“Buyers are liars. … Real estate agents are business people … They have to pay their bills every day and make the best use of their time, and we’re just trying to give them an idea of who they should concentrate on, who’s a serious customer.”
– Drew Warmington, CEO and managing partner of iLeads.com. Warmington’s company recently unveiled RealTAG, a “prospect qualification tool” that provides real-estate agents with a complete property and “financial capabilities” report on prospective buyers.
According to a column that appeared in the Tribune a few days ago, agents will use RealTAG to gauge how serious buyers are. With a few keystrokes, they’ll be able to call up information on an “individual’s home-ownership status, when he bought and how much he paid, how much home-equity and mortgage debt he carries, and whether he has any foreclosure actions pending,” according to the Trib.
Here’s a post from one of my long-neglected blogs pointing to a study that shows agents have a 15% satisfaction rate with this sort of service.
That’s about as low a customer satisfaction rate as any industry you can imagine.
When agents stop thinking of people as “leads” buyers will no longer appear to be liars.
I will be wasting my money somewhere else… like the local bar (with one my liars…er, buyers). I was dissapointed Tribune ran this “story”.
bizarro story. buying a house was a pretty time-consuming experience for both me & my wife and our realtor, why on earth would someone go through the motions if they didn’t at least desire to buy?
It would take a very desperate (and untalented) agent to use a service like this. Joe’s blog post is correct; there’s always some sucker willing to throw away money on some scheme they think will get them a bunch of money.
It’s like those infomercials that sell supposedly revolutionary investment strategies: all they need is for a handful of dumb people to send in some money and the schyster selling the product gets rich.
Just to play devil’s advocate here – what responsibility do potential buyer have to prove themselves to the realtor?
I notice that redfin.com requires a pre-approval before taking potential buyers on home tours.
Dear Webmaster,
I am the webmaster of site http://www.iLeads.com. Recently I was checking my back link profile and found that my site is linking to your website at –
https://yochicago.com/quote-of-the-day-buyers-are-liars/8790/
I would request you to remove the my website backlink from your website as it is effecting my back link profile in negative manner.
I hope you understand my concern and take an immediate action on it.
Thanks,
Webmaster
iLeads.com
Mr Kumar
We’ve done nothing wrong – and you haven’t suggested we have – and see no reason to make a change.