People & Places & Zzzzzzz…
I know what I’m about to say makes me sound as of I’m from the Paleolithic Era, but I love the Sunday newspaper. The full of fat, ink-stained, stuffed with pharmacy fliers, wrapped in the oh-so-environmentally-unfriendly green plastic bag, print edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I am dinosaur, hear me rustle… the pages.
In my line of work, I should be interested in the Real Estate section, but quite frankly, I hardly ever look at it. I’m not in the market for a house personally and professionally, we have very little exposure to settlement work on new homes by the local big builders because they provide incentives against using anyone but their in-house lender and closing company. These incentives are a topic for another day, but trust me, I’ve got opinions on those too. So I have very little non-work or work interest in most of the Sunday Real Estate news. But I do typically take a glance at the People & Places column to see if anyone I know has changed brokers or received any of the constant stream of monthly sales & listings awards that the local big brokers are dishing out.
But I did pick up on one interesting thing in the past couple of People & Places column that caught my eye. Last week, one of the larger brokers announced all their new agents. There were twenty-two of them. In itself, not that big a deal. These guys have dozens of offices and dozens of agents in each office. So it isn’t that noteworthy when one of them announces a slew of new agents. But what I noticed was that only one was noted to have moved laterally from another broker. It’s possible that others were making a move from another broker, but it wasn’t mentioned. Today, again there was a broker announcing a string of new agents (sixteen this time) and almost half were listed as making a lateral move.
Now, I would never advocate that anyone choose an agent based on the logo on the agent’s business card. Actually, I would suggest that the logo on the card and the sign over the door means almost nothing. Anyone looking for an agent should foremost, middlemost, lastmost and all mosts-in-between be concerned that the individual agent you choose is one that fits best for you regardless of whether they’re sporting red, green or blue trademarks. But if you are just calling a broker and asking to be connected to a random agent, I would certainly advise you to call the one with the higher ratio of experienced hires.
