Working in real estate can be the most fulfilling work you can do. You can experience the highest level of satisfaction and goodness. You can be helping families and you can be the catalyst for others to achieve their dreams. Within it all you can make money and do well for yourself and your own family.
With that said, nobody ever suggested, at least nobody should ever have even intimated to you, that this business was easy. It is competitive, it is frustrating and it is exhausting. It is not for the faint of heart or those who are short-tempered. If you are one of those, don’t come near this work, you will blow a gasket.
There are so many frustrations within the industry, ranging from new commission structures to government demands and regulations. There are also the frustrations of dealing with customers who can be thoughtless and inconsiderate of your best efforts.
There are customers out there who use salespeople as a novelty or a recreational activity without any thought to the fact that sales reps are deserving of consideration. They call up without notice to see a property and then when all manner of arrangements and inconvenience is taken to accommodate their wishes, they change their minds, sometimes without even telling the sales rep.
There are people who present themselves as customers who have no intention of buying a home, yet have salespeople show them dozens of properties just for weekend outings.
The worst are the customers for whom a sales rep spends hours researching properties, digging through files and showing listings, and then the client says, “We’ll get back to you” – only to turn around and buy a property from another sales rep a couple of months later. Perhaps not a property the previous sales rep showed them, but still a property that was purchased after much knowledge and research was imparted to them by the first agent about a certain community or about the buying process.
In this particular case, organized real estate has tried to help sales reps protect themselves from those people who take such thoughtless advantage of a sales rep. A Buyer Representation Agreement was created and sales reps were urged to ask their customers to sign that agreement to safeguard all the work they do.
Anyone buying a home, regardless of what language they use, knows the value of that transaction. They must understand from the outset the weight of what a real estate professional does for them. The Buyer Representation Agreement acknowledges in writing that they do in fact understand that value.
There was a story in the media recently about a buyer who worked with a sales rep and signed the Buyer Representation Agreement. This person subsequently bought a property with another sales rep. The first salesperson claimed compensation for the work he had done and was granted his commission through the courts. All of that seems right to me. However, a story about it ran on the CBC and a lot of other smaller blogs and print rags picked it up, rewriting it but still presenting it in the same negative light that the CBC created toward the sales rep who sued for his compensation. He was presented as a heartless schmuck.
It seems that the client who lost the case in court is now challenged personally to pay the compensation. He claims he was tricked into signing the document because he did not speak the language. I feel bad for him truly and I wish there could have been another solution but it went all the way to court and that was the finding. I think there is more to the case than just the one side that was presented by the CBC and the Mickey Mouse blogs that re-ran the story.
Justice was served for the sales rep who originally worked with this person, because he was protected by the Buyer Representative Agreement. That’s what it was for. Unfortunately this sales rep ended up looking bad, but he is not the only one. Everyone involved in this case lost, including the general public who badly need to be educated about the value of working with a real estate professional.
Heino Molls has been the Publisher of REM, Real Estate Magazine (formerly Real Estate Marketing), since 1989. Previous to REM, he worked as an executive at the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB), and at the Toronto Star. Contact Heino by email or call 416-425-3504 x2.
