good land agents right now are on MLS. You need to… MLS is still relevant because it’s a feed for everything. So then I had another agent call me, and she told me, “You know that land contracts don’t have due diligence.” I’m like, “Really?” Sold 75 pieces of land this year, they all had due diligence.” But she went with a convincing little “You know land contracts don’t get due diligence money.” And I was like, I didn’t know that one.
Why don’t you teach me about how to do a land contract with a… This is the hottest market in the history of America. If you want to buy a piece of land, you have to give… You can’t do it for free. You have to give some money to put it down. Just to give you for-instance, the property that she called on had five offers on it and it was $230,000. We got $15,000 in due diligence money. So I would say that’s a big difference from, “No, and we know land contracts don’t have due diligence.”
I mean this all happened this week. We had a house listed for $440,000. It went live Monday at 10:00 in the morning. That’s usually not when I like stuff to go live, but the seller had some issues, that’s when she wanted to go live, Monday at 10:00 in the morning. Monday at 7:00 at night, agent calls me, “Yeah, we got an offer at $360,000.” It hasn’t even been on the market 12 hours and you’re offering $80,000 less” and I was like, even if you think I’m not very smart, even if you think I don’t know what I’m doing, that’s still the seller’s expectation, right? If at 10:00 this morning, my seller was hoping for $440,000, what makes you think it’s 7:00 at night, all of a sudden her mind has changed.
Speaker 1: How do you even respond to that? What do you-
Speaker 2: I really didn’t. Unfortunately, I want to always maintain a professional… But I was really taken aback by that. I said, “It hasn’t even been on the market 12 hours.” I couldn’t even say ,”It’s only been 12 hours.” I said it hasn’t even been 12 hours.”
Speaker 1: Did you mean $460,000?
Speaker 2: Right, and that property was in a remote area, but it did sell a couple days later, and it sold for $440,000, which we were expecting.
So with the shortage of inventory, we have a lot of Wake and Orange County agents calling about our listings. This is the last one, don’t be that agent, I’ve discussed this before this… and she was a nice agent. She called on a Thursday at 4:30, 60-acre track, and she didn’t get me on my cell because I was talking to someone else, so she talked to my staff and she said, “Yes, I need Eric to walk this 60 acres with me tomorrow at 10 AM.”
First of all, that’s your job. Secondly, and my staff is really, really supportive of me. They’re like, “You do understand that if Eric did that, that’s all he would be doing all week long is walking, playing with other agents?” The best comeback that she had one time is she’s like, “You list houses, right?”
She’s like, “Yes, I’m very good at listing houses.”
“What would you do if an agent called you and said, ‘I’m going to show your house. I want you to be there to help me show this house.’?”
No one would ever do that in a residential situation, but with land they think, “Oh, well he has to da, da, da.” No, no. So one of our favorite expressions, “Don’t Be That Agent.”
Speaker 3: That’s funny. How long does it take to walk a 60 acre track like that?
Speaker 2: It takes about two to four hours.
I mean, but Len, I promise you, I get, I get asked to walk the 125, the 60s, the 180s, the 300 all week long. And they are shocked when I say no. They are so shocked that I had to put on a piece of paper… Like I had to put in the documents of MLS: “I am not going to walk this land with you. If that is your job, if you wish to get paid, you have to walk the land. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, then you should probably get an agent that does know what they’re doing. Or you can hire a surveyor to walk the land with you.”
But you know, people say, “Well, you’re the listing agent. You want to help out the seller? Da, da, da.” Yes, of course I want to help out the seller, but I don’t possibly have that much time in a week.
