A tale so real it could be true!!
Portia Public listed her property with Ronnie Representative. It was a poor time to sell, she didn’t receive any reasonable offers and the listing expired. It wasn’t long before Portia was bombarded with calls from REALTORS® asking if she wanted to list with them. At first, Portia simply hung up as soon as they started their sales pitch. After receiving several calls over a few days, Portia had enough. Hadn’t she indicated in her original listing agreement that she didn’t want to be contacted? Didn’t Ronnie Representative say very emphatically that if she marked “NO” in the contact box she wouldn’t hear from any other member? Didn’t putting her phone number on the CRTC’s Do Not Call list mean anything?
On the very next call, Portia vented her frustration on Samuel Salesperson, the REALTOR® at the end of the line, but not before she got his name and his company’s name – Portia intended to file a formal complaint with the real estate association and with the CRTC. And complain she did.
The Professional Standards Committee investigated the complaint and found that Samuel was in breach of RAHB’s Rules and Regulations:
Section 6, Solicitation, Sub-sections 6.02 and 6.05:
6.02 – Members shall make a reasonable enquiry to determine that a prospective Seller or Buyer is not subject to an existing Services Agreement to ensure that they are not offering the same type of real estate services.
6.05 – Notwithstanding the foregoing provisions, under no circumstances shall the following sources be used by a Member to identify prospective Clients:
(i) the Association’s MLS® System;
(ii) Members’ real estate signs; and
(iii) other Member generated sources of information such as, but not limited to, printed and television advertising, office window displays, and the Internet.
No matter how Samuel got the information that Portia’s property was no longer listed, he was in the wrong. If he used the MLS® database to look for expired listings, he was contravening the MLS® Rules and Regulations. If he noticed Portia’s “For Sale” sign was gone from her property and he hadn’t recalled seeing a “Sold” sign, he was still contravening the MLS® Rules and Regulations because he didn’t check the REALTOR® Report information and the “CONSENT after EX” section to find out if Portia wanted to be contacted after the listing expired. If he was suddenly struck by the idea to call one person in the neighbourhood and picked Portia, he was still wrong – he should have checked the Do Not Call list his Broker has in the office: Portia’s name was on that list.
What is the lesson here? DO NOT use the MLS® database to search for prospects; DO check for previous listings and whether the seller wanted to be contacted; DO check the national Do Not Call list before you call a prospective client.
Note: This story is actually based on a real Professional Standards case – a RAHB member was in a similar situation and was found to have been in contravention of the articles cited here. We may have embellished the details a bit, but the outcome was the same.