The importance of relationships with my broker colleagues
I spent a lot of time during the harried spring real estate market reflecting on how critical relationships with other real estate agents are for my clients’ success in the home search and the home sale process. A unique element of my work is that one day, I could be the “belle of the ball” as a listing agent representing sellers, and the next day I might be groveling among the hordes of agents representing buyers. Someday, I’ll figure out how to make an image that represents how this dynamic feels–it would be a listing agent as a king or queen on offer review date, high up in a castle opening the window to see a gleaming kingdom below, with the air filled with birdsong, contrasted with a buyer’s agent who looks like Smeagol, slogging through an unearthly muck.
It’s not all slogging through the muck though, because I’ve had a handful of wins for buyers even in competitive situations, and in every case, it’s because I either had a relationship with the listing agent or have been able to quickly build rapport to establish trust and collegiality prior the offer review date. This is a practice that I’ve built over years, and the commitment has paid off in the form of name recognition and even mutual admiration and support which has helped me win for my clients!
Here are a few of the ways I am strategic about laying the groundwork for these relationships.
Save agents’ contact information in my phone contacts. Since 2016, I’ve saved the phone number of nearly every agent I’ve had a substantive conversation with in my phone. When agents call on my listings, I save their name and number and the listing they were calling about. This means that I have a record of previously communicating with someone i.e. “Jen, toured Bellora” and I know that I had been in touch with her in 2018. I’m able to answer by name and quickly reestablish rapport by sharing when we were last in contact.
Read and mirror the listing agent’s communication style. Most agents tend to have a communication medium (phone, email, text, etc.) and style that they prefer. I act like a chameleon, and use their preferred mode of communication. I’ll even match the way someone always (or never) uses emojis to mirror their style.
Follow up and follow through. When I request an inspection report on a listing for my clients who choose not to make an offer on the home, I let the listing agent know that they will not be pursuing the home. When a listing agent has an accurate guesstimate on how many offers they are expecting, it helps everyone to understand the potential competitive landscape. I actually won a home for buyers recently by following up to let the listing agent know we wouldn’t be writing an offer after all. It turned out that when no other offers came in, I got an update from the listing agent with this information. I passed it along to my clients because I thought they’d be interested to know, and sure enough they decided to pursue the home and we won it at list price with no competition.
Similarly, when I will be writing an offer, I am proactive in following up with the listing agent to let them know to expect our offer. I have seen others deploy the opposite strategy of sending an offer without any prior communication with the listing agent, but this approach eliminates the opportunity to gain potentially useful knowledge of the sellers’ motivations that could help to structure a winning offer.
Provide feedback after touring listings. I tour several homes every week and get a push notification after most home tours with a request to provide feedback on the home. I know from representing sellers that information on how buyers responded to the home is invaluable for listing agents and sellers. This is the practice that I could use the most improvement. I prefer to send feedback in batches rather than ad hoc, but often by the time I circle back to it, the home is already pending.
In the future, I’d like to see a way that agents can rate and review each other to create a scorecard on aspects like professionalism and communication. I may eventually start requesting feedback from agents that I have worked with. I could include a customized set of feedback with a buyer’s offer to show the listing agent that other folks in their brokerage have enjoyed working with me. Of course, there is a dark side to the game of reviews. There may not be a perfect solution for the negativity bias that tends to come into play in reviews, but I do think it’s an idea worth more thought.