SURPRISE! You've Been Tricked By A Real Estate Agent

There are some real estate agent marketing "tricks" that have been around a long time, some of them make sense, others not so much.

But there are several old tricks of the trade that should be ended, as I believe they cause more damage than good and lessen the experience of buyers who are searching homes for sale.

Do These Real Estate Agent Tricks Really Help A Home Seller?

Did you hire a real estate agent because they claimed to be a marketing genius who could expose your home better than everybody else? Well, perhaps you should have. The more people you can have bidding on your home, the better chance you have to get top dollar when all the dust settles.

But "exposure" is a funny word. What exactly does it mean?

If I were selling a home, I would use the term exposure to mean getting a home in front of as many "ready to buy" homebuyers as possible.

Therefore, none of the following would have great value to me, and the fact that a listing agent pursues any of them would have me concerned about their integrity or their competency (or both).

1. Listing your home multiple times simultaneously
2. Relisting your home on a regular schedule (cancelling the MLS entry and then relisting during your listing contract period)
3. Buying online traffic (typically from overseas) to make it look like your home has been viewed by active, local buyers
4. Holding multiple open houses on Saturdays or Sundays to show you how hard they are marketing the home

The Simultaneous Listing (The Multiple Multiple Listing)

The first agent trick, listing your home multiple times in the Multiple Listing Service, is actually a remnant of smart tactics from the past.

Prior to the internet, we used printed MLS Books to show prospective homebuyers what was available on the market. If we had a nice 4 Bedroom home (for example), we might list it twice. Once so that it would show up among 4 BR homes, and once again to show among 3 BR homes. In a book, these "multiple" listings could be 50 pages apart (never would they appear side by side).

The only way to "sort" homes back in the good 'ol days was to turn pages, and we didn't want a buyer looking for 3 bedrooms fail to see a great potential 4 bedroom home that might serve just as well. Thus, it was a smart, common practice to list some homes multiple times.

But the internet (computer based property searches) has changed all of that. Now, when we list a home multiple times, it just appears next to itself in the search results. Look at the two homes on the right in the image below.

Just like in the 1980s when a property search was "book based," this home is being marketed first as a 4 bedroom home and secondly as a 3 bedroom home. If people still used Tandy computers with 1,200 baud modems, this might be a wise thing to do.

So do you think these multiple occurrences are going to make the home more desirable to a buyer? In fact, most buyers seeking a 4 bedroom home on the top property search tools merely select the "3+" option so they see all homes with three or more bedrooms. And so do those seeking a 3 bedroom home.

So you have to wonder. Is this agent ignorant of today's homebuyer practices or in fact somebody trying to trick a home seller into thinking the listing agent is doing everything possible to sell a home? Either way, neither ignorance or trickery are traits that I would seek from my real estate listing agent.

Also, doesn't this also degrade the experience for people who are searching for a home? We occasionally have buyers tell us we accidentally showed the same home twice (thinking our search tool is broken).

And this technique is not effective at helping sell the home. I have studied all MLS listings going back to 2012 and can report that (statistically) the agents that often employ this old "tactic" have far worse results than those of us who really know how to market a home on the internet.

But does this mean a real estate agent should never do multiple simultaneous listings?

Actually, one scenario that it is smart to employ this technique is when there is a home with acreage that can be subdivided. As a homeowner, if you are willing to sell either the house with land, or the house subdivided from part of the land, you could end up with 3 listings (none of which would ever appear side by side like you see above).

You could market the home three ways:

1. The whole package (home on acreage)
2. The home on a small parcel of land
3. The remaining land with no home

These three simultaneous listings would make great sense, would give you better exposure than any one of them, and would not degrade the user experience for homebuyers.

Why Do Agents Relist A Home Every Week (or Regularly)?

If you understand that homeowners who sell a home in 4 to 14 days get more money, then you might understand why some real estate agents think keeping a listing looking "fresh" is helping the home seller. It is not.

How are we certain. Well, obviously, the agent did not sell the home in 4 to 14 days. And YOU CANNOT FOOL THE NEIGHBORHOOD STALKER! This is the person most likely to pay top dollar for your home, and they know the neighborhood and the homes on the market better than anyone (including your listing agent).

