Speaker 1 (00:00.076)
What's going on everyone? Welcome to Real Talk Real Estate. This is Real Talk Realtor, the show by agents for agents. And we've got a unique twist for you all today. I am joined by Angela Hadorn, a project manager that works with me in several of my different companies. And she is helping me sell some of my own houses. So last week we had Angela on to talk about her experience with selling one of her houses in Crystal Beach, Texas. The nightmare deal that that was and how she finally got rid of it. And today,
We are going to be talking about the realtor questions that come to her from the agents that we have hired to sell my properties. Now this is different. This is not stuff most people talk about. That's why we call this Real Talk Real Estate. We are going to talk about the things that I would have thought that these agents would know better, the things they would have known how to do, and how we had to tell them what to do. Now keep in mind as we go through today's show.
These are top producing agents that were vetted, that were referred to us by other people and they gave us a very good impression. They even sell a lot of houses. And I think you're going to be shocked when you hear about some of the ways that they made mistakes or they handled these listings, which are not cheap properties. Hopefully you think maybe a laugh a little bit and you don't cry too hard, but the end of today's show, I would love it if you would be a better realtor because you see the perspective that comes from the client side.
and not just your own. Angela, welcome to the show.
Thanks David.
Speaker 1 (01:27.97)
Yep. Thanks for joining me again today. Quick reminder, today's show is sponsored by The One Brokerage. So if you're looking for somebody to finance your client's real estate, we would love to help grow your business to do that. Send me a DM on Instagram at David Green 24 or visit the onebrokerage.com to learn more. And also if you could do me a favor, if you know any loan officers, maybe that you work with that sell your homes, please tell them that The One Brokerage is looking to add more loan officers. We need more people for the business that we're doing.
and we want to give them more products, more training, and more support than any other brokerage that they could find. All right, so let's get into this thing, Angela. Let's start off by talking about how many houses approximately are we trying to sell out of my portfolio?
Ooh, we have, I wanna say six or seven listed right now.
That's right. And there throughout California, Florida, Georgia, anywhere else?
Nope.
Speaker 1 (02:26.158)
Yeah. So we've got these houses to sell. Now, admittedly, this is a bad time to be selling because especially like the South Florida market's not doing that great. The California market's not super hot. The whole economy is kind of in a bit of a stalemate and all this tariff talk has scared people quite a bit. So realtors, as you're listening to this, if you're not selling a lot of houses, if things seem slow, you're not crazy. There's not a lot of transactions that are taking place. There's also
Not a lot of sellers that feel desperate enough to lower their prices a lot. And there's not a lot of buyers that want to pay today's prices at today's interest rates. So it's not a market where things are moving really quick. And that has created a lot of content for real estate agents to go over and podcasts like this, to talk about how they can be better. So Angela and I are going to run through a list that we have of eight questions or situations or concerns that popped up from agents.
She's going to explain what the agent said to her, and then we're gonna go over what I told her to tell them and talk about my logic of why. You ready, Angela? All right, what's number one?
Let's do it. The first one, we have a property in South Florida and we had a cash offer, a verbal cash offer, which was okay. It was under the list price by about $50,000 and she was going to pay cash. immediately I already had a lot of questions.
Do we have proof that she has cash? Cause that's a lot of cash. She also wasn't an investor. Oftentimes when someone's going to pay cash, in my experience, it's been an investor. So we have no information besides she's going to give us $50,000 under asking.
Speaker 1 (04:11.914)
cash on comes to you and says, what do want to do? Okay. just for reference here, 50 K under ask is about 15%, maybe a little bit more, under what we have it listed for. And Angela, I don't remember which property this was. How long had this one been on the market?
This one at this time would have been on the market for about two and a half months.
Okay, so this is a little bit longer, but that's still very significantly under where we're listed, and we are listed at the cheaper end of the homes that are available for sale. So it's not like 50K is where it should be selling at. We're already priced cheaper than the competition. What I interpreted this was, was a buyer that was shotgunning offers to every single person to see who's desperate to sell. They didn't even wanna take the time to write out an offer formally.
to buy the house. They just told their agent, see if they'll pay this, see if they'll pay this. Just have your agent call every person and make a verbal offer and see which of the sellers say, play ball. What I didn't like about that is I didn't think they wanted to buy my house. I thought that they just wanted to find out who's desperate and if we go, yeah, we'd consider that, then the written offer is gonna come in at $150,000 less. What we wanted was an actual offer.
that was written out with an agent that made an effort that communicated with our listing agent. And do you remember what I told you to tell our agent who brought us this verbal offer?
Speaker 2 (05:43.438)
You said that we needed an actual offer, not a verbal offer, but an actual offer so that we could counter it.
Right. So when you're in this situation and you're the listing agent and you're representing your client, what you're trying to do is balance between being a fiduciary and representing them so that you're not giving their house away and also not blowing up a potential deal. So when the buyer's agent says to the listing agent, hey, what do you think about 50K under whatever the case would be? The listing agent should say, I'm so excited that your clients want to make an offer on this house. Tell me what you liked about it.
