Obviously what is done is done and you can't change what happened so far. When does your contract with her expire? Can you terminate the contract now? I would do my best to get your current contract terminated.

Then it's time to interview new agents. A minimum of 3. Before they even come to meet with you, they should have pulled the listing history on your house, the tax records, all the sales in your area for the past 6 months and every thing on the market in your area. Then you sit together and compare your house and features to all the recent sales and listings to determine your price. In addition the agent should present you with a marketing plan and why he/she does everything in the marketing plan. You should walk thru the house and make a task list of items for you to accomplish - cleaning, decluttering, items that may look inappropriate, etc. you can even interview these agents about the negotiation process and closing process, ie how to handle,offers from people who are not prequalified for a mortgage.

Good luck.

A little comment about the pre-approval. The letter only shows the amount that the buyer would be borrowing. In our case it didn't give any info about the cash that we would be bringing to the table. With our last purchase the pre-approval was only for 25% of the purchase price. However, we had enough cash to pay the full asking price for the home.

Sounds like you didn't interview enough agents and screen them properly. Get out of the contract with her and start over.

Good advice Pixie.Thanks.

As for the pre approval, I think those circumstances are very different and your situation is not common.

As for thinking I may not have screened enough agents - maybe so. But she has been selling homes in my town for 20 years and is well known. Before selecting her I wanted another well known guy that has been selling homes in my town for 20 years and was on the city council. However, he didn't return calls twice. Important calls. And at my wifes urging we didn't use him because of that. And the wife had a good point. I may go back to him and give him a second chance. At least an opportunity to earn my business and see what he says. I will also interview at least two others. Thanks for the advice.

Now to see if I can get out of this contract. I do have a long list of areas where she's let me down so hopefully if I explain that she will admit she could have done better and will understand. The issues I've had are really pretty black and white and there's not much defending it.

Hi, I am the noob who criticized a REA on another thread. Don't ever worry about people making a big deal of your first few posts, it's sort of like pointing out typos, or a gentle form of good natured hazing. The exception is people who suddenly show up and spam forums. If your questions are real it should not make a difference. Good luck and I hope all goes well in spite of your realtor.

Sorry you got off to a rocky start with selling your home. There are some other threads in this forum with good information about how to choose an agent. "Well known" is a lousy criteria for choosing an agent. They may have name recognition for undesirable business practices, or a reputation for poor service to clients. Or they may simply be too busy to give the level of quality service that you deserve. If your second agent didn't return important calls twice, there is little reason to believe that will change once a contract with him has been signed.

I agree with the above posts. Sometimes the learning curve starts out rough; but make corrections and move forward. Good luck. And please stop back here and let us know how the sale is progressing.

If you got comparables from this agent before you listed with her, & you knew that the comps were from a different part of town, why did you list with her?

& while we can give the data to our sellers, we always have to remember that the property being sold belongs to you & not us, so the decision on pricing has to be the seller's (although if you've gotten 3 good offers within 2 months, it sounds like the pricing is good).

A professional photographer does indeed have to be scheduled, & it does sometimes take time to get him/her out there.

The photographer should have taken photos of *everything* though, & let the agent choose the most helpful, so he should have taken some shots of the backyard the first time (assuming that there weren't motorcycles or pot-bellied pigs evident in every possible shot!)

The fact that one buyer backed out because of a "kid toucher" (do you realize how trivializing that sounds? these guys are not just nice guys with quirks; they assault children, they cause their victims devastating physical & emotional damage) is entirely understandable, even sobering, & there's nothing your agent could have or should have done about it.

Without knowing how & why the other 2 offers failed, I can't know if your agent could have done anything about those, either.

If all you needed was a revised pre-qual letter, they're easy enough to obtain; the buyer's lender pulls up the form letter & plugs in the necessary numbers.

As someone said, no lender or buyer's agent would let a seller know that their buyer, who's offering, say, $250,000 for a $350,000 house, could actually afford a $500,000 house.

Even if the one buyer does work in finance, you're the person who wants to sell his house.

You can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out what the potential buyer's logic is & how much more money you could squeeze out of him, or how much he's trying to squeeze out of you (&, really, you're safe just figuring that you want the most from him & he wants the most from you!).

In this sense, your Realtor is exactly right:
whether the buyer 'needs' the closing paid or is just trying to get you to pay it, just respond to the offer that's before you right now.