Much like the previous trick, an agent shows that people who sort listing by "time on the market" will see your listing more often because they "reset" the listing date. While this might sound logical, it does not consider that the majority of buyers who are ready to make a purchase decision have already looked past your home.

Here's the real issue. Do you really want to hire an agent who spends so much time trying to trick the one poorly informed buyer in the market while simultaneously overlooking the hundreds that are ready and capable of buying your home? Time is a resource and agents who waste time on low-producing techniques are not spending the right amount of time on the high producing techniques. Can you afford the consequences of marketing your home to merely a small subset of the market of potential buyers?

Buying Online Traffic Is An Awful Real Estate Agent Trick

Did you know you can find places on the internet that will send traffic anywhere you want it for a small amount of money?

Without going into too much technical detail, there many providers that can send people to a site, for money.

You can pay a lot of money and do it through Google and other search engines, but you literally spend several dollars per visitor. These visitors might or might not be looking to buy a home in Tallahassee.

But you can go to other sites and get visitors for pennies (or even cheaper), but none of these visitors are buying a home in Tallahassee. So why do they come to see your home?

Because they are part of online networks that give them rewards for visiting websites. They might land on your listing for less than a second, but that's all that it takes for your listing agent to record another "showing."

If you have an agent who you have hired (or you are thinking of hiring) who tells you they will drive massive traffic to your listing, get them to show you the source(s) of their traffic. If they really are that good at driving traffic, they will have a simple report they can pull from Google Analytics that will demonstrate to you the source of traffic. If the sites are all overseas or have nothing to do with real estate, their great promise will not deliver you a stream of ready-to-buy homebuyers.

Holding Open Houses Every Weekend Is For The Agent, Not You!

In the old days, when you couldn't surf the internet to see what homes were for sale in your area, you had to troll neighborhoods looking for signs. Open houses were wonderful, as they gave buyers a chance to get a feel for the market without first having to deal with an agent.

But times change. Where you once needed to be open a few days of the month, you now need to be open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. Open houses must never end!

Of course, open houses are now done online, as real buyers are shopping in the pajamas in front of a computer screen in their homes. They want to see inside your home when the time is right for them. That is why virtual tours are an important part of a progressive real estate marketing campaign.

So why do agents still do "open houses?"

The number one answer from a recent poll of real estate agents who still do open houses was "because I want to make my seller happy." Home sellers who have no idea how to sell a home today but who are frustrated often ask the agent to do things that used to work in the past. Well, open houses seem to fit that bill.

YET DID YOU KNOW ...

Even during the heyday for open houses, there was less than 1% chance of selling the home. Why? Because buyers are people, and people want what they cannot have. Most open house visitors visited homes outside of their price range.

SO IF OPEN HOUSES DID NOT WORK FOR THE SELLER, WHY DID AGENTS DO THEM?

Because open houses were a great source of buyer leads (just not for the home being held open).

Moral of the story. You should not ask your agent to do an open house. There is almost zero chance it will result in the sale of your home. Ask your agent to spend the hours he or she would have dedicated to the open house by writing content online that will drive traffic to your home.

You Just Can't Trick A Homebuyer

I hope our four "tricks of the trade" exposed above provide you an understanding of what many un-trained real estate agents are doing and promising in the field.

The majority of homebuyers are borrowing money to buy their next home, so there is small chance they will pay more than an appraiser will allow. I suspect this means that the buyers that listing agents are trying to trick are the ones with cash ... are agents really hoping somebody fortunate enough to have that kind of cash is also stupid?

If you are looking to sell a home, make sure you INTERVIEW MULTIPLE AGENTS so that you can find one that is not trying to trick you or a buyer, rather find the one with the best local online marketing plan. Ask about each of the four tricks above and use them to rule out the ones that include them as part of the home selling plan.

Related Links

• Zillow Zestimate Missed By A Mile On This One
• Is Your Home HGTV Ready (Should It Be)?
• How Is Market Time Defined In Real Estate?