The Housing Scene

Basic Customer Service Creates Big Opening for Agents

New Study Says Many Agents Don’t Get Basics Right

Lew Sichelman

If you clicked on a real estate agent’s name next to an online listing, don’t hold your breath waiting for a call. Nearly half of online property inquiries are simply ignored, according to new research from real estate analyst and consultant Mike DelPrete. 

DelPrete wrote that the recent study’s results “highlight significant areas of opportunity for brokerages and agents in the fundamentals of customer service.” 

But it should also show consumers that they shouldn’t expect too much from the agents they try to contact, whether electronically or face-to-face. 

To test agent responses, 100 “secret shops” were conducted across the country. Secret shopping is often used to evaluate a business’s services and customer experience. It has also been used to uncover discriminatory practices. 

In this case, a team of experts “used a standardized method conducted in a professional, repeatable manner to evaluate each brokerage,” DelPrete said in his report. The secret shoppers “inquired about specific, median-priced properties on individual brokerage websites,” mostly via online forms. All of their inquiries were made during normal business hours on weekdays. 

Big Divergence in Responses 

A whopping 47 percent of inquiries were flat-out ignored. Of those that got a response, the median time to hear back was a reasonable 39 minutes.  

To test agents sitting at open houses, DelPrete writes that “secret shoppers walked into local, median-priced open houses across the nation and collected specific data points about their experience.”  

The result: These agents didn’t do much better than their online counterparts. To wit, 42 percent failed to ask for contact information from potential customers. And of the 58 percent of agents who did, a third of them never followed up. 

DelPrete described the overall findings this way: “Most interactions were consistently inconsistent.” 

“There was no rhyme or reason to the level and quality of follow-up – or even if there was any follow-up at all,” he writes. “It was a roll of the dice each time.” 

DelPrete’s bottom line: This study “lays bare the immense opportunity in simply getting the basics right: following up with people in a consistently structured way.”  

Will Buyers Steer Themselves? 

Meanwhile, now that buyers are responsible for their share of the real estate commission, there’s a good chance they’ll be hunting not just for houses, but also for sellers willing to pay at least a portion of their fees. 

Call it a new form of “steering” – the term used to describe how agents take their clients only to houses offering the best commission split between them and the listing agents. Now, it looks like buyers will be in the driver’s seat instead of agents. 

According to a recent study from Inman Intel, the research arm of the Inman real estate news service, the process is “primed to become much more prevalent” when guided by buyers themselves. 

In a survey of 611 real estate professionals, Inman Intel found that most buyer’s agents, directed in many cases by the buyer, will feel the need to confirm the portion of their commission the seller is willing to cover before making an offer on a house. 

The survey found that 3 out of 5 agents plan to reach out to the listing agent to confirm the buyer-side commission before their clients make an offer, and 1 out of 4 plan to encourage their clients to submit an offer that requires the seller to cover the full commission just to learn the seller’s position as part of the normal negotiation process. 

“Much more steering will happen, at the direction of the buyer, of course,” one agent responded. “I actually have not heard of any steering in the past due to [the] amount of commission being offered – ever. Now, with the buyer directing [agents] to do so, it will happen every day.” 

Finally, in other consumer news, the Federal Trade Commission now bans fake consumer reviews and testimonials, as well as celebrity tributes. Consequently, you should start seeing a lot fewer celebs endorsing outfits that peddle fix-and-flip investment schemes and programs to “protect” the title to your house, among others. 

The consumer watchdog agency also now prohibits businesses from buying positive reviews, and forbids them from misrepresenting websites they control – for instance, by implying a site provides independent reviews about products and services when it really doesn’t. 

The FTC bars businesses from using lawsuit threats, physical threats, intimidation or certain false public accusations to prevent someone from posting a negative review. 

Lew Sichelman has been covering real estate for more than 50 years. He is a regular contributor to numerous shelter magazines and housing and housing-finance industry publications. Readers can contact him at lsichelman@aol.com.