TorontoRealtyBlog

Did you ever watch The Americans?

I did.  All of it.

It was one of those series that I watched the first few seasons of, then stopped, but then came back to years later.  I finished the last season at some point in 2023 and, while I had many, many questions about the show, the plots, the accuracy, the ending – and just about everything else that a show-watcher will dwell on upon the conclusion of the series, there’s one scene that I acted out in my mind, over and over.

(spoiler alert)

The family of four is splintered in the end with Philip and Elizabeth going back to Russia, the eldest child, Paige, abandoning her parents at the train station to stay behind in the USA and carve her own path, and the youngest child, Henry, being left alone at boarding school.

There’s a scene when the hapless, sad-sap FBI Agent, neighbour, and best friend, Stan Beamon, who acted like a father figure to Henry, sits Henry down at his school’s hockey rink and, presumably, explains what had happened.

We know what happened.

But what did Stan say to Henry?

That was left intentionally vague, as we only saw the conversation and reactions, but no dialogue was provided.

In Hollywood, that’s often the best way to portray a tough situation like that, especially near the end of a show or movie.  Let the viewer fill in the blanks, and don’t risk the writing and the scene failing to live up to expectations.

But what did Stan tell Henry?

I’ve played this over in my mind a dozen times.

Did he start slowly?

“Henry, there’s something I have to tell you.”

Did he just spit it out?

“Henry, your parents are Russian spies.”

How should this conversation have gone, if not for Hollywood’s desire for brevity that often comes at the risk of realism?

“Henry, I have to tell you something, and it’s not going to be good.  It’s bad, Henry.  So prepare yourself.  But also, you’re not going to believe it.  You can’t believe it.  Your mind won’t allow you to.  And your emotions will also cloud the situation, so just prepare for the next words I say, okay?”

That would never make it into a Hollywood script, but it’s a good start.

“Henry, your parents are not who you thought they were.  They’re not who anybody thought they were.  They love you.  They always have and always will, but who they are is going to come as a surprise and it’s going to be tough to accept.”

Okay, now we’re on to something.

So now, don’t just spit it out.  Start slowly…

“Your parents weren’t born in the USA.  They were born in Russia.  They weren’t born as Philip and Elizabeth but rather they were born as Mikhail and Nadezhda.

Pause.  Let Henry absorb.

“You see, Henry, after the conclusion of the First World War, the USA, and Russia went from being allies who defeated Germany and tried to restore Europe, to being enemies who subscribed to different systems of government.  They started a war that wasn’t really fought like the way the previous wars were fought; it was a “cold war” of sorts, and basically, our two countries have been spying on each other for the last thirty years.  Your parents were born in Russia, trained from birth as spies, and came over here to establish their lives in the USA.  They had you and Paige and raised you as Americans, but they were anything but…”

Okay, do you get the picture?

I’m no social worker, folks.  I’m sure many of you deliver bad news for a living, but surely we’ve all pictured ourselves in the role of the television detective in Law & Order who has to knock on the door of a Manhattan townhouse and tell the owner the terrible, terrible news about their spouse or child.

No?  Just me?

What about the doctor from Grey’s Anatomy who has to deliver the terrible news after surgery?

You haven’t thought about what you’d say?  Really?

Well, maybe I’m losing you on the parallel here, since I started with Russian spies and ended with tragic deaths from routine surgeries, but the point I wanted to make today is how to communicate news that isn’t positive.

Negative news, bad news, or awful news, call it what you will.

Maybe not life-threatening but life-altering?  Emotional, nonetheless?

How do you deliver negative news to a person or people who are stressed, anxious, and excited but about to have their dreams crushed?

If you’re a Listing Agent for a property in Toronto and there are twenty-something offers, how do you choose to work with those other buyer agents and their buyers?

I’m losing some of you here, I know.  There’s no sympathy for participants in the Toronto real estate market anymore, especially those dummies who “bid” against a dozen other people, right?

Except, that’s all we’ve ever really known.  It’s how the market has worked for the majority of the last twenty years, and whether you’ve been or ever will be in this situation, or not, there’s still a right way and a wrong way for the participants to act.

In my opinion, that is.

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague offered on a listing that had twenty-three offers.  It took quite some time for the listing agent to go through all the offers – explain the terms and conditions of each offer to the seller, and carve a path forward.

The listing agent, who we’ll call Luka, sent the following email to all twenty-three buyer agents who had offered:

“Thank you all so much for all of your hard work and please thank your clients for taking the plunge and let them know the sellers thank them too.

Please note the agents/buyers with the top tier offers have been given a chance to improve. I have already spoken with the agents (there are three of them). All three of the top tier offers had a $1.4 in the number out of the gate.

I am happy to do a post-mortem with any and all of you and let you know where you were in the mix tonight, I just ask that we do it tomorrow. Tonight is still a bit hairy.

Again, thanks to all for your hard work and professionalism. I typically contact agents by phone on offer night out of respect, however tonight has been especially busy and is still going. I just hate to leave anyone hanging. I trust you understand.”

This is an experienced, well-respected, reputable agent on a great team, with a great brokerage.