And if they have nothing to say, you know, it's like almost like they're swiping right on a dating app. They didn't even look. They just take a quick glance and they're like, okay, they're putting zero effort into this. That's not worth getting your clients all excited about. You don't want to be like, hey guys, guess what? We got a verbal offer that means nothing. Now your clients emotions are going to get involved. The husband and wife are going to start talking to each other. They're going to get all excited. They're going to get worried. They're going to want to ask you a whole bunch of questions and you have nothing to give them.
So the appropriate answer when another agent says we have a verbal offer, which is really nothing, is you ask them a question to you, scout them out, just like they're trying to scout you out. You want to turn it right back around and fill them out and you want the buyer's agent to basically convey, yeah, we're not serious at all. We're just looking for somebody to low ball and we want to know if you're that sucker. Make sense.
makes total sense.
Speaker 1 (07:15.874)
Now if the buyer is willing to actually write the offer at 50K below, that's good because now what we're gonna do is we're gonna send a counter offer much closer to our list price and then if they want the house, they're gonna play ball, they're gonna maybe counter us back. If they don't want the house, they're gonna just ignore it. But now you have made sure that the agent didn't waste too much time, you didn't waste too much time and most importantly, the client's emotions did not get activated so that they get disappointed later. All right, what's number two?
Number two is, believe this was maybe the same property, but we had feedback that this investor really wanted to make an offer, but it needed a new roof and it was overpriced. So if they were going to offer it, it was going to be really low. They were interested, casually interested, but they were saying it's overpriced and needs a new roof.
Okay, whenever the buyer's agent tells the listing agent that their house is overpriced, the equivalent in dating would be like a guy telling a girl, hey, you're cute, but you're not that hot. What he's trying to do is get the girl to lower her expectations of how she's gonna be treated. He's like, I'm not gonna put that much effort in for you. So the buyers are trying to tell the sellers through their agent,
We're not gonna pay asking price for your house. It's not worth it. You're not that great. You should just be happy for whatever peanuts we hand you. And then to solidify that, add credibility to it, they said it needs a new roof anyway. The problem is, how did the buyers get this opinion that the house needs a new roof? Did they say anything? Did they order a roof inspection? Where did that come from?
They were investors, allegedly they knew what they know what to look for when a house needs a new roof. And I think that is something that's common if you're an investor. One of the big things, obviously, it's one of the biggest expenses. you're going one of the first things you're going to look at is the roof.
Speaker 1 (09:16.345)
And this house has a tile roof, I believe.
Pretty sure it does. Yeah. This one's in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So it has a tile roof. Do you remember what I told you to tell that agent?
I don't remember.
Yeah, I think it was something along the lines of like, have them write me an actual offer. And if they get a roof inspection that shows that the roof needs to be replaced, we can calculate how much of the roof needs to be replaced, what the total cost of roof replacement is. And we can negotiate that with the deal. And of course, nothing. They never came back. Similar to the first deal, this is an agent working with investors. And by investor, we mean somebody who wants to low ball the property owners. And they just use the phrase investor.
when talking about it, you have to be very careful when a deal starts off like this. Because you may think you got a deal at a price lower than you wanted, but at least as the seller you're like, well at least it's something. They will come back, they will retrade, they will beat you up on everything that they can, and at that point you're more and more committed to that client. So the job of the listing agent is to find someone that loves the house, that really wants it.
Speaker 1 (10:25.366)
And part of making somebody want it is the price the house is listed at. Last week we talked about a property that you were selling that was priced too high. Nobody really wanted it. You can make people want the house by dropping the price low enough, but it is non-negotiable that if you go into contract with someone, it needs to be a buyer that really, really wants that property. If they're casual buyers, like whatever, I could take it or leave it. That's toxic. You don't want to be in that relationship. All right, number three.
Number three is in a different market. had a few people that said there was some exterior damage. Nothing crazy or it wasn't that major, but it was consistent feedback that we continue to get.
And this was this carpenter bee damage on a cabin. Okay. So if you guys are unfamiliar with the cabin world, this is very common in the smoky mountains. This property is in Blue Ridge, Georgia. What happens is carpenter bees lay their larva inside of wood, especially when it's soft, like after it rains, the larva grows and woodpeckers like to eat them.
but the bees drill holes and put the larva deep in the hole that they drilled. So you can tell when you got carpenter bee damage, because you get these little like almost like perfect looking circles that go deep into the wood where they lay their eggs. Then the woodpeckers come and just create complete devastation as they peck the wood open to get to the larva that they want to eat. Over time, it just looks like, I mean, how would you describe it, man? Like craters.
Right? It kind of looks like, first of all, I have a house in Tennessee and I spend a stupid amount of money on pest control for carpenter bees. I have to say, cause I know there's people listening who have dealt with this as well, but it looks like someone took a drill or something and drilled it into the side of your house. They're so they're they're perfect circles, which is crazy.
