Bitch Session About Brokers

Article from: http://www.stlagent.com

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By: Darin "Sid" Cameron, CRS
Thu, Feb 22nd, 2007 10:34 am

I usually try to keep my blog posts positive, but today I just need a place to bitch and I know there are other agents that read this who won't mind (and might give me their opinions and advice on what to do).

I get irritated when people in this industry freak out because you aren't doing business the same way it's been done for 20 years.

Our local market is 10-15 years behind the "hot" markets in terms of innovative ideas and technology because there's never been a real estate bubble that drove corporate sales people into the industry.

The top agents in the market are just starting to form teams beyond 2-3 people. There are only THREE agents in an entire market of 2.8 million people that did over 200 transactions (and they are all foreclosure/REO specialists working a part of the market few agents work).

Our broker is constantly trying to determine why we are growing so much faster than "the norm". The mentality is if you don't spend your first 10 years struggling then you're obviously doing something illegal or unethical. And anyone who uses the Internet to get business is clearly suspect.

The latest issue we're having is over our use of a Virtual Assistant. VA's are not a new concept. Michael Russer is constantly discussion them on realtor.org. But we're the first agent in a company of over 700 agents to use one, so we're being treated like criminals.

What bothers me is that there are dozens of agents in the company with unlicensed assistants that were hired off the street with no real estate experience and the company couldn't care less if the assistant gets training or learns anything about state license laws prior to going to work whereas my VA has more real estate transaction experience than anyone in our office but she's a problem because she's not sitting in our office.

Worse, our company has dozens of stand-alone agents that could use a part-time assistant to help with transactions and instead of monitoring what we're doing to see how our VA could help make other agents more successful, they're mad that we didn't just hire a "failing agent" from the office to do the work (because that's the advice they give their agents).

(Editor's note: Original comments to this post were lost when we migrated blog platforms, but ultimately we took several posters advice and changed brokerages because of this and other problems.)