And this is how a situation like this should be handled.

All the points are there.

Communication.

Respect.

Gratitude.

Thankfulness.

Cooperation.

And lastly, the offer to “dissect” the evening’s events the next day, which many buyer agents want to do, but which most listing agents refuse to do.

Every listing agent handles an “offer night” differently, and it’s one of the reasons why we’ll never have a defined, streamlined, predictable, identical process for reviewing multiple offers in this city, province, our country.  Until the federal Liberals take over the sale of all real estate; like the LCBO of houses and condos, but at the federal level.  That’ll be the day, and it’s not far off…

But why is every offer process different?

Because of the largest variable present: people.

People are different.  Every single one of them.  And I’m not just talking about the listing agent, I’m talking about how buyer agents represent their clients and choose to interact with the listing agent too.

When it comes to those listing agents, some are inexperienced while others are just rude and careless.  Some are both.

Some listing agents act as demi-gods and try to make the process painful for the buyer agents involved.

Some listing agents choose to take out their frustrations, anger, disappointment, and shortcomings on the other participants, namely the buyer agents who are presenting offers.

Some listing agents are stupid.

Some are greedy.

But the public often doesn’t see how the interactions work, so I’m hoping that today’s blog post sheds some light on it.

In January, a colleague of mine offered on a property for which there were eight offers.

Offers were at 7:00pm.

My colleague was asked to improve her offer twice, and she did, both times.

She said, “Communication with the listing agent was awful.  There was a language barrier but also a lack of basic respect and common sense.  I would say ‘she must be new’ but I know she’s been around for a long time.”

At 11:30pm, this email was sent to all the agents who had presented offers:

Buyer Agent:
The seller have received eight offer this evening but choose to reject all of them.
The seller have finished bargaining for tonight.
If interested please call tomorrow for better offer price.

That’s verbatim so excuse the grammar but you can read between the lines here.

The seller has rejected all eight offers even after asking multiple agents to improve their prices, more than once, and has demonstrated that this process is considered “bargaining” to them.

Then, the best part, they’ve left the door open to “better” offers tomorrow.

Based on the language above, I don’t know if the listing agent is saying, “Call us and we’ll tell you what a better offer price is,” or whether the listing agent is directing people to “Call us tomorrow to present a better offer price.”

Either way, it’s no wonder this property is still unsold and now on its fourth listing.

I hope this seller and agent get food poisoning…

Now, would you like another story?

Of course you would.

It’s about the television show Better Call Saul…

No, I’m kidding.  I’m writing this from an airplane right now and I think I’m a bit loopy.

This story is about yet another offer process that I did not enjoy.

This is one that I have filed away from years ago and one which I have probably told multiple times, but then again, this experience has happened multiple times so I think several stories have blended together here, as I can remember three listing agents that this happened with…

I’m submitting an offer on a listing and there’s a very well-known listing agent.

For the life of me, I can’t get him on the phone.

I try six times and he never answers his cell phone, nor can I get through the office line.

There are forty offers on this house.  FORTY!

The only communication with this agent is through BrokerBay as he sends mass emails to the 100+ agents that have shown the property, and I honestly don’t know if, when he later sent emails to the 40 agents with offers, that he wasn’t still communicating with the 100+ agents and just wasting the time of even more people…

The only communication I receive is a 9:00am email on the morning of “offer night” with instructions.  You know the ones?

The seller’s desired closing date, the inclusions/exclusions, rental items or contracts, a copy of the survey attached, a note about the stove in “as is” condition, and oh yeah, the classic bullshit line about how “We will do our very best to choose one offer if it’s the highest and best, but in the even that two or more offers are close in price and term, we may extend the opportunity for buyers to improve their offers.”

Buyers just love that, right?

After that 9:00am email, I get nothing.

When I registered my offer – by uploading the requisite Form 801 through BrokerBay, I don’t even get a call.

At 7:30pm, I receive an email through BrokerBay:

“If you are receiving this email, it means we have received your offer registration.”

Still no phone call from the listing agent.

At this point, I simply stop trying.

At 8:30pm, I receive another email through BrokerBay:

“If you are receiving this email, it means we have received your offer.”

Ah, okay.  So it took an hour to go from counting “registrations” to counting “offers.”

I continue to wait.  It’s late so I stayed at the office, and I believe that in one particular case, there was a Blue Jays game on television that I watched on my couch while waiting to hear from the listing agent.

At 10:00pm, I receive another email through BrokerBay:

“If you are receiving this email, you are invited to improve your offer.

Please have your revised offer submitted by 10:30pm sharp.”

What the actual eff?

That’s a conversation you have on the phone, not over email.  No way.

And it’s not a group email either.  It’s one thing to email an agent instead of calling, but it’s another to send a group email to a bunch of agents.

Oh, and by the way:

How many agents are in that email thread?

Two?

Twenty?

All forty?

I called the listing agent and he didn’t answer, of course.

But just imagine this: you’re asked to improve your offer and you have no idea how many other people are improving.  It could be all forty.

And if it is all forty, how disrespectful is that listing agent being?  To waste everybody’s time like that?

