Do You Have Any Offers? Do You Have Any Offers? Do You…. Hello?
OK our market is hot and having any active listing feels a little like painting a target on your back. Buyer’s agents are hunting you down from the moment a listing goes live. What is up with this constant inquiry about offers? As if they expect to be informed in real time? “Let’s see we’ve been on the MLS 20 minutes, and no — no offers yet.” Is that a reasonable inquiry? Certainly the technology is there, but you still may want to think about how you use it. I work with buyers and I make these inquiries as well, but I would never dream of asking a listing agent to keep me informed via real time text messaging and email. That’s ridiculous.
Let’s say it has been two days…in my opinion, if you ask for any more than two status inquiries on the existence/number of offers without submitting an actual offer, you are, my friend, a lunatic. I know you think you are just getting your client the information they request… and they may ask you 10 times a day because buying a house is emotional; however, text messaging me at 8:01pm on Saturday night about the number of offers (and expecting a response) is crazy. Of course, as much as I resent the text messaging and emailing crew, the calling crew is infinitely more annoying for failing to adapt to a technology that can be more readily ignored (after all I do need to answer my phone!)
Maybe I should just include a link in the agent remarks that has a video cam of my day. When an offer arrives, I will get up… dance and mark it off on a bulletin board behind my desk, so then when you have any question you can just login to a portal and check the bulletin board. Especially since you don’t seem to believe what is printed in the MLS remarks — after all that couldn’t be reasonably up to date given that at any period there could be a 10 or 15 minute delay on that information. And, what kills me is that the worst routine offenders never seem to actually bring an offer, and some never even show the property, it’s like they are in the business of status inquiries, or they are just trying to armchair quarterback the listing for the thrill.
Really, I don’t get it.
