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How Cheating Realtors is an Upfront Disclosure From Sellers
When is cheating Realtors an upfront disclosure in the home selling process from a seller’s point of view? I had a phone call today from a future seller who had already talked to and chosen a Realtor. So why was he calling our firm to ask me questions, why didn’t he ask his Realtor?
His first questions were about what types of agency did we use when when listing a home. What he wanted to really know was if he could get the home listed and not pay a Realtor under certain circumstance. It got me to thinking about an old boyfriend who told me upfront about potential cheating and he asked questions about how I felt about cheating. I told him I would drop him like a rock in a deep pond! Why go into a relationship with someone devaluing you up front?
This seller’s second question what if he is out front on his sidewalk when someone stops to talk to him and he gets them to write an offer, does he owe commission? YES. Does he have an exclusion? NO. Under an Exclusive Agency listing agreement, he would owe a commission no matter who brought a buyer.
A better answer here is if a buyer is standing in front of a listing, did she already find the house on the MLS, or did she drive by first and see a sign, or view it on Zillow, Trulia, Metrolist, Realtor.com, RE/MAX Gold, or or any other online listing-based marketing company. So do you think cheating Realtors is an upfront disclosure from sellers? None of these websites are seller-generated opportunities.
Then the seller wanted to know how to access MLS and read what agents wrote in agent confidential remarks. So it is getting clear he doesn’t really want full-service real estate. He was nice enough and perhaps didn’t understand we don’t work for free. Agents spend time and money, we pay employees, also, we are running a business. We pay errors and omissions insurance, self employment tax, membership dues, health insurance, advertisement fees, professional photos, drone photography, association fees, and so much more. Our time and efforts are value added.
When a seller is already trying to get out of paying the listing commission, it is like they are already disclosing they are going to cheat on their agent.
I did my best to explain why this type of listing arrangement was not possible. Top producers earn our commission. Is cheating Realtors an upfront disclosure? Yes, absolutely, in my opinion, it is. I talk to so many sellers who hire our team and are very happy to do so, and to pay us, as they have seen our results online and our mile-long Zillow reviews of happy past clients.
To hire a full service Realtor team who earns their fees, please call Weintraub and Wallace today at 916-233-6957.
— JaCi Wallace
Where Do Buyers Find Homes for Sale in Sacramento?
Where do you find homes for sale in Sacramento online? Which website is best for listings? We’ve got website wars going on in which the Realtor dot com website is advertising that it has more homes than the popular Zillow and Trulia, and it does, but it seems to me that Realtor dot com lost its effectiveness years ago, back when it controlled the entire market. From where I sit, Realtor dot com had its chance and blew it. It’s a long road to retrieve the power it once possessed.
Some might argue it’s because it let its monopoly go to its head and invariably some other business gained a foothold and isn’t letting go. I have no idea. I just know that most of the home buyers I talk to do not use Realtor dot com to search for homes for sale in Sacramento.
The best place to get your homes for sale in Sacramento is from your own Sacramento Realtor. That’s because Realtors have online access directly to the mothership, our MetroList. You can get listings from a public website via MetroList MLS but it won’t be as detailed or customized as you can get from your own agent. Plus, some of its information in the listings are cut off, like my name, Elizabeth A. Weintraub, for crying out loud, because certain MetroList fields are not designed to handle very many characters. I’ve put MetroList on notice; it doesn’t change.
You also can’t find a Realtor at Realtor dot com. Well, you can, but it will take you forever. For starters, fill in Sacramento for the search field city and Realtor dot com will tell you there are 2,027 Realtors in Sacramento. Then, hit the search button and Realtor dot com will bring up 3,438 Realtors. Does Realtor dot com know how many Realtors are in Sacramento? Can you rely on the homes for sale search link if it can’t get one simple search field right? Not to mention, many of the random names and links that appeared when I tried to search were entries without a photo of the Realtor. Not very enticing.
Zillow and Trulia have the pizazz, and no matter what a Sacramento Realtor tells a buyer and no matter how many private emails a Realtor sends, a buyer’s curiosity will almost always win out. They can’t help themselves. They have a computer or an iPad or a mobile device and they will search for homes online with or without an agent. They might hope there could be that one **special** home that is not listed in the emails from their agent. There might be. Especially among the Coming Soon homes in Zillow.