Speaker 1 (12:12.904)
The carpenter bee circles are, but how do you describe what it looks like when the woodpeckers just go and destroy it all to hell?
Yeah, it just looks like someone took a drill and just like randomly drilled into the side of your house and then took a hacksaw and just kind of went to town.
Yeah. It's not clean. It's like they're like ripped apart basically because the woodpecker is not going to the wood and then grab it and pull big chunks of it off. So it creates damage that you just have to go in there and replace the piece of wood. Or if it's not that bad, you can put some wood filler in there. This is not something that a licensed professional has to do. You could get a handyman that's decent and that can just stain some wood and put it up most of the time to fix it. However,
Buyers are going to put up everything they can to justify why they don't want to buy the house or the seller has to understand that they got a terrible property on their hands, needs all new roof, has carpenter be damaged or whatever. The answer to that is tell them to write an offer and include as closing cost credits what they would like to repair the damage. Explain to the buyer's agent that every single cabin they look at is going to have the same thing.
and that when they buy the cabin, they're gonna have to deal with this as well. This is not a defect in the property, this is a condition of owning cabins and that everyone's going to have it no matter who gets this cabin. And then if they write the offer and they include the closing cost credit, what we would do is counter with a higher price, but it's a lower net to the seller, me, because I'm including a credit to repair the stuff.
Speaker 1 (13:46.784)
In fact, on a cabin like this, I would almost rather do something unconventional. Let's say I got a full price offer. I would knock the price up and then give them a credit they didn't even ask for and then have them waive their inspection contingency. Like guys, we're going to cover everything that you might need right up front. So don't even worry about it. Here's 20 grand to make all your repairs. You're going to buy it without an inspection contingency because I don't want to deal with like
you coming back later after you got the good price because you pointed out the carpenter be damaged. And after you got a closing cost credit and then finding a bunch of other stuff and saying, now you need to give us a credit for that as well. They're not buying a brand new cabin that has nothing wrong. And as a listing agent, that should be the conversation that you're having with the buyer's agents. Their job is to say, we don't like this and we don't like that. And this is a problem. And come back and say, hey, all the cabins have that. Have you educated your buyers on what it's like to own in the smokey mountains?
Have you educated your buyers on what it's like to buy in Blue Ridge? This is something that they should be aware of and they need to work this into their capital expenditures because they're going to be making repairs just like my clients are. By doing that, you sort of undermine the severity of the problem. It's not like it's a leak that's really significant or a foundation problem or a roof problem. Carpenter be damaged just like dry rot, just like fungus, just like termites at some point. It's going to be a thing that all properties are going to deal with.
Good example there. What's number four?
Number four, we have an agent that does not give us any updates on showings. We have a couple agents that are really great at saying, hey, there's a showing tomorrow. Hey, there's a showing the day after that. We have one today and tomorrow. No, I don't need more information. That's fine. But we have an agent that's saying there's lots or when we have to follow up with them all of the time to ask how many showings and they're saying there's lots of interest, but yet they're going dark and not saying.
Speaker 2 (15:45.4)
how many showings or what people are thinking about the property.
Have you asked them yet? I would like to know how many showings we've had every week on this day or something like that. That would be the first place I'd start for this one. Like, hey, every Friday I want a text from you that tells me how many showings we had and how much feedback we got. By comparison, Rob and I are selling our Scottsdale property that we have together because Rob wants his share of the money to put into a really big deal that he's putting together.
have not asked them.
Speaker 1 (16:17.804)
That's your partner. I'm always going to back up my partner. So even if I don't want to sell, I'm going to sell because Rob wants to. And I picked our real estate agent. It's Billy. I love Billy. He's one of my favorite agents ever. He's who I bought all my Arizona properties with. He's the guy that I use when I'm selling Arizona properties. I flip properties, but I've referred him to so many people. Billy gets the feedback for every single showing that we do and not only tells us when we have a showing scheduled, he tells us when the showing happened.
He often meets the buyers there. Now of course this is a $4 million property. Not everybody's gonna do this on every single house. But he gives us the feedback from the buyer's agents every time. And if he can't get the feedback, he says, I followed up three times, the agent's not giving me feedback. We don't ask him anything. We don't blow up his phone. He keeps us off his back by just texting us to tell us what's going on. So if you're a listening agent and you feel like my phone keeps ringing every time I sit down to have dinner.
That's because you didn't tell your clients when you were going to talk to them and they don't know what to expect and they have nobody else to call. The other thing that I would say here is, you think our agent knows if we're getting showings or not?
That's a good question. Why would they not know if we were getting showing?
Most of the time when you're selling a vacant property and most of my properties are vacant right now, the agent puts a lock box on the house and the agent's going to show it, don't have to get permission to go. If there's no tenants and they don't need a special code, you can put it in the MLS, it's vacant, just go show it whenever you want. So what usually happens is an agent leaves their business card on the counter. I don't know when that started, but that's kind what everybody does is they show a house, they throw a business card on the counter.