Let’s say this house is listed for $899,900 and there are bids of over $1,300,000.  To ask all forty agents to resubmit is wasting the time of those who submitted “dummy offers” of the list price, or in the $900’s etc.

I might be contradicting myself here since I often say that it’s the fault of those buyers and buyer agents who submit dummy offers, for wasting their own time, and believe me – it still is.  But as a listing agent, I can still help them to help themselves.  I can avoid allowing them to further waste their time, and I always do, which I’ll explain in a moment.

But this agent did three things wrong:

1) Communicated the opportunity to improve the existing offer over email, not phone.

2) Communicating this opportunity in a group email.

3) Not providing any context on the number of competing offers.

4) Potentially wasting the time of a lot of people who have no chance of winning, if the listing agent had sent back all forty offers.

In a similar case to the above, with a very well-known, well-advertised broker in Toronto, I had presented an offer amid sixty competing bids, only to be told by him, “We’re sending all sixty offers back to improve.”

We withdrew right then and there.

Just as we did in the case above with the forty offers where agents were told to submit their best offer within THIRTY MINUTES!

The funny part is, at 11:45pm, I received an email that said,

“If you are receiving this email, your offer was not accepted.”

That was that.

Call me an idealist or call me naïve, but I still believe in service.  I still believe in cooperation.  I still believe in professionalism, respect, transparency, and treating people the way that I want to be treated.

I reviewed offers on a listing last month where we had received an even twenty bids.

I had eighteen of those bids by 7:00pm and I started making calls right away.

But unlike most agents, I don’t start at the top.

I started with the lowest offer and worked my way up.

“Hi John, it’s David Fleming with Bosley Real Estate, how are you?  Listen, I have twenty offers registered and eighteen in hand, and I’m just starting to make my calls – but I’m calling from the bottom up, so to speak, right?  So what I’m saying is that, I know your clients are probably first-time buyers like so many others out there, and this is a tough market, but this price just isn’t going to work tonight, so I wanted to let you get that information to them as soon as you can, so you can quash their anxiety and reduce their stress levels, okay?  But I really appreciate the offer and the efforts here.”

From there, it’s often one of very few responses:

1) “Thanks David, yeah, I knew that, but they wanted to try, you know?”

2) “Thanks David, I mean, they’re new, and they wanted to see what the process was like, but I think next time they’ll just sit out and focus on the next one.”

3) “Thanks David, so, like, are you cutting us, or what?  I mean, is it ‘over’ or do we have a chance to improve?

It’s that third option where I have to use my judgment.

$899,900 list price with two offers over $1,300,000, and I’m talking to an agent who offered $950,000, what do I say to him?

Again, I want to avoid that agent and his client spending time, effort, and energy, and expending emotion, experiencing stress and anxiety, to move from $950,000 to $970,000.

However, and this is a big however, when I sold my Mississauga listing, which was priced at $899,900, one of the agents who had bid $950,000 came up to $1,100,000 and beat everybody else in the end.

So you never know!

And that’s why I start from the bottom.

That’s also why I call agents personally instead of emailing them through a goddam appointment booking system!

To call twenty agents and have twenty conversations is going to take, at most, thirty minutes.

Some calls are 15-20 seconds.  I say what I had detailed above, they say, “Thanks, have a great night,” and that’s that.

Some calls are longer.  Sometimes I talk shop with agents and ask them about how they’re finding the market or if they’ve bid on anything else.  It’s just a sign of respect and cooperation.  It’s treating them like a person and not a number in a ledger.

And some calls do take five or six minutes for me to explain to an agent with a competitive bid, what the process is going to look like from here.

When the final bid is accepted, the Confirmation of Acceptance is signed, and a completed copy is sent to all parties, there’s one thing that I don’t do, that many agents have as a right of passage: I don’t turn off my phone.

My job isn’t done just because the property is sold.

I don’t care if it’s 8:30pm or 11:45pm, if one of the other agents wants to call and ask a question, then I owe it to him or her to make myself available.

The part from “Luka’s” email above that really resonated with me was saying,

I am happy to do a post-mortem with any and all of you and let you know where you were in the mix tonight, I just ask that we do it tomorrow.

That’s classy.

That’s saying, “You might have lost, and this deal might be over with, but I’m not done working with you.  If I can help you to see how the process played out, where your client’s bid fell within the twenty-three offers, or answer any questions you have, then I’ll make time.”

You just don’t get that these days.

I know many of you think that it should be automatic.

I also know that many of you want to poke holes in the offer process or complain that every house should be sold via “open auction” (presumably by the Liberals when Prime Minister Freedland takes over in 2025…), or suggest that a seller should be “forced” to sell to the highest bidder, etc, etc, etc.

But I’m working in reality here.

I’m talking about today’s market and how today’s processes play out.

If you’re a buyer, I really hope this helps you gain an understanding of what can go on behind the scenes.

If you’re a buyer agent, I’d like you to think about how you want to treat people when you’re on the other side.

And if you’re a listing agent, I’d like you to look deep within yourself, and then tell me what you see…

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