But eventually, those Coming Soon homes will go online and they’ll get the listing from their own agent. Because most homes for sale in Sacramento generally end up in MetroList.
Every so often I’ll get a Sign Call. This is when a buyer passes by a home for sale in Sacramento, spots my real estate sign and calls me. I have so much information on that sign, and so many ways to get instant data without calling that I’m always astounded when buyers call. They can access a virtual tour by texting a code from the sign, or taking a photo of the QR code or by calling an 800 number. They can call the big honkin’ telephone number of the closest Lyon Real Estate office, prominently displayed. They can call the first agent listed on the sign rider, which is one of my Elizabeth Weintraub Team members, always ready to show homes. And, then, they can call me, the listing agent. I’m like the bottom of the barrel.
I wonder why they aren’t looking online. I wonder if they are working with a Realtor. They ask me for the sales price and I ask if they’re looking for a home. They say no, they are not. I share the sales price with them and then they ask for the square footage. I ask if they want to sell a home, and they say no, they do not. Then they ask for the number of bedrooms. Finally, after I am drilled with a series of these types of questions I ask why, why do they want to know? What possible difference could it make in their lives to find out the number of bedrooms in some home when they are not a buyer nor a seller, and apparently don’t know anybody who is?
The Trouble With YOU, Sighs Trulia . . .
“The trouble with YOU,” sighed my Trulia rep Charis, “is you want to make our website work according to Elizabeth Weintraub.” That accusation, which is certainly true enough and made me laugh, came about because I made mention of the fact that Trulia “was broken.” It’s broken because the website won’t do what I expect it to do, and no matter how much this poor woman (who doesn’t even work at Trulia anymore) had to say in its defense, it just doesn’t change that fact.
As a result, I have had to figure out how to manipulate the data in Trulia and make it work the way that I need it to work. It means that some of it needs to be tweaked on a weekly basis. If I sob and plead enough I can get my homes in Sacramento featured. The reps have been very kind to apply patches to my listings. My point is if Trulia wasn’t broken, though, they wouldn’t need to apply a patch.
Also, if Trulia wants to grab our listings and put our information on its website to generate content and assist to monetize Trulia, the listings should work and appear correctly. In my mind, Trulia probably ought to conform to its content generator’s needs and to assist real estate agents, not the other way around, because we are mavericks, an unruly bunch. But I suspect we are all willing to give an inch if Trulia will. Of course, if I were Trulia brass, I might be tempted to view agents as that buzzing sound we used to hear generated by honeybees, before they were all dying off due to climate change. I know how agents are viewed. Let’s not go down that rabbit hole.
Instead, you know what I really love about Trulia? I like the fact that when I’m searching for oceanfront property in California, I can go to the map and navigate all along the coast, for as far as I can drag and still retain the strength in my right finger to click the darn mouse, from the Oregon border all the way to Baja. This way I can click on every listing I can find on the ocean and drool. Other people might surf porn or shift through pages of Jimmy Choo shoes, but someday I will move to the ocean and I like to dream about oceanfront homes.
The thing with this type of searching is I am not serious at this point. If I was serious about buying a home on the ocean, I would not look on Trulia. Because Trulia doesn’t have every listing, it takes too long to upload new listings so I could miss an opportunity, and many of the available listings are actually sold. I would search in the MLS that only agents can access (our mothership) and hire agents in other cities. But I might start my search on Trulia to determine trends and find top agents.
See, Trulia, I have developed patience; after all, for 8 long years I negotiated and sold hundreds of short sales — which sprang up outta nowhere and hung around way too long. If that doesn’t teach patience, I’m not sure what does. So, I waited 2 days for my listing to show up in Trulia in order to claim it. Two days. It never appeared. We have an open house scheduled tomorrow, so I had no choice but to input that listing manually if I want buyers to see it. I realize that’s a rebel’s way to do it, and I’m messing with your system, but like any top Sacramento real estate agent, I do what it takes to give my sellers an edge.
Image:Trulia
Zillow to Acquire Trulia and Who Cares About Realtor.com?
You can put all of those rumors to rest about Zillow acquiring Trulia because the official Zillow press release came out this morning that Zillow is indeed intending to take over Trulia in exchange for stock valued at $3.5 billion. As a consumer, you might not notice much difference as both websites will continue to operate as they always have, albeit, the merger should improve Trulia.