Speaker 1 (17:59.566)
but the agent might not be checking their super box code to see how many people showed the house. And that is a sign of an unorganized agent. Usually when that's what you get, that agent has a great personality. They're friendly, they are likable, they're a golden retriever that just wants to sniff your butt and play fetch. They're so likable, but they're not organized, right? Usually the agents that are really thorough and organized have terrible personalities and theirs dry.
as a brand muffin. Am I right in my guess that this is a likable agent?
I am biased because at first I was like, ooh, I like everything he's saying, but very quickly on I was thinking maybe they may or may not be. Well, now I'm realizing that they're not organized.
But their personality was likable, right?
Yeah, admittedly I don't know them very well, so.
Speaker 1 (18:55.896)
But you liked them when you were talking to them or you wouldn't have felt comfortable with having this agent be the one to sell the house, right? That's a trap everyone falls into. They're like, this is the happy one. This is the nice one. I got a good gut feeling about them. And then you're chasing them down forever trying to get the information that you need to sell the house. So as a reminder to all the agents that are listening, if you're the friendly one, if you're guy smiley, if you just love people, you need to be more organized and you need to consider paying somebody.
run your file and keep your clients aware of what's going on. And if you're super thorough and you're super well organized and you do everything I just said people should do, make sure you tell your prospective clients that. You cannot expect them to read your mind. You need to tell them, I do this, I do this, I do this. These are all the things you can expect from me. Sell yourself if you know you're that person, even if you're uncomfortable with it. Because we don't want the only agents getting the deals to be the ones with the great personalities that give the poor service.
Because from your perspective, Angela, how does this agent make you feel?
At first I have high hopes and then I quickly get very frustrated.
Because you have to do all the work of chasing this person down, right? And has this agent come back and said, I'm doing this to sell your house or I think we should change this thing or anything like that. Nope. So they're probably the reactive one. They wait for a buyer to ask a question and then they say, let me ask my clients. And then they come ask us, but they're not actually proactive, which is another sign when you, especially in a tough market like this, where houses aren't just selling on their own, you really, really, really want to be more proactive for your clients.
Speaker 1 (20:31.554)
Good example there. Alright, next one number six.
So the next one, we had a property that was listed and it went under contract and they had an inspection done and the inspection was a very normal inspection. There's a hundred things, but only two of them are maybe things that we should really get fixed in order to sell it. The agent freaked out and said, we're not going to be able to sell this house unless we get these things fixed.
They made it sound like the house was gonna fall apart. It was gonna flood. And naturally, I'm not a plumber. I'm not in the same market as this house. So I come to you also probably freaking out and you obviously knew better, but it turned out to be not that big of an issue. And the house ended up selling for more than that initial offer anyway.
Now, this was a flip and I paid for an inspection report upfront and I said, give this to the buyers, right? Yes. Okay. And the agent didn't look at the inspection report when they listed the house. Then they got it. They sent it to a buyer. And the next thing we know, she's calling you freaking out about all the things that are wrong with this house and it needs so much work and we're priced way too high, right?
correct.
Speaker 1 (22:01.058)
Here's how I read that situation. And this is why I didn't agree because I'm not I don't just knee-jerk respond and say no there's nothing wrong with the house. You have to be objective about this. Agents will frequently absorb and amplify then convey the emotions of their clients. This is not an admirable trait for real estate agents to have. Yet they do this. It's especially the high eyes on the disc profile. They're like this. OK. So if
If a buyer sees a house and falls in love with it and they talk about how great it is, the agent will absorb all that energy, amplify it, and then they would call listing agent and gush about how much the buyer wants the house. But then the buyer might go see a different house tomorrow that they like way more, and they forgot all about your house, and that never gets conveyed to you. So you're sitting there as a listing agent or as a seller under this impression.
They love my house. They're going to buy it. I'm gonna get such a good offer. You're getting all excited. And then it's crickets from the other side. You hear nothing, right? Especially because the buyer's agent calls the listing agent gushes, then the listing agent calls the client and gushes even more. They amplify it again. So by the time it hits the seller, it's like super powerful, okay? In this case, what I think happened is a buyer went and looked at the house and wants a deal.
They looked at the inspection report and they went to my agent and they said, my gosh, this needs so much work. We could never pay this much money. And they're doing the thing where they're telling the girl, you're not that cute. You've got a mole, your hair gets frizzy, you're too tall. All of these things that they don't like about her to be like, and that's why I'm not taking you to a steakhouse. We're going to Taco Bell and you're gonna accept it because you're not that great. It's an abusive.
in a romantic relationship, it's a normal thing in real estate investing. This is what people do. And so my agent absorbs all that energy, doesn't counter, doesn't say, actually, this inspection report doesn't look worse than any of the other reports for the houses in the neighborhood. This was a house built in 1972. Did you know that? It's gonna have this or this or that. These are normal things. That's what they should have said to the buyers. They should have pushed back and brought educated perspective to them.
