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There isn't always a reason to be in at 9 am M-F when you also have to work evening and weekend appointments. Agents that aren't careful can end up working 60+ hours every week and burning out.
Totally get that. Welcome to life of every self-employed person on the planet.
The marketing guy was talking about agents marketing themselves, and you elect to through in a red herring to divert the conversation to commissions.
?
I dont consider the commission the red herring in this discussion. It is my opinion, and just about everyone else I know who has recently dealt with a realtor that the commission is the problem. It is not commiserate with the quantity or quality of work done.
I can see how the time can add up, but honestly 90% of the work is so simple anyone could do it...There is only that small 10% that that actually needs intelligence....furthermore so much of the work is repeat work (common for ALL transactions) that you could do it in your sleep. Recommending inspectors, survey companies, lenders, etc is all repeat. You got good folks one time and you re-use them over and over again. That may have been work at one time, but it is no longer work...its part of your package. It takes seconds to convey that information and a good agent should have a package pre-prepared that details everyone they recommend.
An average American earns $63,091. That same person will likely buy a house in the $200,000-$300,000 price range. Taking the low side just for the sake of argument (and assuming a fictional 6% commission) the realtors in the transaction will receive $12,000....Now the seller of that property does not care how it is split - its still $12,000 from his pocket to yours....that is roughly 19% of his total income for the year. That same person works on average about 2000 hours annually. So a seller looks at that and says to himself that the realtors would need to work cumulatively 380 hours (2 months full time on his property only) to have "earned" the commission in his eyes. The reality is that a realtor works substantially fewer hours than that on most transactions....Most people earning $63,091 likely believe their job is as difficult as that of the agents and they work much more rigid schedules with much longer hours.
The other perception is that the only thing the realtors these days actually do is take pictures and post on MLS. In slow markets they probably do much more than this, but in a good market that really is all they have to do to get a buyer. There is no inventory of homes in the good areas and a post on the MLS is all that is needed to get alot of interest. Several of the areas around me have less than 30 days of inventory...its very easy to sell a house with 30 days of inventory....
So - even though commission was not his initial complaint, it is the major complaint in the industry..Agents get a big check that has absolutely zero bearing on the quantity or quality of the work completed....sometimes they went above and beyond and earned it, others the check was literally handed to them for nothing.
And to answer your other questions Bill, I charged my uncle only my licensing fees. I am rebating all but $1350 of the commission back to him....although he is letting me hunt the property this winter free of charge....Im also not advertising or seeking out clients...I will use my license primarily for myself and the benefit of my family, the business, and close friends.
Oh, there are ambulance chasers to be sure. But the large, large majority of attorneys are professionals who do a good job for their clients.
But, as I have pointed out several times on this thread, there is an amazing amount of churn in the real estate biz with attrition rates topping 50% annually. That means 1 agent in 2 will not be around next year, which means the agent replacing her will be new to the job.
So. If buying a house is one of the most important lifestyle and financial decisions of your life, would you really want to entrust the process to someone who hasn't been in the biz a year and likely won't be here a year from now? Yet, that's exactly that the buyer/seller faces. Small wonder agents have such a terrible reputation in the market.
So if I'm going to prison for 5-10 would I trust a 1 year experienced attorney ?
That low attrition rate for attorneys.... Should it not be higher if they actually eliminated or did not protect the bad ones ?
Our office has about a 20% turnover of new agents which is fairly low. We are very selective in who we accept into the office.
And to answer your other questions Bill, I charged my uncle only my licensing fees. I am rebating all but $1350 of the commission back to him....although he is letting me hunt the property this winter free of charge....Im also not advertising or seeking out clients...I will use my license primarily for myself and the benefit of my family, the business, and close friends.
And you really have no or little real world experience in the day to day grind of being a full time agent. Agents do not make the huge sum of money you quote, have high expenses and share the income with their Brokers.
Plain and simple? Raise the entry barrier and make it more difficult to maintain a license and the quality of agents will increase. If the quality of agents increases the reputation of the industry will increase. Of course you'd have to get those changes made at a state or federal level because there is no way the companies will quit being agent factories on their own.
So if I'm going to prison for 5-10 would I trust a 1 year experienced attorney ?
That low attrition rate for attorneys.... Should it not be higher if they actually eliminated or did not protect the bad ones ?
Our office has about a 20% turnover of new agents which is fairly low. We are very selective in who we accept into the office.
Hah. You'd think.
But the problem isn't your office. It's the profession. You might have a 20% turnover. But the biz overall has a much larger attrition rate. This is a huge business problem for the industry, one that affects credibility and wrongly affects the reputation of those veterans who do their conscientious best.
I'm no fan of lawyers. But let me put it this way. You just trashed the legal profession because of a relatively small percentage of bad practitioners. At the same time, you're defending the real estate biz when the level of training, client attention, and staying power is far lower. Remove the log in your own eye, man.
Im an attorney and I can tell you there are alot of bad attorneys and lots of dishonest billing practices...I think the higher barrier to entry makes it less than real estate agents, but there are still lots of bad and dishonest attorneys.
Attorneys do not become proficient at their profession for 3-5 years. I would never trust anything to an attorney fresh out of law school. Law school does not teach you how to be an attorney, it merely teaches you how to think like one....the day to day grind of the legal profession is learned only by doing.
What really makes so many agents bad and causes bad experiences for people is desperation. This can exist in new agents and people that have been in the business 20 years and you can always tell when and an agent is at this point. They will do anything to make sure the deal happens. When the market gets bad and it's harder to sell things the numbers of agents like this increase. That is why I never want this job to be my only source of income.
Your reading comprehension needs work, I see. I would hate to see how you review contracts.
Let's review. As I stated earlier, I have worked directly with four different brokerages. Three of them on a specified contract period, one of them long-term. All were quite happy with my services. All have recommended me to others.
And, elsewhere, I said that 10% of realtors are professionals who have my respect. These are the people I can work with. The other 90%? Wastes of time at best, dangerous at worst. They are people who come into the biz, hit a lick at it for a few months to a few years and then get out, evidenced by the astronomical attrition. Even during the boom period of last decade, somewhere between 50-70% of freshly-minted realtors washed out of the business inside of a year. And those were during the good times, years when a trained chimp could have had several million of closings in a year. So why should I devote energy to someone who hasn't proved staying power?
Finally I use realtor and agent interchangeably because they pretty much are. Yeah, Realtors® sign a form that says they'll obey a code of ethics, but that's just so much hogwash, and has no true distinction in the mind of consumers. I've seen Realtors® do some pretty dirty deeds in their everyday professional life, and I've seen some pretty okay agents who have never bothered with it.
I had called a broker recently, after my previous realtors contract ran out. She in turn, went behind my back and called the previous agent.
Some have the mentality of cheap used car salespeople. And they are a dime a dozen. Some have no clue how to talk to the mortgage bank on the phone. Sorry to say I have seen it firsthand and this man was supposedly 'in the business' 15 years.
I had a great professional broker in florida. But they are VERY hard to find these days it seems. And unprofessionalism runs rampant.
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