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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3501 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 17, 2024

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It seems that most of the work that real estate agents do is finding clients. How does that work? If I want to sell my house, it's not hard to find a real estate agent. I can contact one in two minutes. For real estate agents to be spending so much effort finding clients, there has to be a large pool of people who want to sell their houses but for some reason don't have real estate agents yet. How can that be? What are real estate agents actually doing?

A real estate agent’s main job is finding clients by convincing people in the regular world to use them and not somebody else- you can google ‘real estate agencies near me’ and cal them and they’ll assign you one, but most people would prefer to hire an agent from their church/country club/PTA at their kid’s school/whatever. In other words the job is networking, finding clients instead of having them find you on google.

They work their personal networks, chat with friends of friends and let people know they are available. They tend to specialize in certain neighbourhoods so they can join social groups in that area. People are a lot more comfortable if they have some social connection to the agent, or if they get a referral from someone. Some of them actually are also Uber drivers so they can chat with locals and find out who may be interested in selling.

There are also some very underhanded tactics. Back in the day there were real estate agents who paid black women to push strollers around neighbourhoods to convince people it was time to sell. Also things like talking to lonely seniors and convincing them to sell.

Why do people prefer real estate agents in their network? Is this rational? Why don't real estate agents compete on price instead?

They've banded together and declared standard commissions, so they can't compete on price.

Given how commissions are structured they are incentivized to close deals fast instead of holding out for the best price.

Basically people want real estate agents in their network because they believe they are less likely to screw them.

They've banded together and declared standard commissions

Source? This article says that any explicit attempt to "declare standard commissions" would fall afoul of antitrust laws.

Do you have a source on said underhanded tactics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

from the link,

The tactics included:

  • hiring black women to be seen pushing baby carriages in white neighborhoods to encourage white fear of devalued property
  • hiring black men to drive through white neighborhoods with their radios blasting
  • hiring black youth to stage street brawls in front of white homes to generate feelings of an unsafe atmosphere
  • selling a house to a black family in a middle-class white neighborhood to provoke white flight, before the community's property values decline considerably
  • saturating the neighborhood area with fliers offering quick cash for houses developers buying houses and buildings, leaving them unoccupied to make the neighborhood appear abandoned – like a ghetto or a slum

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