Speaker 1 (24:23.234)
And then we see if they really want the house or if they were just trying to find a great deal. Instead, they grab the energy, they amplify it and they go barf it all over you. Just puke this negativity. my God, this is so bad. It needs a new roof. There's plumbing issues. It's probably got as best as I think somebody died in here one time. It's possessed by crazy maniacal clowns. Like they just go into this crazy story of trying to get you to panic. And then you call me like, we got a big problem.
right? And I'm like, great. Another big problem. This is the last thing I need. Then I say, Well, what is the problem? And when we actually turn it into bullet points that are just written down, we don't have a big problem. We had buyers that think that a house needs a new roof. And there was a couple like, there was something with plumbing, right? Like there wasn't a leak, but there was something mentioned like the plumbing might be old. Is that son right?
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Right. So we basically asked the agent, hey, why did you not already know about this stuff? We paid for an inspection out of our money and gave it to you. You should have looked at that so that you were ready. That's why it's there so that the buyers don't have to spend the money and they can make an educated decision on buying this house. You didn't tell them anything. Normally they would have had to pay 500 bucks to get that report and they would have already had some skin in the game at this point. Right. And we realized the agent didn't even give a
They didn't care. They didn't read the report. They didn't make an effort. And they also didn't push back against the client that was being ridiculous. I lost confidence that that agent could represent me in the house very well. We said, Hey, we'd like to get out of the contract. said, okay, fine. Because they thought that they were selling a death house that was going to collapse on them. We found another agent to sell it and a shout out to Jesse. He did a great job with that. And we basically had no problems. We didn't have to change the roof.
Speaker 1 (26:11.234)
The plumbing was normal for houses that age and we sold it for more than the first agent thought we could sell for. that correct? Okay, this is a great example. Agents, when you get the emotions of the buyer or the client, it is not your job to amplify it and puke it all over the other side. You are supposed to be a professional. It is your job to absorb their emotions and calm them, not amplify them.
Yep.
Speaker 1 (26:39.49)
We don't need everybody running around like Chicken Little screaming that the sky is falling, right? Turn emotions into information. Hey, I can see that you're really concerned about the roof. Why do you think it needs a new one? I don't know. Everybody just always says it needs a new roof. There's discoloration. discoloration doesn't mean you need a new roof. It might mean that you need some new shingles. It might mean you need some new composite.
Why don't we take a picture and send this to a roofing company and ask them how cheaply they could repair that? Might be a $400 problem, might be an $800 problem, might be a $2,000 problem, could be a $20,000 problem. Let's get the information before we get the emotions. Another thing is just saying, hey, if you're comparing this to a brand new house, yeah, it looks like it's falling apart. If you're comparing this to all the other houses that are on the market, it might actually be in better shape than some of the other houses that are in the neighborhood, right?
Like this house had been renovated. It had all new appliances. It had all new flooring. It had all new paint. It had some mechanicals that were replaced. It had some doors that were replaced. There was a lot of things in this house that were in better shape than the other houses in the neighborhood that our agent should have came back and said, even if it did need a new roof, you don't need a new dishwasher. You don't need a new stove. You've got a brand new sink and countertops. You've got brand new cabinets. You've got a refrigerator that's coming in it. You've got all new floors.
You've saved a ton of money buying this house over those. That never happened. So remember agents, it's not your job to fight with the other side, but it's not your job to panic and run and yell at your clients and tell them everything that the other side said when obviously the other side is biased.
And one other thing I forgot to mention about that property is we did have a roofer go and look at it and give us a letter saying it did not need a new roof.
Speaker 1 (28:26.53)
Yeah, did we provide that to her?
Yeah, it was only several, it was maybe a couple hundred dollars to fix a flashing or something that was very minor.
That right there is why you want to turn emotion into information because it sounded like the end of the world when it first came in. By the time that it goes through a couple of filters, it's like, okay, it needs some flashing. That's actually one of the better roofs in the entire neighborhood for the area. And this can happen with foundations. People panic about foundation. It's the F word in real estate. The minute someone says foundation, people lose their mind.
A lot of houses have old foundations and foundations can be repaired sometimes for less than a thousand bucks. It doesn't mean that the house is going to fall. Good example there though, especially because that one turned out better for us.
Number seven, we had a property listed. We were listing it to sell, so we listed a little bit below where we thought it could sell. And we had an offer within, I think, maybe two days. Again, a verbal offer from an investor agent. And it came in about fifteen thousand below our asking price.
Speaker 1 (29:36.214)
Okay. So in this case, our agent had recommended a price range and not only did I go at the low end of the price range, I went below his lowest point. So we've already priced this house pretty aggressively and it's been on the market a couple of days and another agent says to him, Hey, I'd like to buy it. And she comes in even lower than the lower price that we had put in. And again, it was the verbal offer. And you told me this and I said, tell him to tell her, Hey,
This is specifically what we said to tell her. I've advised my clients not to take anything below asking price for the first couple of weeks the house is on the market because we've already listed it much lower than I think it's worth. I wanted him to sell it up here. He agreed to sell it down here. So I will present your offer if you write it, but I'm going to tell him that we should wait. If you want to wait a few months and the house hasn't sold, I'll tell him to consider that offer.
