In this week's Real Estate Today column, which you can read at www.GoldenREblog.com, I wrote about Golden Real Estate's commitment to "Hometown Service Delivered With Integrity." It was hard to stay away from making the point that one of President Trump's most negative impacts on society has been making political dishonesty "normal."
The biggest and most painful lie Trump tells is everytime he uses the phrase "fake news" to color news that is true but he doesn't like. One has to wonder how long-term the effect of his presidency will be. We must return to honest discourse by our leaders and to honest appreciation of the hard-working mainstream media.
Another particularly painful development is how all those "Never Trump" incumbents fell right in line with him after the election. Why? The simple answer is that they put their re-election above what they already knew was the right and honest thing to do. An example is our own Colorado congressman, Mike Coffman, who vowed to "stand up to Trump" if he were elected. Not a chance.
In my column I spoke fondly about Rotary's Four-Way Test, but many Rotarians who recite the Four-Way Test at the beginning of every meeting support President Trump. In my opinion, no self-respecting Rotarian who sincerely believes in and promotes the Four-Way Test could support Donald Trump -- just like no self-respecting Evangelical could... but they do!
Let's talk about climate change. It is clearly the number one issue facing the world today, and its impacts are playing out with each new 500-year flood, out-of-control wildfire, or devastating hurricane. Meanwhile, the EPA administrator has ordered the phrase "climate change" purged from the EPA website and has fired his science advisor. How appalling is that?
It is evident that major damage has been done well beyond the walls of the White House in every agency of government. It may take decades to recover from the Trump Administration, no matter how short we're able to make it with our votes in the mid-terms and in 2020.
Showing posts with label Integrity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Integrity. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 17, 2018
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Keeping Listing Agents Honest - A Modest Proposal
Recently I was competing for a listing with another agent. We were both asked how much real estate we had sold in the last 30 days. For myself I guessed (correctly) about $1 million, but the other agent said $1.7 million. When I got home I looked him up on the MLS. He had sold one small property in January and another in February -- nothing since! Agents can indeed lie to prospective sellers and the seller has to take their word, because there is no way to verify past sales, only current listings!
Back in April 2008, I competed with an agent for a $685,000 listing (which I got). The seller showed me the listing presentation which the other agent had left behind. That agent claimed to be the city's top selling agent for over 10 years straight selling over 100 listings per year. Since I'd never heard of him, I looked him up on the MLS and found that he had averaged under 20 sold listings per year in the last three years and had not sold any of his own listings or any other agent's listings in the previous 2 years! (He claimed he had a database of buyers waiting to buy a "home like yours.") It was outrageous, and I wrote about it without naming him in my newspaper column. (www.ecentral.com/members/jimsmith/Columns/Apr24YH.pdf) A couple colleagues guessed who I was talking about, which surprised me! My only regret is that I didn't file an ethics complaint against this agent, because he is a Realtor and bound by the Code of Ethics which says you should not lie about your statistics.
I'm thinking of creating a website on which sellers could get accurate performance statistics on any agent usng the MLS. It would involve the seller giving the agent's name and someone with MLS access would look the agent up on the MLS and send a report. Do you think this is a good idea?
PS: I don't want to do the analysis myself -- and don't have the time, either. But it requires access to the MLS to do the analysis. One solution would be for the local Realtor association to farm out the assignments to volunteer members whose reports would be anonymous. This should not be a way for one agent to win clients away other agents, just to keep agents honest and give sellers some way to verify perfomance claims. I think we owe this integrity check to consumers. Don't you?
Back in April 2008, I competed with an agent for a $685,000 listing (which I got). The seller showed me the listing presentation which the other agent had left behind. That agent claimed to be the city's top selling agent for over 10 years straight selling over 100 listings per year. Since I'd never heard of him, I looked him up on the MLS and found that he had averaged under 20 sold listings per year in the last three years and had not sold any of his own listings or any other agent's listings in the previous 2 years! (He claimed he had a database of buyers waiting to buy a "home like yours.") It was outrageous, and I wrote about it without naming him in my newspaper column. (www.ecentral.com/members/jimsmith/Columns/Apr24YH.pdf) A couple colleagues guessed who I was talking about, which surprised me! My only regret is that I didn't file an ethics complaint against this agent, because he is a Realtor and bound by the Code of Ethics which says you should not lie about your statistics.
I'm thinking of creating a website on which sellers could get accurate performance statistics on any agent usng the MLS. It would involve the seller giving the agent's name and someone with MLS access would look the agent up on the MLS and send a report. Do you think this is a good idea?
PS: I don't want to do the analysis myself -- and don't have the time, either. But it requires access to the MLS to do the analysis. One solution would be for the local Realtor association to farm out the assignments to volunteer members whose reports would be anonymous. This should not be a way for one agent to win clients away other agents, just to keep agents honest and give sellers some way to verify perfomance claims. I think we owe this integrity check to consumers. Don't you?
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