What’s better than having a Realtor’s advice? Having a Realtor’s advice for free!

by Cathleen Collins

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

Last Friday, on January 5, our nephew Bryan celebrated his twenty-first birthday. Less than a week earlier, on New Year’s Eve, he wasn’t yet old enough to join in a New Year’s champaign toast at the club where’s he’s played gigs for the past few years. He graduated from high school three Decembers ago, last month he celebrated his second wedding anniversary, and later this month he’ll begin his fourth year in the US Navy, where he plays sax in the Navy Band Southeast’s Jazz Ensemble in Florida. And… he has already had three real estate transactions in escrow, every time without having been represented by a real estate agent. How has he fared in real estate? Not very well, despite being the favorite nephew of real estate professionals in Texas and Arizona. And why would that be? Because after having listened to the advice of his doting aunts and uncles, he followed the course that made the most sense to him and his young bride.

I don’t blame youth for real estate decisions that Bryan has made contrary to loving expert advice. I blame “human nature.” There is a reason that everyone who speaks English knows the old saw, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I began this post with Bryan’s bio to demonstrate that despite his tender years, he has made several life altering decisions. And I should also point out that Bryan actually solicited our opinions, rather than having them forced upon him, which is so often the lot of young people. So you would assume that he asked our advice so he could mull it over, weigh it and then make a better decision having had the benefit of expertise. There’s even a good probability that Brian no longer remembers that Aunt Denise suggested he not walk away from his first purchase contract and his $5,000 earnest deposit, nor Aunt Cathy’s caution against buying a much lesser property, a condo, six months later, during Florida’s bloated seller’s market, for the same price he would have payed for the first house. But at last he heeded us when during his third real estate transaction we recommended that he sell his property without using a Realtor, in order to mitigate a short sale.

Wha-wha-what?!!! Don’t use a Realtor? Isn’t that blasphemy among the initiated? Nope. Sometimes that’s just good advice. In Bryan’s case, he has an aunt in Texas who is a very successful mortgage banker. She helped him understand his financial options and got him to enlist the mortgage holder in a solution to his problem, rather than avoiding the lender. And he has another aunt (me) who is successful at selling listings during a buyer’s market, so I coached him on presentation and marketing. And he’s in the US Navy so he has free access to an attorney. Although I am trained to write contracts incident to real estate transactions in Arizona, I had Bryan run every contract that he asked me to review past the Navy’s attorney — I just helped him understand the questions he needed to ask.

Using the resources that were available to him for free, Bryan was under a purchase contract in less than sixty days, one that actually would have let him walk away with a Happy Meal profit. We’d touch base during the escrow period so he would know what to expect… simple things that a professional thinks about that are not commonplace to the do-it-yourselfer… Things like getting to know your escrow officer… Things like what to look for in the title commitment and later in the preaudit… And later, staying up on the buyer and the status of her loan. Even so, the buyer couldn’t close on time. In fact her lender failed to meet the extended date to fund, which put the young couple yet another month behind in payments. But at the counsel of their aunts they sucked it up, rode it out and accepted that they’d have to forego their Happy Meal. And by the time the holidays had begun, they were free of their encumbrance.

I wish that real estate transactions would always work out well for everyone, represented, not represented, or represented for free, as was the case with our nephew. But of course there will always be transactions where someone walked away unhappy. We’re sure to hear about those transactions if there was representation or implied representation, and that’s appropriate. The same is true in any segment of a customer service industry — I’m sure you’ve all heard the maxim, “For every one person a satisfied customer tells about his experience, a dissatisfied one will tell ten.” (I know I’ve paraphrased that, but the meaning is right.) We probably won’t hear many complaints from the unhappy represented-for-free buyers and sellers, because they would have been represented by a close family member. And when FSBOs (For Sale By Owner) or BUBBAs (Buyer Unrepresented By a Buyer’s Agent) have successful transactions they love to brag, but not so when there are unhappy consequences and there’s no one to blame but themselves, so we won’t hear much about those transactions.

My point is that I don’t believe anecdotes about an unhappy friend’s (once or twice removed) experience with representation by an unnamed agent should be or is the determining factor in whether a buyer or seller should hire a real estate agent or go it alone. Everyone should weigh his own circumstances to make this decision. People without real estate licenses who have the time and experience to represent themselves, like many of the non-licensed commenters (at least I assume they’re not licensed) who brag that they’ve been pleased with the outcome of transactions that they’ve handled themselves, might never want to use a professional agent. But if they had the burden of liability that a real estate agent has when counseling people on real estate decisions, would they go on their virtual soapboxes and preach that everyone would be better off handling their own transactions?

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