Buying and selling a house are two of the most intense, stressful, crazy, humongous things you will ever do in your life. I’ve either done or helped loved ones through all the other crazy, stressful, intense things (marriage, death, divorce, children, major illness, unemployment…) and trust me when I tell you that both houses I’ve bought and sold caused me more pain, more stress and more anguish than anything else I’ve ever experienced.
So many things our realtor didn’t tell us; so many things he didn’t help us with. The list is actually never ending, I’m almost ashamed to admit. Yes we were inexperienced (in that we’d never actually bought a house before), but we were smart, dammit. We’d done a lot of research.
I’m going to make a long (and rather painful story) short(er). I’m just going to say that we had a poor experience and I would never recommend that particular realtor to anyone. Two years later we sold that house and bought a house in Ottawa (family circumstances changed). Poor customer service from our selling realtor and again quite poor service from our buying realtor in Ottawa. Three years after that we sold the house in Ottawa and had yet another poor experience…and swore off buying or selling houses anywhere ever again. How can we have had such terrible experiences? Perhaps the real estate business is actually set up backwards.
Recently I visited TheRedPin offices. I told my tales of woe to them and watched as their mouths fell open, feeling my pain. And then I listened. I listened intently as they told me (the still slightly stung, slightly not-able-to-believe-anyone-could-do-a-good-job-as-a-realtor me) about how they would have never allowed me to walk away from a sale or purchase feeling as though I’d had such terrible customer service.
Don’t believe me? Here’s some of what I learned:
At TheRedPin they aim for happy home buyers and sellers, and they work really hard to give great customer service, from first search to the final signature. To do this, they removed the one facet of realtors we all love to hate: commissions. They actually employ their agents and give them bonuses when they win our hearts by delivering outstanding customer service. They also believe in referrals. If I buy a house, there’s a good chance I’ll sell that house in a few years, or my friend will need a real estate agent or my parents will be looking for a condo…they want those jobs too and they make sure you want to refer them.
And they’re not just about being nice and sweet and understanding (although, honestly, they are!). They also have the knowledge and are able to supply buyers with the information they want and need when purchasing a house or condo in Toronto. School rankings and ratings, more than ten years of real estate investment stats, and more than 100,000 local businesses are a sample of what you could find linked up to each listing on their site. This way you can do full research in minutes, without doing a lot of leg work or hours of driving around in each neighborhood.
So yeah…perhaps I haven’t totally sworn off buying or selling a house forever. But you can bet that the next time I get a hankering to purchase property I will be logging onto theredpin.com…because it’s about time the whole real estate experience was reinvented, and I think they are the peeps that have done it.