Now I wanted my agent to present himself as the bad guy instead of the seller as the bad guy because I wanted him to explain to the listing agent, like, you can't just come in and say, what's the listing price? Let me knock a bunch of money off of it and just shotgun an offer. I don't know that it was conveyed the way that we wanted because his response to us was, boy, was she not happy. I can't see how what I just said could make somebody unhappy.
If you're writing below asking price offers on real estate, when they've been on the market for four days, you shouldn't be shocked that they say no. Especially when you are an agent yourself and should know how it works. My guess would be the agent didn't convey it correctly. Now here's my advice to the agents that are out there right now. If you've been getting by in your personality and being friendly, it doesn't work when you have to negotiate with the other side.
You need to practice scripts. You need to practice having conversations with other agents in your office, other family members, other people you know. This is one of the tragedies of the work from home era that we've fallen into. When I was a new agent, I didn't know what to say, but I would go in the Keller Williams office and I would hear other agents on the phone all the time having conversations. And I literally gained confidence from listening to how other people handled objections.
Speaker 1 (31:59.832)
from hearing the way they said things, from hearing the pause before they started to talk, from noticing sometimes they don't just answer the questions. Sometimes they ask a couple questions of their own first. Sometimes they know they have something bad the other side's not gonna wanna hear. So they build a little rapport and then they sneak it in during the rapport building. Like I learned the confidence to use the tools verbally that agents need to have. When you work from home, you don't have those tools, you're kind of just like setting yourself up to fail.
You need to know how to say things in the right way to convey them. And I will frequently use this like good cop, bad cop method where I'll tell my agent, you tell her you fought like hell to get her offer accepted, but your client's just stubborn. And he said no, but if she writes the offer this way, you can probably get me to take it. I'm okay to be the bad guy if it's going to make the deal work, or sometimes it's the other way around. I want the agent to say it, right?
Agents, have to understand you're not working for your own egos. Too many agents are like this. They're, want to be liked. I don't want the other side to be mad at me. Well, then you're not being a fiduciary to your client, are you? Cause they didn't hire you to be liked. They didn't hire you to market yourself with their listing. They hired you to sell their damn house. And sometimes the way you convey things to the other side is how they'll convey it to their clients, which is what we're really trying to get. So I thought that this was a good example of the realtor who just didn't
likely have a lot of confidence with the way that they articulate things that probably led to an argument for some reason happening over the deal, which is not what you want. You don't want two agents arguing with each other. You were trying to get the other side to understand the house is already priced at a discount. At asking price, you're getting a great deal. Why would you go even lower and insult your client? Anything you want to add to that from your perspective of what you saw?
Yeah, it was frustrating because we had, like you said, we had already listed it below what we thought it was gonna sell for and they were very confident that you list here, it's gonna sell pretty quickly. It was not the case.
Speaker 1 (34:05.612)
Yeah, that's a good point because we went even lower than the price that he recommended. He thought it would sell quickly. OK, number eight.
Number eight, we have a property that has a main house and a guest unit. rent them together. We also rent them separately. And the square footage in the bedrooms was only listed. It was only listed for the main unit. did not include the guest.
Well, you say guest house, but it's basically two cabins on the same lot, right? Correct. Yeah, we call it the guest house within our community, but it's not like a tiny little casita or something.
Right. It's a three bedroom, bath house. it's, it is, it's not a small little tiny house or tiny cabin. It is a significant cabin. So two cabins on the same lot. And you, when you bought the property, you did remodel it so that it was a B it was able to be used as a separate cabin. And the square footage was only included for the main cabin.
Okay, so when you looked at the listing, you're saying the square footage was only the main cabin and the bedroom count was only the main cabin. It basically like the entire square footage and three bedrooms and two bathrooms of the second cabin wasn't included at all. So what that does is it makes it look like we are way overpriced for what we're offering. So we're getting no phone calls, we're getting no showings, we're getting no inquiries.
Speaker 1 (35:30.126)
I found this out by looking up the listing myself and seeing what the hell, why is it showing like this? And this is another top producing agent, sells a lot of cabins out there. They're not incompetent. So I realized what happened, I explained this to Angela. When realtors put listings into the MLS, they usually don't hire an appraiser to go out there and measure the square footage and measure the bedroom and bathroom count. They import it from the tax assessor's data.
And they just take whatever it sold for last time and it uploads right away and they don't look into any deeper and maybe they don't even double check it. Well, this was a burr project where I converted a garage with an upstairs unit into a full cabin. So I added almost double the square footage. And like we said, added three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a bar, several living areas, like a lot of value here. Well, that's not in the tax assessor's information. So I've got a cabin that's like
two cabins on one lot that's not showing up that way on any of the listing portals and has way less score footage listed than what it actually has. We tell the realtor about this, they make the adjustment. How long was it after we did that that we started getting showings? Do remember?
It was immediately, I think it was the next day, we immediately had a couple of showings after not having showings for a significant amount of time.
