What’s Happened to Real Estate?

You know you’re getting on a bit when you start sounding like your parents. Starting a sentence with, “Well, in my day…” is a tell-tale sign. This week’s column has that flavour as a lament of real estate days gone by. As an active selling sales representative for John Dethridge in the late 1990’s, other agents working the area worked collaboratively to seek out buyers, matching them to homes listed for sale across the Fremantle area. These were the days were agents were encouraged to buy ‘a sensible, clean sedan’ so you could ferry buyers around the various properties on offer in comfort. On Friday’s (before we went to the pub) agents would converge on a local agency (back then it was Jeff
Brockway’s office in Wray Avenue) to collect the Multi-Listing book which listed every property available by REIWA agents across the metro area.

The thousands of properties listed carried a brief description and a code to a lock-box that enabled agents to access homes for sale at their leisure and if your buyer purchased it, a guaranteed ‘conjunctional’ fee equivalent to 40 percent of the commission was paid by the listing agent. The multi-listing service was a great way to collaboratively sell property and remains a popular method in the USA. Nowadays, the conjunctional is all but gone. Instead, buyers employ buyer agents to assist them to acquire property or deal directly with the selling agent. In this hyper-competitive sellers’ market, it is not to the advantage of a buyer to rely on an introducing agent to seek a conjunctional with a listing
agent when that agent is likely to have direct buyers to choose from without sharing their commission.

The advent of digital client relationship management systems also means that most active buyers are already known to the listing agent, disqualifying them from being introduced by an agent seeking a conjunctional. All this has led to a less collegial environment amongst local agents. Listings are in short supply, so agents fiercely compete for the limited stock available.

There are some high-pressure tactics

being applied to sellers to secure the listing. As REIWA President, when members of the public asked me how best to choose an agent, I’d suggest they sought out three local, experienced REIWA member agents for market appraisals. After all submissions were received, contact each one and suggest you had decided to list with one of their competitors…and await the response. Those that bagged out the competitor and got stroppy, could be excluded, those agents that wished the seller well and offered to assist if things didn’t work out, were probably the better choice. Manners cost nothing and lack of respect for your competitor reveals much about an agents’
character.