Ever Hear an Agent Say I Don’t Want to Waste Anybody’s Time?

Agents might reconsider saying I don’t want to waste anybody’s time

When an agent prefaces an email by writing I don’t want to waste anybody’s time, the first thought that pops into my head is then why are you talking to me? Who are you, Al Pacino? If you truly don’t want to waste anybody’s time, it would seem as though you’re about to do that very thing you were hoping to avoid. I suspect what they mean to convey is they are about to say something the recipient does not want to hear.

In part, that’s probably true. Saying I don’t want to waste anybody’s time generally means the agent is probing for some kind of guarantee that the seller will be receptive to a lower offer. Further, it’s not really the seller’s time nor the listing agent’s time the buyer’s agent is worried about. It’s their own time. They don’t want to waste their own precious time.

But you know what? Sacramento real estate is all about writing offers and negotiating. You can’t know how a seller will respond until we present an offer in writing. Verbal offers are meaningless. A seller can’t legally accept a verbal offer. This means the buyer can’t go into court to complain, but your honor, she promised to sell me the house and didn’t. The judge will say show me the offer.

There are no guarantees prior to presenting an offer in Sacramento real estate. Every single agent, pretty much, who writes a purchase offer is potentially wasting his or her time. I want to ask agents who pull out that verbiage from their arsenal just how do they conduct any business? Are they so lazy that they email every listing agent to ask, hey, if I wrote an offer, would your seller take it? See, I don’t want waste anybody’s time.

Maybe they can’t handle rejection, and if the offer is never presented because it’s never written, they were never rejected. On the other hand, how many offers do you think fall by the wayside because they never materialized into a signed purchase contract? And they never materialized into a contract because the agent was too damn lazy to type it up.

Probably quite a few, would be my guess. Because you never know how a seller will respond. If the seller counters, you never know how a buyer will respond. That’s the beauty of negotiation. You get in there and do your best. You don’t sit on a high horse filing your nails and muttering: I don’t want to waste anybody’s time. That’s a sure-fired way to never go into contract.

Please don’t say to a Sacramento listing agent: I don’t want to waste anybody’s time. The truth is I have nothing better to do in my job than help my sellers negotiate a purchase contract. Believe it or not, that’s what I do for a living. It’s not called wasting time. We call it selling real estate.