There are three ways to get exposure to realtors.
- Word-of-mouth from friends and family.
- Personal experience or investigation.
- Realtor-paid advertising.
First, let’s identify how realtors get their business.
Either they earn the business (#1&2 above), or they buy the business (#3 above).
They earn it by creating relationships with friends and family that turn into sales. Those results create word-of-mouth endorsements that will hopefully be the foundation of the realtor’s business.
Or agents can buy the business through advertising.
There are several realtors in our area who spend $25,000 to $50,000 per month on advertising, which means they need to charge the higher commission rates – and that probably won’t change.
Billboards, bus benches, trailers in movie theaters, grocery store carts, etc. all lathered with realtor advertising that supplement their online ads, social media, and mailers to the neighborhood. These realtors hope to subconsciously create a positive image in the homeowners’ minds, which causes them to reach out to the ‘local expert’ when the time comes.
Which realtor will help you the most, and be deserving of their pay?
The best part of the realtor lawsuits is that they might cause consumers to investigate the choices more thoroughly. It is a daunting task because of the number of realtors out there, and the lack of hiring knowledge available. It’s why 80% of consumers hire the first agent they meet – they haven’t moved in a while, and in the microwave society they just want to grab an agent and go. Plus, the realtor industry provides virtually no guidance on the selection process, so you’re on your own.
My General Tips:
Those who spend the big money are vunerable to investigations – they hope that you grab and go instead. Once a team gets to 10 people or more, you have to wonder who is doing the heavy lifting. There are many top producers now in North County who have retired – but you wouldn’t know it because they leave everything in place, and just let the assistants run the machine. See if you can get the team leader on the phone, and check their reviews on Google and Zillow to see which agent is being acknowledged for the work. It’s not a bad thing to work with the assistants, but you’d like to know that up front.
The bigger the team, the less personal attention you will get. Their expertise will hopefully make up for it, but you should know that if your sale doesn’t work out, it’s not going to change their lifestyle.
Realtor websites look the same – brags about their sales, a button to search for your ‘dream’ home, and another for a computerized value of your home. With both buttons, you give up your contact information so they can pester you. Do they provide any helpful content on their website or social media? Their published content is a direct reflection of their expertise, and awareness of current market conditions.
Are they too busy for you? Simple way to find out. Call their phone number, and see what happens.
Every agent has their sales history on Zillow (whether they like it or not, because Zillow auto-loads them). If you are looking to conduct a full analysis, you’ll have fun with this data. One sale per month is a good sign, and check their mix of buyers and sellers, mix of price points, the SP:LP ratio on their sold listings, their listing presentations (quantity/quality of photos) and days on market. It’s takes work, but time well spent.
Do you want to hire the local expert? Rarely do they go into detail on what that means for you, and besides, every agent calls themselves the local expert.
Do you want to hire a long-time veteran? Only if they are still on their game (minimum one sale per month, etc.). More than half of all realtors are 60+ years old, and you don’t want to be their last sale.
Are they available? Deals are being done 24/7, so how the agent handles that is important.
Can they put a few sentences together to describe the current market conditions? It means you have to talk to them live, but it’s a terrific way to judge a realtor’s competency.
My big hope is that the realtor lawsuits give consumers the idea that they should shop around more, and they search for the best combination of quality realtor and commission rate. My guess is that the commission rates won’t change much, and they sure won’t be advertised. It should mean more scrutiny on what a realtor does for you – which is a great thing, and how the decision should be made!
Get Good Help!
Uh-oh….
There are more Americans who say they have serious cognitive problems — with remembering, concentrating or making decisions — than at any time in the last 15 years, data from the Census Bureau shows.
The increase started with the pandemic: The number of working-age adults reporting “serious difficulty” thinking has climbed by an estimated one million people.
About as many adults ages 18 to 64 now report severe cognitive issues as report trouble walking or taking the stairs, for the first time since the bureau started asking the questions each month in the 2000s.
The sharp increase captures the effects of long Covid for a small but significant portion of younger adults, researchers say, most likely in addition to other effects of the pandemic, including psychological distress. But they also say it’s not yet possible to fully dissect all the reasons behind the increase.
Richard Deitz, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, analyzed the data and attributed much of the increase to long Covid. “These numbers don’t do this — they don’t just start suddenly increasing sharply like this,” he said.
In its monthly Current Population Survey, the census asks a sample of Americans whether they have serious problems with their memory and concentration. It defines them as disabled if they answer yes to that question or one of five others about limitations on their daily activities. The questions are unrelated to disability applications, so respondents don’t have a financial incentive to answer one way or another.
At the start of 2020, the survey estimated there were fewer than 15 million Americans ages 18 to 64 with any kind of disability. That rose to about 16.5 million by September 2023.
Nearly two-thirds of that increase was made up of people who had newly reported limitations on their thinking. There were also increases in census estimates of the number of adults with a vision disability or serious difficulty doing basic errands. For older working-age Americans, the pandemic ended a yearslong decline in reported rates of disability.
The rise in cognitive issues aligns with a common symptom that plagues many Covid long-haulers: “brain fog.”
Emmanuel Aguirre, a 30-year-old software engineer in the Bay Area, had Covid at the end of 2020. Within a month, he said, his life was transformed: “I felt like I was permanently hung over, drunk, high and in a brain freeze all at once.”
He stopped dating, playing video games and reading novels, though he managed to keep his job, working remotely. Some of his physical symptoms eventually abated, but the brain fog has lingered, disappearing at times only to steamroll him days later.
Cognitive impairment is a “hallmark of long Covid,” said Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, chief of research and development at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
Studies estimate some 20 percent to 30 percent of people who get Covid have some cognitive impairment several months later, including people with symptoms ranging from mild to debilitating. Research has also shown clear biological changes from the virus related to cognition, including, in some long Covid patients, lower levels of serotonin.
“It’s not just fog, it’s a brain injury, basically,” said Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, chair of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “There are neurovascular changes. There’s inflammation. There are changes on M.R.I.s.”
Why the changes in reported cognitive impairment appear more common for younger adults is not clear. But older adults are more likely to have had some age-related cognitive decline pre-Covid, said Dr. James C. Jackson, a neuropsychologist at Vanderbilt Medical Center. Cognitive changes “stand out far more” for younger cohorts, he said.
And long Covid often presents differently in younger and older adults, said Dr. Gabriel de Erausquin, a professor of neurology at U.T. Health San Antonio. In his research, he has found that older adults with long-Covid-related cognition deficits have more issues linked to memory. But younger adults are more likely to experience difficulty with attention and concentration and, in some cases, fatigue or pain so severe their thinking is affected.
We receive solicitations from realtors around the country who offer to pay us a referral fee if we send our clients their way.
I used Zillow to evaluate an agent’s remark that he is “a top agent in Arizona”.
He has had 23 sales around the Phoenix metro area this year, and all but three were under $600,000. If you go back through his history, you’d find that he’s never had a sale over $1,600,000 (I went back to 2019).
If you were a high-end buyer, you should keep looking.
I wonder how long it would take to make a “Consumer Reports” or “UL tested” type trusted independent reviewing organization? Clearly the dangers of being co-opted are huge but…
Right now, that’s probably Yelp by default.