By Marty Douglas
Ooooo – don’t you just hate the Ides of March? But before my rant, a little Latin never did anyone harm. According to infoplease.com and Wikipedia, long before they scuttled cruise ships, the Romans, having invented several of the months, decided they needed internal reference points. So the Kalends (recognize the root word of ‘calendar’?) was the first day, the Nones was the seventh (nine days before the Ides) and the Ides was the 15th day, Ides meaning half division. But only in four of the months.
If Will Shakespeare and Brutus had killed Caesar on the first or seventh of the month, every English Lit student would have a different single Latin word vocabulary. But, it was not to be, or to be or not to be, or…. oh stop it!
My wife and I were in Victoria for a weekend and decided to drop in to an open house for a Trevor Linden (you remember, Vancouver Canucks, about five years ago, that’s BB – Before Boston.) condo project on the edge of Chinatown.
The host Realtor, who I shan’t name, whose initials are Tracy Menzies of Pemberton Holmes, was very gracious after I had identified myself as a busman’s holiday licensee from the sticks of the mid-island. She ushered us to the elevator, only to discover it was temporarily not available, meaning we had six floors of stairwell to conquer. She quickly estimated my age, had an appraising glance at my much younger wife and said, “Good luck!” I had occasion to ponder the meaning as I rested on four, but the chest pains were a distraction. I’m sure she meant well.
It’s a great project by the way; right downtown, six floors of wonderfully functional design, some overlooking a Zen garden, starting around $250,000. (www.601herald.com/contact) That’s right, no misprint, $250,000. Probably sold out by this date but for those of you planning your retirement on Vancouver Island, that’s how we swing!
Ah, the drop-in Realtor. I’m referring to the one who has never seen your listing, perhaps from another real estate board or city, who has a client in search of your commission. Here in the west we used to shoot them but since gun control has become such an issue, we began a more passive approach – don’t pay them.
Although the poaching issue has been with us for decades, the most recent discussions arose in a conversation on www.linkedin.com in the CREA Discussion Group. The lead comment was, “I would never put a lockbox on my own listing,” followed by 89 reactions – and over-reactions – from Realtors across Canada. The thread is fascinating to follow and gives great insight, hopefully to CREA executives who monitor the mutterings of the grass roots.
The point-counterpoint included remarks about out-of-board Realtors showing and then writing offers on lockbox accessed listings, mostly in Ontario. It followed then, for me to comment on the selling Realtor who wrote the contract without the benefit of showing the property, usually because the buyer had seen it and wanted to deal with “their own agent”, ostensibly for representation but frequently for a slice of the commission pie.
This “drop-in” practice was/is particularly rampant in the territories of the Vancouver and Fraser Valley Real Estate Boards where boundaries are easy to cross. Eventually, someone had had enough and decided to force showings on the selling salesperson, with the seller’s consent of course. Phrases began to appear in the MLS Realtor remarks such as “Comm: $1,000 if Realtor not present at 1st & all subsequent showings” or “S. Comm 3.22% 1st 100k/1.15% on balance upon first physical introduction to the property, otherwise $500.”
You get the idea – if you want to be paid the full selling commission, we want you to be involved from the first showing. No fair sending your cousin unannounced through open houses and project sales or remote corners of Haida Gwai and then surprising us with a faxed offer.
CREA and the legal team have opinions on this issue – no kidding! Seriously? And yet the only discussions ongoing about the practice apparently are between the boards that – wink, wink, nudge, nudge – allow it and those that don’t. My board, the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board, would not publish a listing that, in their words, “dictated the level of service a selling broker provided” and so we have the unique experience of a listing contract for a property located in one of the several condoning boards in the province being rejected by the member’s own board, despite a spirit of co-operation agreement between boards.
Way above my pay grade.
Back to Shakespeare. I wanted to show off my university learning by dropping a quote like, “I pray thee cease thy counsel, which falls into mine ears as profitless as water in a sieve.” But instead decided on research in my Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations where I came across this gem from Robert Wilensky: “We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”
Enjoy your Ides.
You can find Marty Douglas on Twitter – https://twitter.com/41yrsrealestate – Facebook and LinkedIn. He is a managing broker for Coast Realty Group, with offices on Vancouver Island, the Discovery and Gulf Islands and the Sunshine Coast of B.C. Marty is a past chair of the Real Estate Errors and Omissions Corporation of B.C., the Real Estate Council of B.C. , the B.C. Real Estate Association and the Vancouver Island Real Estate Board. [email protected].
