All you have to do is respond. That is all our team asks. Have you ever had this thought when reaching out to a listing agent? It is no wonder Real Estate Professionals get a bad rap sometimes. Far too often, people are simply non-responsive. It’s even worse when you win a bid and the agent is still non-responsive. How and why does this happen?

Ok disclaimer: This is a short vent and at the same time a challenge to us to keep improving ourselves!

Let’s be fair, sometimes the agent is out of town. Or their phone broke. Or maybe an emergency came up. We get it, life happens and we totally understand that. Some would argue that someone in a scenario like that should leave some kind of message stating as such however there are arguments to both sides of that debate.

BUT, what seems to happen far more often is the agent is simply non-responsive. We are not talking about getting back to you one or two days later. We are talking about not responding at all and you know they are around. Professional? We think not. Maybe they are just super busy. Welcome to the club. As professionals, we have to find a way to improve that. Especially when we are talking about offers and earnest money.

The kicker for me was when we won a bid on a property and we never, not once heard from the listing agent. We had to follow up with the office just to get addendums and after a few days of waiting we finally got them. We wondered if we really had anything but eventually they did. Sadly once earnest money was delivered, it went silent again. We ended up not moving forward due to inspections however then getting earnest money back was no less an issue. It’s one thing to be busy. It’s another to be too busy to tell people where their money is. We don’t anyone who appreciates that scenario.

Real Estate is a smaller world than many people realize. It is not terribly hard to find out if someone is around and simply not returning your call. If as a listing agent you are not returning calls or at least having an assistant return them, shame on you. Yes we are being up front however we have run into this far too many times. If you don’t have time, just say you don’t have time right now but you will get back with us. It’s not too much to ask. What makes it worse is when multiple colleagues share the same view. It is truly a small world sometimes.

If you don’t have time, please reconsider if you should be listing properties. As Buyers, we count on and depend on at least a reasonable level of communication, especially when we win a bid! With all these time sensitive addendums with REO’s, time and money is truly at stake on every deal done regardless of whether the Buyer is a home owner of investor.

All you have to is respond when we reach out to you. It’s all we ask. In the meantime, we must always look at ourselves to ensure we don’t make the same mistakes we vent about. Works both ways!