Real estate reality shows – Home Buying
Sam Schneiderman, Broker-owner of Greater Boston Home Team, shares his first impression of home buying reality shows.
Since I deal with the often-stressful work of advocating for buyer and seller clients every day, the last thing that I do to relax is watch TV show about home buying.
Recently, my wife stumbled across the channel that features such shows and I had time to check out a couple of real estate home buying reality shows. Here are my first impressions:
It appeared to me that the buyers in the first show were being shown property by the seller's agent until I later realized that she was actually the buyer’s agent. I was confused because of her abundant salesman-type comments about various aspects of the home and virtually no critique about the home’s weak points.
During both shows, I noticed that the agents offered very little insight to the buyers about the properties price and condition in relation to its price point and there was no on-screen discussion about the buyer’s other options. At least the agent in the second show took the initiative to show several other properties in the buyer’s price range so that they could see what they could get for their money.
I didn't see any discussion about agency disclosure, which is required in most states, to help buyers understand if they are working with a buyer’s agent, seller's agent, dual agent, designated agent or facilitator. (Those are the options in Massachusetts, where one of the episodes took place.) Hopefully, disclosures were handled before the show was taped.
When it came time to make the offer, the buyer’s agent did not offer an opinion about the value of the home. She didn't even indicate whether she thought it was priced high, low or fairly. She let the buyers play into the idea of how much they were going to get off of the asking price instead. Frequent readers of this blog know that asking price often has nothing to do with the value of real estate and therefore a discount off of the asking price can still result in overpaying.
The home inspection I saw revealed several obvious issues that I certainly would have pointed out to my buyers at the first viewing of the home.
In one of the episodes I saw a lame excuse for negotiation and guidance. An offer was made. The seller barely came down in price, and the agent did not counsel the buyers on any other option other than accepting the reduced price. It looked to me like there was money left on the table. I never got that far with the second show. I was disgusted by that time.
While the shows satisfy viewers desire to look at other people's homes, it doesn’t teach them much of anything about buying real estate. I also think that viewers see this and think the process is much easier than it looks. Anything looks easy when it’s compressed into 20 minutes.
If this is where buyers are learning about homebuying and agency, now I understand why some have distorted views of how the process works. In real life, the good agents spend time helping people choose a house in a consistent way, the agent provides a CMA, the agent really advises on negotiation, they inspector looks for things that are harder to find, and it takes more than 20 minutes.
If this is what you think agents do, you don’t know what a good agent can do. Did you have an agent like the ones on this show, in real life? Or did you have a good agent that provided some real service?
