I try to behave myself, I try to keep my emotions www.ered so that my opinions can be read and understood without coming off so harsh that people click away before they finish reading.  Well today I just don’t care.  This is a list (though not comprehensive) of the reasons that I’m sick and tired of what SOME agents are doing:

• “I haven’t seen the property so I cannot help you.”
  • If you haven’t seen the property, know nothing about it, and are not offering to help me find someone who has seen the house to help me, how can you possibly be representing the seller?
• “I have so many listings that I cannot do X, or Y, or Z”
  • Your lack of staffing to handle workload or your inability to say “no” to too many listings is not an excuse for being unprofessional and arrogant.
  • This means you are too busy to act professional, which means that you are not a professional, which means you shouldn’t be a REALTOR since we are a trade organization of professionals.  Try selling a house without being a REALTOR and see how it goes.
• Total lack of due diligence on anything related to the property
  • City inspections (that are required) are often forgotten or ignored till pressed by buyer’s agent
  • “Buyer and Buyer Agent to verify everything” – that’s code for I’m too damn lazy to do anything so a trained monkey would have done more checking on this property than I did.
  • The SMELL oh my god the SMELL. Why don’t you deodorize the home (or at least try) before you make me walk in and come out coughing and ready to vomit?
• Responses from REO agents during offer submission can take days (even to confirm that the offer was submitted)
  • Apparently since they get multiple offers on most everything, they can provide no customer service because someone will patient to stick around.
• Listing foreclosures at prices 15%+ under market value to garner multiple offers (10+ often)
  • This brings a lot of people through a house that they simply cannot afford because they can pay the list price but not the selling price.
  • Many times the agents do not respond to inquiries on status or questions regarding property/offer submission rules/etc. for days or sometimes they never respond at all.
  • An argument can be made that the listing is not a “true and accurate depiction of the property” as the list price is never intended to be honored.
• Only one photo of the property and often it is out of focus, at night, or shows very little of the property.
  • Some times there are more photos of the outside, but none of the inside.
  • Sometimes the photos of the inside are shot so all you see is a floor.
  • Sometimes the photos show a great upstairs only to find a mold-infested basement.
• House is a teardown or major renovation project but they say nothing of this is the MLS remarks.
  • It’s a total waste of time for my buyer and I to even see this house.
• House could qualify for an FHA or VA loan (appraisal would be fine) and the seller will consider an FHA or VA offer but it isn’t listed as an Acceptable Term under the MLS.
  • I would have shown your house had I known it would have worked for my buyer.
• FHA or VA is listed as an acceptable term but the house is so far beyond repair that it isn’t likely to work.
  • Thanks for wasting my buyer and my time (AGAIN) on a house we cannot purchase.
• An utter lack of information inputted into the MLS listing
  • Why would they bother giving me and my clients information on room descriptions & dimensions, finished square footage, condition, features, etc when they can let 1/2 the buyers skip the property completely and the other 1/2 waste their time seeing a house that doesn’t fit their needs.
• Little to no effort is made to check on the status of the title work before closing.
  • If there’s a problem with title work and the house doesn’t close on time a buyer may be homeless but there’s no concern shown from the listing agent.

Now this is not to say that all REO agents are doing this poor of a job and most of the time it is only a few of these issues on each house – still, the utter lack of professionalism and accountability of a few agents tarnishes the whole business since they represent a sizable portion of the total foreclosure MLS inventory.  I LOVE good competition and there are some GREAT foreclosure agents out there that do a fabulous job.