Below I am going to paste in a long response I put in to an Active Rain article today. The original topic will be referred to by this link. Basically, the remarks by the original writer are a series of complaints against other agents regarding response time to emails.
Here is my reply to that post:
Clearly there are some disconnects in the industry and not all of them are with respect to professionalism. I came from 15 years in the tech industry before getting into real estate 6 years ago. I literally had many agents yell at me when emailing them about their listings. Their comments were as such, “don’t email me, I only check that once a week!” My, how times have changed. Now everyone wants to scream about not getting their email replied to.
There are many things at work here, some of them economic, some of them how our industry operates, and more. First of all, I’ll throw out the economic factor. Not all agents have the money to upgrade their equipment each year. We’re all business owners and we have to make decisions on where our money is spent. For those that run out to buy the latest iPhone, well, good for you, but not everyone is going to do that. I should have prefaced that with the fact that I do have a Sprint HTC phone and have capabilities to email, text, call and open keyboxes from my phone. So, I’m all set. But, I know other agents who aren’t.
With regard to sending offers in the evening and expecting a reply. If you knew you were going to be writing an offer that night, and we’re discussing degrees of professionalism here, it would have been reasonable to consider that YOU, the buyer’s agent, might have called the listing agent during business hours to confirm their schedule. Plus, there is also an option in many email programs to require a notice of receipt for your email – use it, you might have your stress levels go down. Oh, you don’t have the email program that offers this tool? It’s too expensive to get or maintain? Ah, then perhaps you might understand why someone else doesn’t have a different tool that you have. We all, as business owners, have to budget our funds to all the tools we use and because of this our industry is not standardized – heck, it’s one of the reasons why this field is so damned competitive. The sad part is when the public doesn’t require their agents to have some of these tools. But, I can tell you, not all clients care. Many of my older clients would prefer the older methods of in-person contact, less email, and more high touch. It all depends on the client. My technology based and younger clientele require the constant in touch mode of work and we strive to do that as well, while also letting them know that we respect their time and we expect the same of them.
It’s easy to rant on this initial post about unavailability, but then I also see agents getting worn out from working non-stop. Lord knows we’ve been working mostly 7 days a week since last fall but with mostly listings and short sales to show for it… all of which take time and money. It’s important for all of us to continue having a personal life because most of our referral base comes from this group, so it’s important to feed all sides of your business and to prevent burn out.
One gal (comment 101) wants to say that if you only want to work 9 to 5 you should get out of the business. I disagree. I’d like all the part time people to remove themselves from the business, because it is most likely that these are the folks that are being complained about in this post. When the NAR puts out statistics that show a strong number of our members are part time agents, you can imagine that this might cause difficulty in reaching some agents. I recall a transaction I had about 2 years ago where an agent asked me not to call him during the day as he was at his main job – he only did real estate part time and couldn’t take his real estate “work” calls during the day. The first time he told me this I was flabbergasted… then later I was just annoyed because it meant he was requiring me, the person who already works in real estate 50-60 hours a week, to spend even more time in my so-called off hours working.
There can be a shared middle ground on some of these things and rather than just complaining and hoping people “get it”, we should continue to push for high standards, lessening the number of non-serious agents in the field (read part-time), and using those tools that are at our disposal to verify transmission of documents. Remember the fax? If I think contact is going to be questionable upon the evening delivery of a contract, I email AND fax it. That way I can get verification of delivery at a minimum on one of those methods.
And speaking of that… many MLS areas don’t allow email transmission of documents unless the contract has it in writing that both parties agree to it, so you should make sure you’re following your own local rules in that regard. I’m not defending the inaction or non-responsiveness of others, but for goodness sake, there are some things you can do about it.
