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Real Estate Agents – Dirtiest Secret – EXPOSED!
Real Estate Agents – Dirtiest Secret – EXPOSED! by Kurt Wannebo Today I’m going to cover one of real estate agent’s dirtiest secrets that they don't want you to know about and they don't want their clients to know about. Let’s be clear here, a lot of other real estate agents are going to be extremely and really mad at me for putting this out there and on video. But i don't care because you see I dedicated my career as a consumer advocate and doing what's in my client’s best interest. First, I have to start by educating you on something about what agents do to market your property. Yes, they market it all over the internet into the world and they create videos and they create brochures and you might think that's all great and that's all they do but there's actually another part of marketing at home to sell that agents do and that is the marketing they do to other real estate agents. There's a lot of different ways that they do this. They send out email blast, they do it through networking, they do it through broker caravans or in office meetings or communications and they also do this through the mls. Now, the mls has actually a little section in it called Confidential Remarks and this is where agents can put some notations in there which only other real estate agents can see. It doesn't go out to all of the different marketing websites and consumer doesn’t see this. Now some agents use this little confidential remark area to inform other agents about maybe a dog in the house. “Hey Sparky’s in the house, when you show it. He’s friendly, don’t worry about him” or “Hey, there’s a cat in there, don’t let the cat out”. Other real estate agents use this Confidential Remarks to convey the seller's motivation and why they are selling. Now, what do I mean by that? Or what is it that they say? Well, it isn't very uncommon for me to see that agents would put in there that the seller is very motivated, let's think about this for just a moment, seller is very motivated, if the seller puts their property on the market obviously they’re wanting to sell so there's some level of motivation there but the fact that they're putting that back in there in big bold letters actually mean something. Other comments they might put in there is that seller is very motivated and bring us any and every offer or any all offers. I even saw one recently in the MLS that actually said “seller is very motivated and will accept all offers”. Now, let me clarify what the term “Accept” means, that means, if somebody were to submit any offer that the seller would accept it, and in our contract terms, that mean they would accept it and move on to escrow. Now how do they do this? They will send this out through marketing. Here’s an example right here. This is an email blast that I got from a very prominent, well known real estate agent, marketing a property or listing that he has and in that email it says “Motivated sellers, bring all offers. I went to show the property the other day, I was previewing it for a client. As soon as my preview finished, the agent texted me “Seller is super motivated, just send us anything.” So text, emails and the MLS they convey all of this stuff here. Now let's think about this one more time, here you are, you probably hired your Real Estate agent, who told you that they're going to get you the highest and best price, and now they’re running around telling all the other agents how motivated you are to bring any and all offers and you might not even know about it. Now, I don't do this, I would never do this. Why? I don't do it because, first i feel it cost my clients money. I also feel that you're giving away negotiating leverage to be able to command the highest price and lastly, without my client’s approval, I just feel it's unethical and shady. Now, may I ask how often do agents really do this? Well, the answer is, more than you would actually think. It is happening more and more, especially since the market has started to shift and agents aren’t prepared for this. Now, why would they do this you’d ask? Well, you’d have to understand that most real estate agents here in San Diego, they’re only selling 3 homes a year and they just don’t have the negotiating or the marketing skills to attract buyers, especially on a slower market, and deal with them so they have to revert to this secret marketing through agents. Another time agents actually like to do this quite often, is if they have a contract with somebody to list their home it’s usually for a specified period of time and if that contract’s expiring, usually at that point when it's getting close, the agent will start letting other agents know “Hey just submit any offer or send me anything” so that they can rile up their client and maybe provide something to them or an offer that they haven’t provide through that entire time and maybe keep the relationship alive and again as we said before, this market is shifting, be very clear about that even if you're not seeing it in the news. It's taking longer to sell homes. Buyers have more choices and so some agents instead of being able to ramp up their marketing, just to entice buyers, agents start using these tactics. Again, do I do this? No. I wouldn't do this without my client’s permission. And you know what? I've never had a client tell me. “Kurt, you know what? Can you please tell every buyer that I would accept any offer and I’m super motivated?” No, they actually want the opposite. It’s just against my ethics and morals to do this behind my client’s back. Now, again, let’s be very clear here, there are going to be a lot of real estate agents that are going to be really upset that I posted this video, but again, you know what? I don't owe them anything. My loyalty and duty is to my clients and i feel the consumers. I don’t want to be like those other agents and i believe it’s this thinking that has got me to the point of my career where I helped over 1,200 families and I’ve gotten over 500 5 star reviews all over the internet. So this is something that you want to take into consideration if you're considering putting your home on the market, this is something you might want to ask your agent. What do you put in there? Do you put fliers out there telling the buyer’s entire agent that “We’re super motivated”. Can you show me and prove that you don't do that? And hopefully this will just give you something to think about if you’re considering putting your home on the market because again, I feel these tactics can actually cost you 10, 20, 30 thousand dollars when it comes to the sale of your home. Thank you for watching. I’m Kurt Wannebo. Have a great day!
