How to Avoid Bad Real Estate Agents in El Paso Texas

How to Avoid Bad Real Estate Agents in El Paso Texas

Hey El Paso buyers and sellers, there are times unfortunately where unscrupulous players have entered into the arena and that could potentially cost you a lot of time and money. So in this episode of Living in El Paso, Texas we're going to talk about the realest snakes and the experiences that we've had so that you

can definitely avoid those kind of pitfalls. So before we do that my name is John Peña with Peña El Paso Realty Group. Thank you so much for checking out the YouTube channel. If you're looking to buy or sell a home and you want to avoid a realest snake, by all means reach out to us as we are the home selling experts

here in El Paso and we love helping buyers find their dream home. So what is a realest snake? A realest snake is a funny term, obviously I'm a real estate agent, but it implies that essentially an agent is a bit of a snake and I'm going to give you some pretty concrete examples of folks that we've run into

here in the past. Of course we are not going to use any names and hopefully just being aware of this will help you kind of avoid some of those pitfalls. So the first one that I'm going to talk about is so crazy that we've made a whole video about it and I'm going to link it up here if we remember. Everybody

always says that and then they forget, but we're going to put it up there. And in a nutshell this is kind of a warning for for sellers because in this story basically there was a gentleman who wanted to list his home. He reached out to a real estate agent who was very very well known and the real estate

agent suggested that he sell his price for basically $75,000 less than what we ended up selling it for. So this potential real estate agent has been in the business for a very very long time and because he's most likely lazy and just didn't want to do the work and just wanted a quick easy commission, he was

going to shortchange this Vietnam veteran $75,000. He wanted to list the home at $270,000. We sold it within the first week for $345,000. That is a realist snake, okay? Here's another example of a realist snake who represented a buyer. Well who almost represented a buyer that we now represent. This young woman reached

out and she didn't have a huge budget. She reached out to a real estate agent to help her try to buy a home here in El Paso. This real estate agent said, hey no problem, but I'm going to only show you three homes and then after that if you want to see any more homes than other than three, I'm going to charge you $50 a

home. That's illegal for one and it's mind-boggling, okay? If a real estate agent ever tries to get you to pay money upfront for anything, big huge red flag. Absolutely a realist snake, okay? I love this one. Number three, this is for sellers. A lot of times if you're going to sell your home, what do you do?

Maybe you reach out to a couple of different real estate agents. You invite them over to do a listing appointment. They basically do their spiel and in their spiel, what they're likely going to do is explain how they're going to market your home because the goal of any listing agent is

to get your home in front of as many eyeballs as humanly possible so that the right buyer can see it and you know buy it essentially, right? So what these listing agents are going to tell you, they're going to say, oh don't you worry, you know it's 2023, we're great with social media, we're going to post it on our

Instagram and our Facebook, maybe they have a YouTube channel, probably not and yeah we're going to post it on there and it's going to be seen by all of these people. That is absolutely incorrect because you have to understand the difference between organic reach and paid reach. If I put a listing video or

listing pictures or you know a listing description on our Facebook page, it's going to be seen by maybe five to ten people, right? And we keep up on our social media platforms, alright? So these are not just relics we have collecting dust. We keep up on them. We post all the time. I'm not sure a lot of

other agents do but the point is that if you just post something to your social media, you're only getting organic reach, right? You're only getting a handful of people that are going to see it because Facebook, Instagram, Google who owns YouTube are making money from advertising. What that means is that if

you don't, if your real estate agent doesn't actually put their own marketing dollars behind those posts and turns them into paid advertising, they are not going to be seen by anybody, okay? When you're selling your home, your real estate agent, your listing agent should be a partner with you. They should be

spending their own money. We spend in the ballpark of one to two thousand dollars on a listing for pictures, for video, and paid marketing so that we can get your home sold in the quickest amount of time for top dollar. So don't be fooled by that one, alright? Number four. Here's some real snake examples of

experienced agents. That first one was was an unbelievable example of someone who's been in the game forever and they're lazy, they're tired, and all they want to do is collect a quick commission and they try to get you to sell your home for a lot less, right? They are doing you a huge disservice, right? All of

that equity that you may have built up in the home now is basically, you know, a lot of it's gone because this old real estate agent basically just convinced you that you should sell it for a much lower price just so that they didn't wouldn't have to do any work, alright? Definitely watch out for that. And of

course with the experienced agents, the other problem that we see is a complete lack of understanding when it comes to social media. Over 50% of people are looking at homes and finding homes now online. Think Zillow, Realtor.com, all of this, right? Nobody really is walking into a broker's office anymore and saying

