During the height of the frenzied housing market it was not unusual for real estate agent Robert Israel to sell a home in one day — even at an inflated asking price. But as the market cools and homes go unsold for weeks or months, home sellers aren’t blaming unrealistic pricing expectations. They’re blaming their agents.
“People want to blame the agent before they blame the price,” said Israel, vice president of Chevy Chase-based Gerlach Realty. “As markets slow down and its taking 60, 70 days to sell a house that before would take 15 — there are going to be more expired contracts.”
Switching real estate agencies when a home doesn’t sell right away is just another symptom of the cooling market, local real estate agents said.
Sellers typically sign a contract with an agent to market their home for 60 to 90 days. Now, some are cutting ties when the home doesn’t sell during that period.
Israel said he’s getting anywhere from 10 to 15 calls a month from potential home sellers looking to switch agents — something that was virtually unheard of during the height of the market. Margaret Ireland, chairman of the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, said it’s a growing trend. Ireland, who also manages a local Weichert Realtors office, said her office is taking four to six new listings a month that were previously with other agencies.
Long & Foster agent Rodrigo Cruz said he lost a client to unrealistic market expectations last month. Cruz listed a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house in Northern Virginia for just under $1 million — a price he acknowledges was on the high side — earlier this summer. But when it didn’t sell, his clients switched to Fairfax Realty.
“As a seller you’re trying to justify what could be going wrong,” Cruz said. “You don’t want to realize there is a change in the market. Even if there is plenty of communication between the agent and seller … there is doubt. [They think] the real estate agent is doing something wrong.”
But with the shift to a buyers’ market, the strategy usually doesn’t work, Israel said. Like other sellers who switch agencies, Cruz’s clients ended up reducing their pricewith the new agency.
“It is very, very rare that somebody switch agents and get the price they want,” Israel said. “But it’s a very hard thing to accept that the amount of money you’re asking for is too much.”
