The Problem With Trusting Other Sacramento Agents

There is a new Real Safe Realtor safety app coming to Metrolist that relies on trusting other Sacramento agents to help a fellow agent in distress. It’s based on a cooperative spirit and the fact that agents should rely on each other to help out. I’m not so sure how well that will go over in Sacramento. My experience has been limited in that regard. I recall when I first started at Lyon Real Estate and I thought I had lost my display key. Patti Martinez, who used to work in our downtown office back then, came to my rescue. She had something else to do the day but she drove over to the house where I thought I had left my key and unlocked the door for me. That was a nice thing to do. A selfless act. I was grateful. Enough so that I’m still talking about it. I would do the same thing for another agent.

But not every agent is like that. Like last Wednesday was a comedy of errors. I had put a home in Sacramento on broker preview for only Lyon real estate agents to tour. Lyon policy is to put homes on tour as a favor for Lyon agents before the homes are officially for sale. It’s convenient for Lyon agents. They get a sneak peek at homes with lockboxes and those without. The nice thing about the Supra lockbox is it does not rely on trusting other Sacramento agents because Supra sends me lockbox reports when it is opened. I know who opened the lockbox, the time the lockbox was accessed and how to contact the agent.

On that day, 3 agents from a Lyon Real Estate office accessed the lockbox. I won’t say which office these agents were from but let’s just say it wasn’t the downtown office on J Street where I work or the Land Park office on 21st. The first agent sent me an email to say how much she liked the new listing, so I know she got in to see it. The key is a little tricky to use. I put a note in the lockbox and in MLS about how to open the door. It’s one of those doors that needs to have the key pulled out slightly to turn it. But real estate agents are used to working with quirky keys. It’s part of our profession.

Around 4:00 that afternoon, the seller called. She had stopped by the property to discover an agent had left the key dangling in the lock. Further, the agent also had locked the bottom of the box box, a basket that holds the key, back into the lockbox. This meant the seller could not pull it out and put the key into the lockbox. Who would leave a key in the door? What kind of real estate agent would do that? Hmmm. I studied the Supra showings records. Only 3 Lyon agents. Well, it wasn’t the first agent. I called the last agent. She insisted the door was open when she got there, and she could not make the key work, so she put the key back into the lockbox.

How could she do that if she was the last agent and the key was in the lock? I called the agent in the middle. This agent said she could not get into the property at all. She could not make the key work. She was very frustrated and wasn’t really listening to my own dilemma, which was who left the key in the lock? She insisted the key did not work, even when I explained several times it does work. You would think an agent who had trouble with a key would call the listing agent, right? I mentioned that not a single Lyon agent from that office bothered to call me. Finally she spit out have a nice evening and hung up.

So you can see why I’m not too gung ho on trusting other Sacramento agents to bail me out if I’m worried for my safety at a house with that new Metrolist Safety App. I wonder if encouraging member agents to download this free app reduces the insurance premium for Metrolist? It costs $15 a month otherwise. I can’t figure out why our MLS would offer this as a free service because I’ve never known Metrolist to do anything that doesn’t benefit Metrolist in some way.

But at least I know enough to remove a key from the lock and not leave a home unsecured. The culprit who stuck the key in the lock and walked away should be ashamed; but down deep we all figure they are not.