My own Sacramento listings on Trulia are tangled up and a mess. Still, I am excited about the news of Zillow to acquire Trulia. I’ve talked with customer service reps who seem to be following a revolving door and nobody has been able to fix the problem. In some instances, I can’t feature my listings as a special promotion. Some of the other problems are:
- Photos and marketing comments vanish after a listing moves into pending status
- No conformity among links to property sites
- Status modifiers are not active on all listings
- Photos uploads are slow and clunky
- Updates are not immediate and require 24+ hours
And that just breaks the surface. So, if you see that stuff on Trulia, don’t blame me. At times I may need to perform manual manipulation of my listings into Trulia if I want them to appear on my profile at all, but I’m not really complaining. Sometimes, I get clients who gripe and want to know why real estate agents don’t routinely try to update data on other companies’ websites but we don’t own those websites. They are owned by corporations. They may supplement our business a bit and provide a friendly service to the public but they are not our personal websites.
Some real estate agents around the country are freaking out over the intended purchase, they are not happy that to hear Zillow to acquire Trulia. They believe Zillow wants their jobs, their companies, their business and is out to slice their necks off like the top of a pineapple in one fell swoop. Zillow is not King Kong and we are not Jessica Langs. Paranoia has its place — why aren’t they more worried, for example, about Google world domination? BTW, you notice that nobody is talking about Realtor.com. Does anybody even use that website anymore?
I just go about my business, selling homes in Sacramento as a Sacramento real estate agent. If I had to pick a favorite website though, it would be Zillow, even though its computer-generated Z-estimates cause my clients so much frustration — because it makes my job even more important. It’s not a conflict. I bring extreme value to the table. Real estate still requires a human touch and expertise.
Crooks and Real Estate and the Internet
My husband used to cover criminal courts as a beat newspaper reporter in Chicago, and he says crooks get caught because many crooks are stupid. Can’t say that I know very many crooks, if any, but my personal feelings are if a person is stupid enough to be a crook when the other choice is to not be a crook, it seems likely that the person is stupid enough to make a stupid mistake.
I’m not talking about the people who are starving for a baloney sandwich and nobody will give them any money as they stand begging at the corner of the freeway, so they swipe a loaf of bread from the corner grocery; I mean the guys who would knife you in an alley and grab your wallet, along with your wedding ring. Or, kick in the door of your home and run off with your big screen TV after pulling out all of your copper plumbing.
Speaking of which, another seller in Sacramento just had his AC unit stolen from the yard while selling his home. I mentioned this to sellers yesterday as I listed their home in Elk Grove. Some people install cages over their exterior AC units. But this couple have a neighbor who kind of sounds like Gladys Kravitz, so they will probably be OK. I have neighbors like that in Land Park, and one of them is a retired police officer. There was once a time when you didn’t want anybody poking a nose into your business, but not so anymore.
Which brings me to the point, and I apologize for the long-about way I went to get here, that not only are we dealing with real-life crooks in Sacramento who are in our faces, but we have crooks who run amuck all over the Internet. These people don’t think of themselves as crooks, which makes it even more challenging. However, they swipe content that belongs to the person who wrote it and post it on their website as original content. That qualifies for crookism.
Now, I think it’s bad enough when a Sacramento real estate agent, for example, hires a professional writer to write a blog for that agent, because that’s not what blogging is about and it’s misrepresentation in my book, but it’s a hundred times worse when they intentionally swipe content.
Imagine my surprise this morning when I came across a response in Trulia that was copied and pasted by an agent in San Francisco, and it was my words that this agent swiped. Not only that, but it was my words from a response to another post I made on Trulia. So, he stole the content from the same website that he plagiarized. Where I, the original author, would likely spot it.
I noticed it because I recognized my own words. Most people don’t write like I write. I string phrases together and use certain words in a way that other people don’t. It’s one of the reasons why About.com hired me. I have a unique voice. And when somebody tries to take it from me, I will put a stop to it.
You can’t take photographs or words or articles that you find online and republish them. Everything online is copyrighted, and to reprint, a person needs permission. You can’t just give credit to the person who wrote the piece, either without obtaining permission. Getty Images is suing a real estate agent because she re-blogged (with permission), another agent’s blog (not mine), and the image in that blog belonged to Getty Images.
The moral to all of this blathering is help the hungry, don’t swipe AC units, and don’t steal online material.
