The real estate market has been hit hard over the last few
years due to the economy and the pandemic which means real estate agents are
hungry to make a commission and sellers a huge profit. Unfortunately, it also
means that sellers are hungry to make the type of profit margins and success
that was once available ten years ago, and if they don’t get it, they’re
extremely petulant in their words and actions. What I have found over the years
is this, as a real estate agent, the relationship with your clients far outweighs
the profit you could make on a property, instead you create long lasting
relationships that reward you with plenty of referrals from previous clients
and their friends wanting a reliable and honest real estate agent. Unfortunately, in today’s market it is hard
to find that honest real estate agent, instead you encounter unprofessional and
unethical agents who are more interested in making that commission rather than
help a person find the right home for them that they can afford.
If you buy a property with the intent to flip it, then you’re
taking a gamble. Monetary gains are only a small part of investing in the real
estate market. Especially if you bought the property when it was run down and
you got it for a low price and you sunk a lot of money into the property to
refurbish it in order to make it resalable. Then you pray you make your money back
on it with a huge profit margin. It’s called an investment gamble. Unfortunately,
this can also be a crap shoot as to whether or not you’ll make your money back.
Sometime you do make your money back and other times you lose your shirt,
depending on how you play the game.
This also goes for greedy developers who seek out patches of
properties in order to build ugly structures and try to sell them at a huge
profit. Doesn’t always work, but they do it anyway. Throw in the pandemic greed
and you’ve got serious price gouging which artificially raise the price of
properties. No matter what it’s greed with a capital “G”. We’ll talk about
developers in a separate article in weeks to come, so for today we will
concentrate on buyers and sellers, and their greedy real estate agents.
Now we circle back to the real estate agent and their
behavior. There are many ethical agents out there, don’t get me wrong, but over
the years I’ve encountered many others who are completely unethical and
unprofessional, just looking to make a buck and not help their clients. Hell,
just watch that show on Bravo TV, Million Dollar Listing New York or Los
Angeles. Both of these shows show the agents as unethical and so very
unprofessional it’s not funny. They might know the market per say, but in reality,
all they want is the big buck commissions and the status as top dog in town.
Meanwhile they couldn’t sell a house to the down to earth person in society if
they tried. Not only do they inflate the prices to please their own wallets,
they don’t know how to talk to sellers with respect or professionalism. If I was
the seller of a high-priced home, I’d have don’t my homework before hiring a
agent to sell it for me, which it appears many of the sellers on these shows have
clearly done, however, the agent gets frustrated with them, shows their true
colors and then basically sandblasts the seller for being ignorant. Not only
would I walk about on that unprofessional agent, but I’d also report them to
the real estate association to revoke their ability to be a real estate agent. But I digress. Bottom line is that these
agents appear to represent every hard-working professional agent across this
country and make them look bad. If I were in the industry right now, I’d be staging
a protest to get those shows off the air because they falsely advertise agents
as so unprofessional and unethical, unlike those who are the opposite.
But getting back to the greed of the industry. When people
watch those types of shows they get the “get rich quick” attitude and believe
that if the housing market in their area is showing $300 or $400 a square foot,
then why not jack up the price 20-40 percent and see what happens. These are unrealistic
prices that damage the market far more than you would think. What will these unethical
agents do when the housing market is prices so far out of reach that no one can
afford to buy a home. Where will they be then, when there is no commission to
be made on a property that they represent?
Buyers should request a call sheet for the homes they are
about to visit and review. If the sheet says renovated kitchen, yet the kitchen
is the same set up since being built, that means the homeowner or unethical agent
paid to have the cabinets refaced with new doors and paint. That’s not a full
renovated kitchen, that’s called a sham. What’s worse is that the county assessor
has taken those two little words as fact and reassessed the home value by increasing
the property taxes when they shouldn’t have been raised. This happened to a
friend of mine. The kitchen was never renovated, yet the county increased the
property taxes by a few grand over the course of 6 years that she had the home.
Plus, there was a county easement on the property for drainage, so she couldn’t
even put a shed on that portion of the property, nor build a garden on that 1/3
of her property. It wasn’t until I stepped in and met with the county taxation
office for her and explained what the real estate agent had done and failed to
tell the buyer that her property was reassess and she received a check for over
priced taxes that never should have been charged. Renovated kitchen means, rip
out the flooring, counters and cabinets, possibly the drywall and fixtures and
replace with new items, not just throw on a coat of paint and make the house smell
like the paint aisle of Home Depot and call it renovated. That is fraud in the
building industry by the way. Most real estate agents don’t know a damn thing
about construction or renovation so when they list a property as renovated and
it’s not, that’s called false advertising. Buyer beware!
Author Elizabeth Kilbride is a former political operative,
author, scriptwriter, historian, journalist. business professional, and
creative artist, and life coach consultant. Ms. Kilbride holds a Masters in
Criminology and a BS in Business Management who stepped out of the loop for a
while, but who is now back with a powerful opinion and voice in the direction
of this country and our economy. As a life coach, she is available to counsel
individuals to enjoy their dreams and a better life. Ms. Kilbride loves to
travel, photograph her surroundings and is also a gourmet cook who loves to
garden and preserve food for the winter months.
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