Taking care of buyers

Taking care of buyers

Buyer Services image. Original image at http://www.suzied.ca/images/buyer_services_tab2.gif

A wired world

It was Marshall McLuhan who coined the phrase, and that was half a century ago. But he was certainly prescient, if only because e-mail messages and websites have brought about a profound change in how business can now be conducted. There's in fact no longer a compelling need to go to the office every day or, in many cases, to have an office at all. Indeed, all that's come to be required is a computer and a desk that will tuck into a corner of your personal residence. It will, of course, depend on what your business is, but you can even start out in a garage -- as Bill Gates and the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) managed to do.
Anyway, in the Niagara area, there's been a steady influx these past few years of people who've also found that they can make a decent living without having to reside in a major urban area, let alone a king-sized city.

To make my point this month, though, I can't help but reflect on some accompanying shifts in focus in the real estate business since I started in it twenty years. And I'm not so sure that they are as well recognized -- or even sufficiently understand -- as they need to be.

Let me explain ....

1. Access to the market

For innumerable years hitherto it was possible to find information about houses for sale in a given area. There were newspaper ads you could see and peruse. There were agents who dropped off Just Listed cards. There were offices with a display of photos in the window. There were phone calls to find out if you were interested in selling what you already had. And some agents weren't afraid to knock on doors, introduce themselves, and ask if you knew anyone (including yourself, needless to say) who might be interested in selling.

In effect, the industry spared no efforts to make its presence felt in a neighbourhood. Indeed, it still does and there's little chance that it will go into hiding any time soon.

Yet there was an underlying implication that you needed to connect with an agent if you wanted to know much about a particular property and never mind obtain an idea of what else might be available. Moreover, the information wasn't provided in much of an organized way. Rather, it was largely scattered in terms of location, style, price and other variable factors. You had to do some digging to find what you were looking for.

But then came the Internet; and this was followed by the search engines; and this led to agent websites, many of which included links to the local MLS database; and this allowed you to browse through an entire market or whichever part(s) of it you were interested in; and it all meant that you were presented with a one-stop-shopping collection of facts, figures, and whatever else you wanted to find out about..

So suddenly you sort of no longer needed an agent to tell you what you wanted to know. You could discover much of it yourself, just so long as you knew how to use a computer.

2. What use is an agent?

You do, of course, still need help from real estate offices and agents in order to see if a house measures up to what you want -- or, in the case of a For Sale By Owner property, you can't just walk into it unannounced. Appointments for viewings remain an essential factor.

However, much of the basic information tends to be available in advance, if only because you ask an Agent On Duty where it can be found on the net or, even better, by having had it already given to you on the phone or by an e-mail response. All you need to do then is get inside the place to see if it's as good as you're expecting.

But this shift in emphasis from getting information to arranging for a closer look changes the way an agent should work with you from then on -- or, as I'm prepared to ague, ought to change.

In effect (if I can fall back on my weakness for playing with words), the question What use is an agent? needs to be replaced with What use is the information an agent has given you? Thus, rather than simply waxing lyrical about how good the place is, the agent in question should have the sense/smarts to compare it with whatever else is available. His/her enthusiasms shouldn't exist in splendid isolation. Instead, they should be part of the whole picture or, more precisely, allow you to consider them in relation to the entire market.

However, such an attitude is in decided conflict with the traditional basics of salesmanship, and a too common lack of it has much to do with the reputation of the real estate industry being lower than it really deserves to be. The longtime -- and generally continuing -- belief in Letting the Buyer Beware is, in my opinion, an underlying principle that's out of sync with what the public is hoping for nowadays.

3. Advise and Consent

A listing agent's primary job is, of course, to sell what he/she has listed and to suggest that buying anything else will be an unwise decision. There's also some imperative to get as high a price for a property in question as a potential purchaser is willing to pay.

No fault in this, it goes without saying, but the increasing appearance of Buyer Agents -- not to mention the rare emergence of Exclusive Buyer Agents (myself obviously included) -- has somewhat run alongside the "computerization of the market" (if I may call it that) and allows agents who are working for buyers to help them become aware rather than expecting them to simply be beware. This is a subtle difference, but it's a significant one. It incorporates reasons why a place should NOT be bought no less than the reasons why it should. It implies more information and a critical analysis of it. It should anticipate surprises and ensure that they'll either not occur or can be overcome if and when they do turn up. This supports the sense of a Home Inspection, for example, but it also calls for checks on such ideas as zoning, building permits, change of use, and the need/advisability for updates and replacements.

Moreover, it's in this way that an agent can show the usefulness of the information he/she provides to a buyer. Or, as the sales field likes to put it: the importance isn't in the features but in their benefits -- and, if the latter don't exist (as say in a fixer-upper), advice as to how to bring everything up to par (or better).

I'll maintain that it's taken a while for the industry to realize that this has been happening and it isn't altogether unfair to say that a lot of agents have yet to realize what the effects are, let alone to become adequately reconciled to them. Habits can die hard and the ersthwile role of being a primary source of information still, at least as I see things, governs the attitude of more industry participants than it should.

In turn, I think the industry could usefully consider the habit of questioning the suitability of a proposed candidate for political office. The pros and cons are given a thorough airing before a U.S. President's recommendation is accepted. Despite what may be too great a stretch of my imagination, I can't help wondering if the purchase of a property doesn't call for a similarly hard nosed examination.

Most of all, I do believe that the real estate industry's reputation can only benefit the more -- and the sooner -- it changes its ways in such a direction.

All in favour say "aye," eh??!!