Before 2011, whenever a buyer would call in on one of my listings, I would always tell them they needed to go find themselves a Realtor. I did this for several reasons, one of which is because, I just was too busy with listing to be taxing people around to look at homes.
As a new year resolution and, after considering that I may very well be leaving a lot of money on the table by not working with these buyer’s, I decided I would create a buyer’s team. This would be a group of trusted Realtors who like working with buyers that I could forward these buyer’s to and these agents would work them to close.
The way I had envisioned this team to work is, I would pre-qualify the lead, hand it off to the buyer’s agent, they would work it to close and pay me a 25% referral fee, fair enough. Well, after many months of doing this, I realized very quickly that buyer’s agents don’t like to work, or at least the ones I had working with me anyways.
It wasn’t like I was just pulling agents off of Craig’s List, I was interviewing them, talking with previous brokers and doing a decent job of figuring out who would work and who wouldn’t, at least so I thought. Push come to shove and I ended up getting rid of about 20 or so agents before I finally found one I really thought was hungry enough to do a good job.
This agent, we will call Suzy Super Agent, she talked an incredible game. She was hungry, needed the work, was ready to do a great job, showed up an open houses, just was totally on board. She told me she was down on her luck, needed a helping hand, had 3 kids to feed, and she would do whatever it took to get a job (that was legal of course).
About three weeks into the job, I started getting calls back from leads that I sent to her. Yes, you heard me correctly, buyer’s were calling in, I was qualifying the lead, assigning them to her and amazingly enough, these leads were calling me back wanting to know when someone was going to be calling them.
Of course, I confronted her but, she kept telling me that she was calling these people and not hearing back from them. So, the 5th time this happened in a week, I conference her in on the call, stayed on the phone, muted my head set and listened. Let’s just say, customer service skills were lacking, seriously lacking.
It happened a 6th time, did the same thing and realized, I have a problem. So, once again I confronted her, she had every excuse in the book and yes, having grace, I extended her forgiveness thinking that our tough talk would straighten her out and all would be good.
At the end of January, I had given her 36 leads for the entire month and not a single buyers agency agreement or deal on the table so, I had one of my other buyer’s agents audit her leads and come to find out, she left $600,000.00 worth of sales on the table and told me she was only working with one lead out of 36. In other words, she didn’t follow up, she didn’t work, she didn’t attempt to close $18,000.00 in commissions but, she was working a cash investor I sent her who wanted to buy a $150,000.00 house.
Needless to say, we no longer have a relationship with this agent and I am looking for an agent to replace her.
Comments
Well, I have an update.
So, Suzy Super Agent just knew that the agent I had used to audit her was a complete liar. She bad mouth him to high heaven so, I followed up directly with every single lead he made contact to ask, what happened.
I was wrong, it wasn't $600,000.00 in potential sales, it is $800,000.00 at a commission of $24,000.00
Ok, so.....just stop, think about this............really. In the slowest month of the year, in the worse economy we have seen in generations, with over 27% of all Americans upside down in their mortgage, Suzy Super Agent walked away from $800,000.00 in business.
Jesse,
Please send those leads my way. DONE DEAL WITH DELIA
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