Important thing to know if you're hiring a real estate agent to sell your home
Today I want to talk about one of the most important things that every seller should know if they're considering selling or hiring a real estate agent. In fact when I'm interviewing to list somebody's home and they're interviewing a couple different agents it's one of the first questions people will ask me. But other times I'd say 25-30% of the time people don't ask me this question or sometimes don't even know what it is. So what is that one important thing that you should know if you're going to hire a real estate agent and sell your home? That is their career (the agent’s career) sales price to list price ratio. Now what is that? Let me break it down for you very simply; let's say an agent lists a property for $1,000,000, they put it on the market asking price is a million dollars but in the end of the day when it's all said and done, it closes escrow and it only sells for $950K. Listed at a million, sold for $950K, that would be 95% sales to list price ratio. It's like a grade like a percentage. Now let's say over the course of a couple of years the agent listed three properties, all for a million dollars. But one sold for $950K, one sold for $975K, and one sold for a million, when you average out all three of those then their career or track record of the three listings becomes a 97.5% sales to list price ratio. Now why is this important, this might come into play based off of you interviewing two different agents, one agent might have a 97.5% and another has a 95%, now what does that mean? That means statistically, numerically speaking, based off of their track record, that this agent, typically out sells this one by at least 2.5%. Granted a few variables are consistent such as the time frame and sometimes the amount of units that they've sold or not. But it's one thing that consumers or sellers will always ask me; what is your sale to list price ratio? And they'll look at these numbers especially if they're weighing out different agents and their different commission's that they charge. They want to go for somebody who can sell it for the most and possibly get good commissions. Now there's another way of looking at this as well, and that is this: the MLS that we operate and use off of now based off of the computers that's been around since 1997. Every sale that's happened on the MLS has been tracked and when you take every sale from 1997 to the day that I filmed this, the average for all the agents and all the properties sold, the average sales to list price was 96.68%. Now you'd say well that's pretty decent. A couple things to take into account about that, sometimes the market slows down and that average will start to drop, likewise when the markets hot and things are going crazy then sometimes that average will start to rise. So this average is really the consistency from that year until today 2018, almost now twenty years that we're looking at here. So again, it does fluctuate, last year obviously it was a pretty good year so the average was a little bit higher if you just take into account that year was at 98.16%. Again, this tool can be used because you want to weigh out is the agent that you're hiring based off of their sales to list price ratio, are they even keeping up with what all of the other agents have been doing? So, in this case if you have an agent who has 95% sales to list price ratio, but the market history of all agents and everything that sold is running it over a little over 96%, well that means that the agent can't even keep up with what everyone else is doing in the market. And they actually might be selling properties less than what the market is doing and what all the other agents are doing. Likewise, if you have somebody at 97.5%, they're beating all of the other agents and the market out there by almost 1%. You can also ask an agent for their sales to list price ratio just for last year and see. Did they track along with all of the other agents in the business or did they do better? You would think you, don't all agents do the same thing and don't all houses sell for the same price irrespective of the agent? I will tell you this; there are plenty of agents out there who are running in the low 90% or even 80% and can't even keep up with the entire market of San Diego and are underperforming and selling properties less than what all the other agents are doing. Likewise there is a handful, not all but a handful of agents who actually beat the market and the entire MLS each and every time, sometimes by 1%, 2% or 3%. These are things that you should take into consideration. For those sellers out there who know what this is and ask me it, I'm always happy because I'm glad that they understand this, but for those of you who don't know, it's one of the most important questions that you want to take into consideration. Next thing people will ask me is, Kurt what is your career sales to list price ratio? What is your sale to list price ratio for 2017? Well first, I always give that to people. I provide it in verifiable writing. This is something that any agent can pull directly from the MLS and should be presented to you right at the table especially if that's important to you. Now if you're interested in hearing what my sales to list price ratio, I'm more than happy to give that to you. Just give me a call, ask me, or shoot me an email and I'll just email you my statistics so that you can see where things lie. But in the meantime I wanted you to make sure you understood this important information. Thank you so much, for watching have a great day!
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