Throughout my career, I've been privileged to have worked with and continue to work with some really outstanding realtors and brokers. When you find a competent, honest, and hardworking real estate professional, you take good care of them at every successful closing, even if you only send them a small gift or a card to show appreciation. I've also worked with a few dunderheads, too, and where else but in Las Vegas you would meet both extremes - one after the other?
I came to Las Vegas three years ago and immediately started flipping properties. I met one of the best realtors I have ever enjoyed working with. Not only did we receive an outstanding service, this realtor had such character, all the information provided to us about deals was 100% accurate. This agent had a very simple formula - assiduously keep up to speed with local information and regulatory updates, so if we had a question, we usually had a same day and reliable answer. Not only that, we were picking up some really sweet deals from this agent. There were a few mistakes, of course, but if you never make a mistake you never make anything.
Bottom line, this agent was picking up six points or more on both sides of the flip (12% total) on some of our deals and not just that, we were delighted to reward that level of productivity.
From there, our realtor relationships went downhill (again!) and, already having survived New York realtors, we should have known what to expect.
We were working with an east coast investor group at the time that we came out west to witness the foreclosure process and attend the Las Vegas foreclosure auction "as seen" on the media. These people didn't connect with the full on Western style of the realtor we were using and insisted on a having us appoint another firm to their projects. Always willing to please, we agreed to give it a try as we were shipping a lot of product at that time.
The upshot of this was the new realtor came on with an increasingly aggressive response with us to every offer and insisted that we should accept each one immediately and without question, even though most of these first offers came at 20% and more below the listing. This quickly became an issue and, of course, the relationship inevitably went sour.
As you can imagine, it all got very ugly after that and came down to a bitter argument about the resale value of each (very nicely) remodeled home. The two FHA appraisals on one of these houses came in with a demand from the buyer for another drop in price (!) and we insisted on putting it back on the market with another agent, which quickly delivered us a 35% better than previous price for the product.
Meantime, back at the ranch, the realtor sent a three pager directly to the Investor Group in a clear attempt to switch the investment partnership from us to his firm. This was as ugly an end run on a client as ever we've witnessed, not to mention unethical. Really gratuitous aggravation it turned out to be!
This incident was a lot to handle at the time. Not only did we have the bulk of our profit ripped out of three of our completed flips, we had to spend some serious time managing these investors when they copied the agents' communication back to us. That and a few mysterious incidents around the houses involved, which caused us even more aggravation.
If you're going to seriously work the real estate business, mixed fortunes with realtors and agents is inevitable and, like everything else you do in this business, it requires a hands on approach. That means the best way to handle your agents is the same way you handle all other vendors; they're usually only as good as how well they handled that last deal for you.
I came to Las Vegas three years ago and immediately started flipping properties. I met one of the best realtors I have ever enjoyed working with. Not only did we receive an outstanding service, this realtor had such character, all the information provided to us about deals was 100% accurate. This agent had a very simple formula - assiduously keep up to speed with local information and regulatory updates, so if we had a question, we usually had a same day and reliable answer. Not only that, we were picking up some really sweet deals from this agent. There were a few mistakes, of course, but if you never make a mistake you never make anything.
Bottom line, this agent was picking up six points or more on both sides of the flip (12% total) on some of our deals and not just that, we were delighted to reward that level of productivity.
From there, our realtor relationships went downhill (again!) and, already having survived New York realtors, we should have known what to expect.
We were working with an east coast investor group at the time that we came out west to witness the foreclosure process and attend the Las Vegas foreclosure auction "as seen" on the media. These people didn't connect with the full on Western style of the realtor we were using and insisted on a having us appoint another firm to their projects. Always willing to please, we agreed to give it a try as we were shipping a lot of product at that time.
The upshot of this was the new realtor came on with an increasingly aggressive response with us to every offer and insisted that we should accept each one immediately and without question, even though most of these first offers came at 20% and more below the listing. This quickly became an issue and, of course, the relationship inevitably went sour.
As you can imagine, it all got very ugly after that and came down to a bitter argument about the resale value of each (very nicely) remodeled home. The two FHA appraisals on one of these houses came in with a demand from the buyer for another drop in price (!) and we insisted on putting it back on the market with another agent, which quickly delivered us a 35% better than previous price for the product.
Meantime, back at the ranch, the realtor sent a three pager directly to the Investor Group in a clear attempt to switch the investment partnership from us to his firm. This was as ugly an end run on a client as ever we've witnessed, not to mention unethical. Really gratuitous aggravation it turned out to be!
This incident was a lot to handle at the time. Not only did we have the bulk of our profit ripped out of three of our completed flips, we had to spend some serious time managing these investors when they copied the agents' communication back to us. That and a few mysterious incidents around the houses involved, which caused us even more aggravation.
If you're going to seriously work the real estate business, mixed fortunes with realtors and agents is inevitable and, like everything else you do in this business, it requires a hands on approach. That means the best way to handle your agents is the same way you handle all other vendors; they're usually only as good as how well they handled that last deal for you.
SHARE
