Answer the Phone! (A “Mini Rant”)

Your Agent Must be Accessible!

Be Accessible:  If you know me at all you know that I place an extremely high importance on accessibility in my business.  If you, as a service provider, are not accessible to your clients or to your peers then you simply can not represent your clients, your business, or your client’s business interests, to the fullest extent. 

Open for Business:  If you own a flower shop and sell flowers you have to be in the store during business hours and when prospective buyers come by to buy flowers.  Your customers must be able to depend on the fact that your shop will be open during normal business hours.  This is called reliability. 

The same holds true in real estate.  It matters very little how good a real estate agent is if he or she does not answer the phone or return emails from you or, and perhaps more importantly, from potential buyers of your house or that potential buyer’s agent.  If your house is listed for sale I will bet dollars to doughnuts that you want your agent to be accessible and answer his or her phone ALL OF THE TIME. 

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What Happened?  So, you may ask, what prompted this mini tirade?  This past week, while putting together a property tour for a client, I had to contact five different listing agents to coordinate Saturday morning showings.  Ideally we would like to have 20 – 30 minutes in each house then move on to our next showing.  Some planning is involved to make a multi-house tour work well and stay on schedule.

Absolutely Shocking!  Out of the five agents that I called, I only got two of them on the phone or received a callback within a couple of minutes!  One of the agents did not answer and unbelievably even had a “mailbox full” message on his phone, one agent did not return my call at all but responded to an email two days later and one agent called me back the following day almost 17 hours after my initial call.  I am sorry to say that this is highly unprofessional and grossly unacceptable behavior for an agent who has a fiduciary obligation to represent another person’s (a house seller in this case) interest. 

While this may be an amusing rant, I assure you that the financial ramifications, including the possible loss of a sale, are not at all funny. 

The Punch Line:  Are you ready for this?  Are you sitting down?  The tour that I was scheduling was for five houses each one of them listed for sale above $2 million!  While this experience would have been just as ridiculous in any price range, the fact that this “bad real estate agent behavior” goes on in this price range is, to me, mind-boggling.  

The Last Word:  Before you hire a real estate agent to represent your interests as a house seller, or as a house buyer for that matter, be sure that that agent answers their phone and / or returns their calls promptly.  Have a friend or a relative who the agent does not already know (this simulates another agent calling to request a showing) call the agent and see how long it takes to get that agent on the phone or to receive a call back from him or her.  The best real estate agent in the world can not represent your interests effectively if he or she is not readily assessable.

Okay, I’m better now.  Thank you for allowing me to get this out of my system.