Selling Your Home and Flooded With Calls From Other Agents?

Glenn Batten | 19th October, 2009
Tagged: agents calling, jumping signs, real estate agnets, selling your home | Make a Comment »

Real Estate Guide

Selling Your Home It’s oh so common for sellers to find that once they appoint a real estate agent to sell their property and a For Sale sign is erected the flood gates are opened with calls from other agents chasing the listing.

Is this ethical or even legal for that matter?

A typical phone call will concentrate on extracting information about your current agency, usually suggesting that they have a buyer or buyers that the home will suit.

Virtually every time these sort of claims of having a buyer for your home are made they are fabricated. In fact you should always be asking yoruself the question that if they are contacting you specifically on behalf of just one buyer, who are they working for, you or that buyer?

Any respectable agent should have hundreds of buyers registered on their books to be notified of any matching properties when they are listed. In fact at Nerang First National we even let you search our database to just how many buyers we have in our database right now that could suit your home.

If they did genuinely have a buyer for the property then they know they can contact the listing agent for a shared commission sale (conjunction). All local REIQ agents have an agreed conjunction policy between them so no owner should be disadvantaged in that regard.

Whether they do or don’t have buyers is not really the point, the key objective is to interfere with the relationship between the seller and their selected agent. Sew the seeds of doubt in a sellers mind about their choice of agent, and then it doesn’t take much to entice the seller to change.

It is unfortunate but occasionally there is an element of salespeople out there that are quite prepared to pursue business opportunities by deception. Some will even knock on the door requesting an immediate inspection with buyers that are in their car.

These agents show little regard to sellers, putting them at risk of being liable for payment of two commissions.

What can you do about it?

Selling Your Home The Department of Fair Trading which oversees and enforces the PAMD Act (Property Agents and Motor Dealers) has strict rules governing this type of activity as does the REIQ (Real Estate Institute of Queensland).

Essentially, if you have never met this salesperson or agent before and the agent is contacting you about the sale of your home they are breaching sections of the PAMD Code of Conduct and the REIQ Standards of Business Practice. It is illegal to interfere with the business relationship between a seller and their appointed agent.

Here is our advice:

Ask them if they are members of the REIQ as we strongly suggest that you never deal with an agent that isn’t
If you wish them to stop calling, politely ask for the contacts to stop. Most agents will respect your wishes.
Let them know that your listing agent is prepared to work in conjunction and will be happy to arrange an inspection for their buyer
Ask for the buyers name, the salesperson and their agency name and number, then advise your listing agency. Don’t allow buyers or agents to inspect your property without your listing agent present.
If the contact continues, advise them you will contact your listing agent about the matter, as well as lodging a formal complaint with the REIQ. We find it rare for the problem to recur thereafter but your listing agent will assist if the problem continues.
You may also be interested to know that if an agent uses particular database service is to get your name, address and contact phone numbers, then it is likely to be a breach of the terms of agreement with their data provider, which requires data to be handled in accordance with their privacy regulations.

Does Nerang First National contact other agent’s listings to interfere with their sale?

No!

At no time does any of our staff or salespeople contact any sellers to discuss the sale of the property. We fully respect the decision of sellers in selecting their agent.

We do however have a responsibility on behalf of all of our sellers to market their properties to every potential buyer possible. When you consider that around 65% of sellers repurchase within the same district they sell in, then logically every local seller is also a potential buyer and we will promote the properties we represent to all local sellers.

If you list your property with Nerang First National we proudly market your home directly to all current sellers in the district so that we capture every sale opportunity for you but we do not try and poach the listing from another agent.