Selling vs. Telling the Truth

Saturday morning I got a call from a real estate agent who is affiliated with a nationally franchised real estate firm with offices here in middle Tennessee.  My caller I.D. identified the firm.  Since I don't give out my personal phone number to other Realtors unless I'm working on a deal with them, I assumed that the Realtor was trying to reach me regarding either one of my listings or one of his listings that I'd recently shown.  


When I answered the phone with my friendly and professional greeting, "Good morning, this is Holly," the other Realtor said, "Good morning ma'am, this is Joe Blow with I-Shall-Remain-Nameless Realty, and we recently sold your neighbor's home at 907 Clayton Avenue, and I'm wondering if you, or anyone you know might be interested in selling your home?"  


I paused.  Obviously this other Realtor didn't realize he had reached a fellow agent at home while she was sipping her Saturday morning coffee.  I said, "Well, I'm a real estate agent myself, but thank you for calling."  The other agent, clearly caught off guard, chuckled and said, "Oh!  Well, best of luck with your business!"


After I hung up, I got to thinking:  Neither that agent's name, nor the name of his firm, matched the yard sign of the real estate company who had listed my neighbor's home.  So I decided to look up the "closed sales" on Realtracs (our local Realtor's website) to see if he had acted as a buyer's agent in the sale.  When I discovered that this agent's name did not appear anywhere as either the listing or buyer's agent on Realtracs, I was surprised and disgusted.  This agent, who had cold-called me on a Saturday morning, was canvassing my neighborhood to generate business by telling an outright lie!


Before I got my real estate license, I was a real estate investor, home-renovator, and landlord.  I resisted getting my license to sell real estate, because of the stigma that I associated with Realtors-I perceived the real estate sales profession to be riddled with con-artists; admittedly, my assessment was generalized, mostly off-base, and in spite of it, I ultimately became a real estate agent myself.  I've since learned that "professions" are made up of people-mostly good, and a few bad-but now here was a fellow real estate agent, claiming to have sold my neighbor's home, lying and setting a bad example and proving to me that my old perceptions were not that far off the mark from what others may perceive as well.  I did a Google search and discovered 2,630,000 hits by typing in "Real Estate Agents who Lie," and while I was at it, found this interesting article:  "The Top Three Lies Told by Real Estate Agents"


Every so often, I wonder if I'd sell more homes if I resorted to the strategies and trickery sometimes used by others in my profession, but honestly, I value telling the truth more than making a sale.