If you make better use of your time, then it would follow that dividing your income by the hours you put into making it would result in a higher average hourly income for listing agents than for those working exclusively with buyers. And, I'm sure that this would be the mathematical result for many real estate professionals. However, does this mean that it must be the result?
Let's not talk about the overall profitability of a real estate practice in this article, as I'll get into that in a broader context later in the series on List to Last. However, if we just look at the hourly income calculation, do buyer agents make less money per hour? Probably most do. However, this doesn't mean that they can't do better, even better than listing agents.
One of the arguments made is that the buyer agent ends up driving around for hours with customers, showing them home after home, sometimes a great many over weeks in time. Before the Internet changed so many things about the way that we do business, this was the case much of the time. How else would the buyer get to see the home's features when they were only able to look at some photos in a listing book or on a brochure? It's very different now.
Buyers have a great many full color high resolution photos in the MLS and on other websites that tell them a great deal about the home. There are also virtual tours, with audio and either slideshow or full motion video tours of the home. Good ones easily take the place of a personal visit early in the search process and for homes that haven't yet reached that stage of interest requiring more thorough investigation. In fact, these better online photos and virtual tours frequently rule out properties from the comfort of the customer's living room.
Then we have Google Maps and Google Earth, allowing the buyer to look down on the neighborhood and the yard of the home from just yards above. With "street view" the buyer can look down the street in both directions. Documents like surveys and covenants can be attached to listings for the buyer to download from the Web. Never before in the history of real estate brokerage has a buyer been able to have this much information available in their home and on-demand.
Considering all of this, a buyer agent who indiscriminately drives buyers around to homes in which they only have a mild interest is a buyer agent who doesn't deserve a higher hourly income. They haven't used the tools available to them to help their buyer to make better use of their time as well. Of course, there are still pseudo-buyers who just enjoy walking around in homes, but it's your job to weed them out to make better use of your time. If you're providing significant information, photos and video and they still want to look at 50 homes, then maybe they need a different buyer agent.
I am a buyer broker only, and my average number of properties shown before a contract usually hovers around 8. Because I work with my buyers extensively via email and on the Web, providing them with documents, photos, video and more on properties of interest, I keep the number of actual property visits to a very manageable level. When List to Last became a mantra for the industry, none of these tools were available. Use them now, and the hourly income argument can go away for you.
