Pet Peeves

We all have pet peeves — drivers who make turns without signaling, people in the 10 item check out line with 18 items who wait until the end to start writing a check, customer support phone systems that never have an option to speak to a human or arbitrarily disconnect.

I've been selling real estate here for 8 years, and in that time have accumulated a list of real estate pet peeves. Here are my tops:

• Toilet Bowl Photos. What is it with listing agents taking bathroom photos with the toilet bowl front and center, with the lid up? If you just have to include a photo of the throne, at least put the lid down.
  
• Misspelled Addresses. Misspelled street names are more common than you can imagine. It's "Bethlehem Road", not "Bethelhem". Searching by street name is one of the most common searches I do, particularly when a client calls and says "We were driving down Pretty Maple Road and saw a for sale sign. Can you tell me about the house?" It's tough to find it when the listing agent has entered the address as "Prety Marple." Mistyping something is human (heaven knows, I've done it enough on this blog), but once you've input a listing, how about pulling it back up and checking it for accuracy?
  
• Owners Who Make It Impossible to Show Their Houses. Believe it or not, more than once, when I call to show a house, the listing agent tells me that the owner (who lives a hundred miles away in Jersey) won't give them a key. I'm told to drive my clients by the house, and then if they're interested, have them come back and the owner will come up to open the house. There are also owners who won't permit their house to be shown on weekends (which is when most folks want to come and look at houses) — because that's when they have friends and family up.
  
• Buyers Who Are Really Late (and don't call until the last minute). Stuff happens, and we all get delayed from time to time. But most of us have early warning signs we're going to be late, like still being in the shower in your apartment on the upper west side an hour before you're supposed to meet me in Livingston Manor! At least a few times a year, I get this call. "David, we're running a little bit late." (The call may come 30 minutes before I'm supposed to meet them here in Sullivan.) "OK,", I reply, "Where are you now?" "Well," comes the sheepish answer, "We're just about getting to the Lincoln Tunnel." Which means you're still in Manhattan and will be about 2 hours late!
  
• No Property Addresses in Public MLS Displays. I've written about this before. Our Multiple Listing Service prohibits displaying property addresses for listings on public MLS search sites, like the MLS Search on my website. Some listings agents fear that potential buyers will drive by the property on their own, knock on the door, bother the owners and encourage them to scuttle their agent, do a deal directly with them and save the commission. (But that overblown fear doesn't prevent them from putting a 'For Sale' sign in the front yard.) Consumers today want more information, and to be in more control. Not displaying property addresses is a paternalistic throwback to an earlier era. You wouldn't believe how much time I spend every week telling potential buyers that the cute little farmhouse they fell in love with on the web is about 25 feet off of Route 17B, something they'd immediately see if the property address was available.
  
• Men Who Won't Listen and Get Stuck. OK, ladies, you know this one well in various iterations, the most common "Refusing to stop and ask directions." But there's a unique twist that happens here in the country. Mr. Man has an SUV and has seen way too many of those commercials with a Jeep perched perilously on top of a mountain in New Mexico. Driving conditions here at times can be pretty challenging during the winter (with snow and ice) and spring (with mud). The public roads are usually pretty OK, but I'm often taking clients on private roads or down long drives that may not have been plowed or maintained well, and hold the potential for getting stuck.
  
  Now, I drive a truck-based SUV, have lots of experience driving in poor conditions, and am equipped for the worst (with heavy duty snow and mud tires, sand, salt, shovels and tow ropes.) But sometimes that SUV owner insists on driving himself against my counsel, and lo and behold, gets stuck. The looks from the wife or girlfriend, who is now glaring at her husband/boyfriend with arms crossed, could kill a deer.

Comments

[larry]

your list should be used as a training tool for all real estate agents. i don't agree with public display of property addresses, however. property addresses in public MLS displays could make it easy for those looking to rip off empty homes for sale. the extra time it takes an agent to disclose this info to a potential buyer seems minor compared with the possibility of having a listing vandalized. your thoughts?

[David Knudsen]

Larry, that's a valid point about property addresses. Interestingly, in the discussions about whether to display them in public IDX searches, that hasn't come up as a reason by those opposed. And if security and potential vandalism is such an issue, then there shouldn't be For Sale signs in the front yard, either. But listing agents don't want to pass up the opportunity to have their name and phone number out there on all those little free billboards sitting in front yards.

Most MLS's around the country display property addresses, and I don't know of any that moved to displaying addresses that pulled back because of vandalism or burglary. And every IDX policy I've reviewed (and I looked at a lot in putting together the original policy here in Sullivan) has an option for address to be suppressed at the owner's request.

No, it doesn't take a lot of time to provide the address to a potential buyer over the phone or via email. However, that isn't how customers want to do it. They want to sit at their computer, map it, pull up an aerial view of it on LiveMaps or Google Earth, see what's around it, etc., right then and there. It may not be the way that we want to work, but it sure is the way buyers do.