Here I am in Minnesota where home sales seem to get slower each month. (not what I am supposed to say but I don’t feel like following the script today) I get these emails and they contain sentences like this:
“in particular there have been hundreds of visitors looking for real estate agents”
or
“We have 6 buyers in your area looking for an agent right now”
or the phone rings
The caller is always form some other state (both mentally and physically) He or she asks for my help with a big problem. It seems that the caller has a ton of buyer “leads” and the buyers need an agent in my area and could I please help. Sadly I have not been very helpful.
None of this makes any sense to me. Why would a buyer contact someone in California to help them find a Realtor in Minnesota? Why would a company create a web site for buyers if they didn’t have any agents to serve those buyers?
The biggest mystery of all is who are these buyers. They are smart enough to find a lead aggregation company most likely via Google so they can be sold to a Realtor but they are not smart enough to use Google to find one of the zillions of Realtors on the internet, or ask a friend, family member or neighbor to recommend one. I come up higher in any Google search for the area than these companies that are always asking for my help as they piss away thousands of leads that they can’t service.
The whole thing is pretty mind blowing and may be the reason for the sluggish housing market. Home buying activity is low right now, it has really dropped off since the tax credit expired. Now I am starting to wonder if I am partly to blame. Maybe all of these buyers are waiting for me to say yes so they can buy a home, and that poor man in California really is having trouble finding a top agent in my market. I am not helping him. On the other hand the lead generation companies are doing the economy and the housing market a dis service by capturing those poor home buyers and not setting them free so they can purchase a home and help the economy.
The buyers have some responsibility in all this too, but we can’t say anything negative about a buyer. That is even too low for the weenie. If I tick them all off it will just get worse and we need them now.