Withholding Address - What's the Problem All of a Sudden?

Angst today in the newspaper about a real estate agency withholding information and charging potential buyers 50 cents for a text to obtain the property address.  Various comments in the article about not acting in the vendor’s best interest and so on.

So, what’s the problem all of a sudden?

This is nothing new. We’ve written about this a couple of times, here and here.  You know the old saying - real estate, it's about location, location, location. By withholding the address the agent controls information and places themselves at the focal point. It is in their best interests, not the owner or the buyer. This is not a new activity. It has never been right and still isn’t.

Ok, then maybe charging for the information is a problem? 

That's a throwback to the bad old days of rental agents when they charged owners to rent properties and charged renters for access to their list of available properties. That was soon kicked in the head. Really it's just a variation on the information control theme - I have the information and you have to work to my rules to get it. Wouldn't it be great if the only place you could find out what properties are for sale is to visit the local real estate agents office? Well it would be for the agent, not so much for the buyer.  Thankfully Trade Me and www.realestate.co.nz killed that.

Market forces will pretty quickly take care of this. Trade Me has released search by map now so both major sites (www.realestate.co.nz has had that capability for a while) have great location based searching. If there is no location information the property will not show in the map search. If it doesn’t show it won’t get selected and won’t get sold.

The same with charging buyers - rental agencies are a good example, there are a few around that charge letting fees to renters, most people simply avoid them and they only really succeed when there is a shortage of property and the buyer has no choice.

Old school real estate is dead, but that won’t stop old school agents trying to wring some life from the corpse.