show me your your book of listings, right? It's not 1985 anymore, right? And a lot of real estate, older real estate agents have not adapted and so they're just completely out of touch. Now if we switch, are there some real estate agents that are younger, inexperienced agents? Absolutely. And I wouldn't go as far to call them

snakes. The problem is that they're just inexperienced. They may not have a very good understanding of, you know, all of the important things like contracts, for instance. They may have an inability to negotiate on your behalf and it's likely that they're not going to either get you the best deal if you're selling your

house or really get you the best deal if you're looking to buy a house, right? So what's at stake here really? If you're a homeowner, what's at stake is basically you're not going to potentially sell your home for top dollar. Being able to sell your home for top dollar doesn't mean that you're going to be able to

sell it more for more than what the fair market value is, right? That's just simply unrealistic. However, selling for top dollar means that your real estate agent came in, they priced the home perfectly, and they marketed the home so that you actually got the home under contract for that price. That's a huge

thing, right? What else for sellers? A big problem for sellers is that sometimes their real estate agents, if they don't know any better, will not give the seller good advice when they're getting different types of offers. And so if your real estate agent isn't really actually reviewing the offers, reviewing

the pre-approvals, reaching out to the agents, trying to get some background information, there's a chance that you'll go with an offer from a buyer and you'll have the home off the market, and it turns out it was a cruddy offer, and maybe the buyer wasn't serious, maybe the buyer's finances were stretched

beyond their limits, and all of a sudden you're off the market for two weeks on this dog of an offer, and then it falls apart, and now you got to jump back on the market, right? And then the other thing that's at stake for sellers that can be really, really important is timeline. We recently just sold a home

here on the west side to a couple who decided that they were moving to Malta, right, halfway around the world, and the wife was pregnant, right? They had a deadline where she could still travel and fly, and we were able to get their home sold, and everything wrapped up. They were able to basically,

on Friday, hand over the keys. They already had gotten the closing done, jump on that plane the next day, and be gone. And so we helped them nail their timeline. Super important. So what's at stake for buyers if you hang out with these real estates and end up with one of them? Your earnest money,

all right, a couple thousand dollars potentially at stake. You're potentially, if you get under contract on a home that maybe wasn't even the right fit for you in the start, you're going to spend 500 bucks on a home inspection, and then things go sideways. You're out that money. Of course, overpaying is a big thing. I

recently talked to a buyer who purchased a home, not with us, a year ago, and basically he was trying to now sell the home, but he couldn't sell the home. He was essentially underwater. He owed as much as he was ever going to sell that home for. So after all the closing costs and everything, he would have been in the

hole. So he's stuck because he went with a real estate agent who let him overpay substantially for a home now that he's stuck in. And of course, one more thing for buyers that can be really problematic is that if you don't have an agent who's really negotiating and working hard on your behalf, there might

be repairs that the seller may have done for you, but your real estate agent didn't either know to ask, didn't have the ability to negotiate and actually get those repairs done or price changes. And so it all really comes back down to your time and your money being at risk. And I'm a pretty optimistic person.

Honestly, there are just under 3,000 real estate agents in El Paso, and I would say for no doubt about it, the majority of them are well-meaning individuals. Now, are there some serious snakes out there? Absolutely, for sure, but hopefully those people are getting weeded out. And it also reminds me that

you should definitely check the reviews of the real estate agents that you're working with. And if you can't find any reviews of your real estate agent on like Google or something, that might be a sign that there's a problem, right? So check out your real estate agents. Check out their social media, right?

Check out their reviews and just be careful. Use your common sense. And really what we've learned is that what most clients want, whether you're trying to buy a home, whether you're trying to sell a home, most clients want good communication, right? They want somebody that they can trust, right? They want

somebody who is working as competently on their behalf as humanly possible, but communication is so important. And I hope that us sitting here constantly giving you as much value and education that we do on this channel and our social media, I hope that that does say something about

our trustworthiness and our ability to communicate with clients. And so like I said, I was raised, you know, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all, which is of course why we didn't mention some of these agents' names. But at the same time, it's an important topic to talk about

because like I said, really what's at stake is your time, your money, and for most of you, your biggest asset, one of your biggest financial purchases is your home. And so you want to make sure that you have somebody who's trustworthy and who can maximize your finances, I

suppose, whether you're buying or selling. So thank you so much for taking the time to listen, and we'll see you in the next episode.