Make your counter-offer based on what your bottom line is & see what happens.

I wish you the best.

Pre Qual letters here state the ENTIRE amount that the buyer can purchase, not only the financed part.

Having a pedophile in the neighborhood is gonna need a huge drop in price for someone to consider this house as a possible. Even empty nesters have grandchildren or neices and nephews. I'm assuming that information is part of your disclosure statement up front, right? Because if this wasn't being shared up front, and I as a buyer found out about it from another source after I made an offer, I'd be seeing red. And I'd be wondering about what other incurable defect was being deliberately hidden. And then, after backing out of the deal, I'd be sending letters to every single real estate agent in town with that information, so that no one else would be put into that situation.

Pre qual letters here usually DO show the entire amount, but the pre approvals only show the borrowed amount.

Thought the OP had said they had pre-approvals?

In case other buyers express concern about the "kid toucher", it would be helpful if you researched him/her and had the facts as to the crime. An teenager who had sex with his slightly younger girlfriend who had vindictive parents is painted with the same brush as an adult who gets his jollies off of abusing a child. If it's the teenager on the offender list, most buyers would have zero qualms about buying the house. "There but for the grace of God go I" will be the most common reaction. The devil is in the details.

I just found an interesting website called "keep agents honest", that has a list of unethical practices to avoid with realtors. It's incredibly helpful. You might want to look at it to get an idea of whether your realtor is engaging in some of those practices. You'll have to google it since I won't link it here.

As far as a pedophile, one reason I dropped a former agent is that she showed us a house with a registered sex offender next door, without mentioning it to us, wasting our time and causing us to overvalue the property.

Buyers & sellers must take responsibility for checking for certain things, such as mold & sexual offenders in the neighborhood.

There's a little bit of a gray area as to what the agent can & cannot tell *anybody*.

For instance, if (s)he knows that someone has died in the house from any cause other than a violent death, informing a prospective buyer may violate the privacy of the seller.

or it may not.

You as a buyer would always want ot have an inspection, but you'd researdh & choose your own inspector rather than asking your Realtor to pick one, & in this marvelous age of google, you can find out who lives in the neighborhood.

Laws vary so much from state to state re disclosure. When I bought my previous house, in California, the agent was required to tell me that the previous owner had died in the house (this was 25 years ago).

Ditto the sex offender issue. It really does take looking into the actual crime because depending on the state, sexting or underage sex can fall into that category.
I don't think it's the REA's responsibility to check into neighborhood stuff like that - it's the buyers. Because it's a slippery slope from sex offenders to crime statistics to race and then all of the sudden the REA is breaking the law by "steering" you into certain neighborhoods.
Not for me. I make my relocation buyers drive through neighborhoods on their own before I show them homes in each one.

(And that "Keep Agents Honest" website? "Agents who allow their clients to pay junk fees" is one of the top 10 unethical practices? When did THAT become an REA's job? Maybe I'll start another thread on this one...)

I never understand why people bring up the fact that there are a variety of crimes on the sex offender list. You just click on their names and the crime and the age of the perp and the victim are right there.

Ehfivessixtwo3 -- The offender registry for my state only lists the barest minimum of information about the crime and none about the victim. For example, the statutory rape offenders on the list for my city look very young (back to the idea that their "crime" was having consensual sex with a younger girlfriend who had upset parents). There's just not enough details on the registry for a home buyer to get an accurate understanding of the crime. More research would be needed to get the whole picture.

Jewel - the level 2 and 3 sex offenders are a matter of public record and are listed in the national registries. These are people who are deemed likely to reoffend. Usually the teenage boy having sex with his underage girlfriend, they tend to be classified as a level 1 offender and those crimes aren't listed on the national registries.

Anybody can go to their local police department and request additional information, as well as a list of level 1 offenders. Just give them the address of the home you wish to purchase and they will give you the necessary information.

"Anybody can go to their local police department and request additional information"

My point exactly. All offender registries aren't created the same. As I stated in my previous post, the registry in my state is extremely lacking in detail. So, a home buyer painting all offenders in their neighborhood with the same broad brush would be a mistake. To protect against this happening, the seller might consider getting the details to provide interested buyers.

This post was edited by Jewel654 on Wed, May 21, 14 at 8:55