Yeah. What do you think it was like two or three months that we weren't really getting any action going on?
Speaker 2 (36:57.536)
Yeah. And I wasn't skeptical, but I was surprised at how quickly that turned around because I was thinking it's, I don't know, it's not my favorite market, but I was surprised. And it was also pulling in one of the big sites. don't know if it was realtor, whatever Zillow maybe that was pulling in.
the square footage from when it was previously listed. So some sites that said nothing, some sites it was pulling in from an old historical listing.
So there you go, this is a experienced agent, not a newbie, top producer for the area, didn't bother looking at their own listing to see if they had included the square footage, if their bedroom count was accurate, and had two to three months of time of not getting showings that it never occurred to them. Maybe I should look at my listing and see what other people are seeing. Maybe I should look at this from the eyes of the buyer. So.
listing agents, if you have a listing and it's not moving. Look at it. Go look at it on Zillow, go look at it on realtor.com, go look at it on Redfin, pull up your MLS. Look at it through the eyes of the person who is looking for a home. Look at the other homes that they would be looking for. Let's get out of this set it and forget it garbage that agents get into where they put it on the MLS and they hope that their broker has some marketing plan that's gonna sell the house and they do nothing until a written offer comes in.
We already have all this technology that's making our jobs easier. At minimum, let's try to think about what we could do, move the pictures around, get better pictures, put the better pictures in the front. You don't need six pictures in a row of what the front porch looks like. You can have one picture of that and then maybe the best bathroom or the kitchen picture that really crushes it in the beginning and then get into the flow of the house. But you got to do something here to show your clients that you're trying to get their property sold.
Speaker 1 (38:51.926)
Alright, those were the eight issues that came up with my own portfolio dealing with real estate agents. Now, Angela actually has a bonus situation. Angela, what's that one?
I've got a bonus for you that just came up and so you don't know about this. So you're going to have to wing this answer. We have a property that we don't have keys to some of the closets that nobody would ever look in unless you probably lived there. So we have potential buyers that have already seen the house several times have had, have spent.
hours at this property and they would like to get into those closets. Now I have never seen these closets but I am confident what's inside is probably a broom and a dustpan, maybe a hanger. It's nothing significant. There are no skeletons in these closets. I am very confident to say that. So because the buyer has spent so much time, what would your answer be?
for them to get in the closets because we do not have the keys to these closets.
Yeah, we thought it was odd that somebody looking to buy a house that hasn't written an offer yet would be asking how do I get in the closets of the home to look at it? Normally that's a red flag for me. In this case, I think that they might just be older and what they're used to doing is looking at everything from their own with their own eyes. What we're going to tell the agent here is to tell them, hey, if you write an offer and put the house in contract, we will include in the offer.
Speaker 1 (40:29.346)
we want access to all of the closets and whatever for the inspection. And then at that point, me as the seller would provide a locksmith to open up the cabins and let them get in there to see it. But I don't think that there is any possible way that a buyer not being able to see what's inside a closet would stop them from putting the house in contract if they want it. I do think this is another example where the agent who's communicating needs to communicate that it is unreasonable
to have them bring out a locksmith for you to see inside these closets if you don't even know if you wanna buy the house. Do you guys want the cabin or not? If you do, what price do you want it at? Let's see if we can even make this deal work and then I will work my hardest to make sure that you can get in there and you can see what's in it during the inspection period and that's what an inspection period is for. If the agent doesn't communicate that, it blows up the deal. If the agent communicates that poorly,
then the clients think that the sellers have something to hide, right? And in our industry, when we communicate poorly in these examples, we're sending the message to the people like me that are selling a house, I should have done it myself. Similar to last week's episode, Angelo, where we talked about you selling your property, you probably thought several times, I should just do this myself. If we don't like for sale by owner, we need to stop going to NAR.
and being like, you guys need to fix things to make this easier for me. And we need to take the responsibility on ourselves to be masters of our craft, to take our vocation seriously, to take our profession seriously and act like professionals and stop being people that are just begging for others to like us while we wear our fancy pants suits and we get our hair done and we take our selfies and we post our TikTok videos, but we don't actually do anything to the clients that would want to buy the house. Anything you want to add on that?
I just want to reiterate everything you just said is totally true. And I people actually listen because as a buyer and a seller and an investor, I just wish that more agents would listen to that advice. It's not about you.
Speaker 1 (42:37.204)
That's really good. It's not about you. There you go. You are a fiduciary for somebody else. So get out of your own head. All right. We also have one more example of something that went well. We didn't want to have only problems that popped up. Let's talk about something that a realtor did good so everybody can hopefully emulate that.
