Home buyers journal part two…

OK, so here’s a lesson for real-estate agents in a buyers market. RETURN YOUR PHONE CALLS. When shopping for agents, I had four leads, all from friends who had recently purchased houses and one from my aunts who recently sold my grandmother’s house. The agent who worked with my aunts took a FULL WEEK to return my phone calls. (I'm still waiting to hear from two agents.) And, only after we had been really busy looking at houses all weekend, did he call on Sunday. We just didn’t have the energy to talk to him and we didn’t have the time, frankly. So, he called again on Monday.

Basically, I had to tell him the frank truth: It’s a buyers market, and people who aggressively want to search for a house look for other representation fairly quickly. I told him who we went with, why we went with this agent, and that we had already looked at ten houses.

His response, “I probably lost out on $6,000 in commission because I didn’t return voice mails.”

Lesson to sellers: Does your agent return your calls promptly? Furthermore, if a potential buyer were to call your agent how quickly does he return THEIR calls?