The Future has the Best Agents
The Future has the Best Realtors
Here’s Why The Days Of Pushy Real Estate Agents Are Numbered
Stereotypical pushy real estate agents give the profession a bad name. Agents often get portrayed in fiction as slick, schlocky or manipulative. Buyers and sellers are leery about running into this type of character at open houses or when calling prospective agents blind. Rightly so!
Where Does This Behavior Come From?
Agents in the past were exposed to tacky methods. Teaching someone how to be a terrific real estate professional is not easy. Excellence starts with a fundamentally ethical, hard working person and is developed with time and experience. Simplistic tactics on the other hand are easy to ladle out to the masses of new agents entering the field. For years that is mostly what the self-help gurus and training classes taught; oversimplified and pushy strategies for how to find and convert “leads” through cold calling or door-knocking, or how to “close the prospect” with slick persuasion, mostly canned scripts designed to be mindlessly recited like pulling a string on an old toy. These scripts virtually ignore the variables of the situation. They are not about helping people do the best thing. They just have a result in mind, namely to close the sale.
There was a day when agents who made cold calls or knocked on doors using pushy scripts and dialogues rose to fairly high levels of success, which is why the industry perpetuated these aggressive tactics for many years. Sadly, a lot of effort went into generating new business, but very little effort was put into doing an excellent job in the transaction. But times are changing!
Word Of Mouth Just Got Louder
Up until around a decade ago, word of mouth was really the only way you could get impartial feedback and opinions on real estate agents. As usual, the internet came along and changed things. It actually gave people more opportunity to share opinions. There are lots of sites where clients can post a review about their agent. Take a look around any of the big review sites and you’ll see countless mentions of agents all over the country who sound authentic, respectful, polite, friendly, and who go above and beyond for their clients. If you are looking for the best Realtors this is not a bad place to start.
In our market there are also lots of community pages where people request referrals for different professionals. I have seen Realtors get praised (and savagely denounced) in these spaces. Agents who are concerned with making the sale instead of doing a great job tend to get beat up online. When an agent is a fundamentally good person trying to look out for their clients, that shines through in the recommendations from their past clients.
A bad review doesn’t have to be disqualifying, as long as it is a clear minority opinion. Even great businesses cannot please the occasional negative person or “customer” with an ax to grind (such as a competitor). If you see more than 10% bad reviews, keep looking. If the vast majority of reviews sing the praises of an agent it probably means you will too. But don’t rely on reviews alone. That is just a start. Interview agents to find out if they are responsive, knowledgeable and professional.
While online word-of-mouth is by no means perfect, it can be a great start in finding the best Realtors, and it is making it much harder for bad agents to get away with being bad. That is a very good thing for our industry. Here are some other tips for finding the best realtors.
We do not share your information with anyone.