Yes, we have an agent that we worked with recently and he was amazing because as your listeners know, you're a very busy person and we've got a lot going on all of the time. And so we don't have time to be dealing with petty issues and something that somebody left in the house or whatever it is. So
I really appreciated about this agent, he would bring us problems, but with that problem, he said, these are the solutions, which would you, which one, how would you like to resolve this? And I will take care of it, which with whichever way you want to go. And so we could make a quick decision, get it off our plate and we could trust that he could get the job done. And then we don't have to think about it and we can deal with all of the other things we're dealing with. And that is something that
Again, I unfortunately hate to say this, but I don't see this with a lot of agents and I really appreciated that about him. And what he did that was unique was he said, okay, I'm selling a property for David Green. He's a very busy guy. I'm not going to bother him with this petty stuff. Now, if he's dealing with another agent who wants to be super hands on and wants to be really involved, he would tailor the way he would treat his client in that way. And I so appreciated it because again, we don't have time to be dealing with
The issue was that the previous owner had left a bunch of stuff in the attic.
Speaker 1 (44:21.036)
like pictures and memorabilia and stuff like that.
I don't want to throw that stuff away, but also we don't have time to be dealing with someone who didn't remember they had pictures of grandpa in their attic.
So he said, Hey, what do you guys want to do about this? And we were like, the buyers can figure that out. It's just stuff in the attic. And he's like, well, I don't really want the buyers have to deal with it. And I was like, well, I don't really want to have to coordinate someone to go out there and figure out how to get the stuff out of the attic. And the buyers actually broke the ladder that goes into the attic when they were climbing up there to check it out.
And so we were kind of in this position where I'm like, well, if they want me to clear it out, I want them to replace the ladder of my house. And he's like, well, they're going to buy it. Like, well, they haven't bought it yet. So like, how are we, what if they don't buy it and I got to fix the ladder? And it was Jesse. He just said, you know what? I'll just go get it rid of it myself. So he showed up with some boxes. He put the stuff in there. He took it out of the attic. The buyers agreed to say they were sorry for breaking the ladder. And I was like, well, if they close on the house, they don't have to worry about it. But if they don't, they're going to have to fix the ladder to the attic.
And he just got it out himself. He's like, I'm an agent. I'm working for the deal. This is something that falls within the realm of what I'm capable of. Instead of saying my clients need to deal with it, he just fixed it. And that meant so much to Angela at that time with all the stuff she was dealing with, just to find one human that said, you know what? I'll do it because it is so common today for everyone to say it's somebody else's job. I don't want to do it. I don't get paid for that. I don't get paid enough for this. Whatever the case would be, it's somebody else's problem. So,
Speaker 1 (45:54.552)
Good job, Jesse. You made Angela happy. And by doing that, you made me happy. And you brought a good example to all the realtors listening to this of how much it matters. And Angela, you've said several times, can we just buy more houses out there so we can use Jesse, right?
did say that. Yeah, Jesse was great and he didn't tell us, there was a lot more to this story because he had to deal with the previous owner of the house, but he didn't tell us, David, you're the king of analogies, so I'm going to use this analogy. When you have a wedding coordinator and something goes wrong on the day of the wedding, you don't tell the bride. You can tell the bride after the wedding, after their honeymoon, after the dust has settled, but if a bus doesn't show up to shuttle guests and you have to figure something else out,
You don't tell the bride until way after the wedding. And Jesse was very good about that because he jumped through a lot of hoops that we actually didn't know about until after we closed on the property and then we could laugh about it and we weren't so stressed about it.
That is a great point. You don't get paid a 3 % commission or a 2 % commission or whatever you're getting to put it in the MLS and let software do all the work. You get paid to make the deal work. And this was, think, a small thing that the realtor did. Well, every realtor should do this. And then maybe realtors wouldn't have such a bad reputation. If you're getting value out of this, if you like this, if you're like, man, I wish that I could hear more stories like this, if you wish you had brokers that would talk to you about it.
Do me a favor, subscribe to the channel and share this podcast. Share this episode with other people, other realtors you know that you think would benefit from it. There's not a lot of good podcasts out there specifically for real estate agents and we're doing our best to bring you as much value as we can. So please make sure that you like the show, you share it with other people. Remember our show sponsor today was The One Brokerage. Send me a message on Instagram at DavidGreen24 and let me know you'd like me to put you in touch with one of the loan officers and you could do me a huge favor.
Speaker 1 (47:48.77)
by telling the loan officers that are in your world that we're looking to hire more and I'd love to be put in touch with them. Angela, any parting words before we let you go?
Ooh, parting words.
I don't think I have any parting words today, but I hope everybody listened to the issue, the real life issues that we deal with in several different markets. It's not one single market. hope that people, agents out there do take to heart because between the two of us, you've got the agent side. I have the side from selling houses and buying houses. And so I hope people listen because these are real life things that unfortunately we constantly see over and over again. So, and they're not hard things to fix.
Great point. If you'd like Angela and I to manage your cabin in the Smoky Mountains, give us a follow at CTC Getaways on Instagram or email us info at coast2coastgetaways.com. That's all we have for you today, folks. Please make sure you leave a comment on the video and keep an eye out for other shows on the Real Talk Real Estate Network. We've got Mortgage Monday, Real Talk Realtor, and The David Green Show. You can also check out realtalkrealestate.com. We've got the...
We've got the website up and running. We'll see you guys next week.