"114 Pounds of Absolute Perserverance" - Redfin Real Estate News

“114 Pounds of Absolute Perserverance”

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Updated on October 5th, 2020

What do you make of this: The New York Times reports today that a San Diego couple, the Ummels, is suing their real estate agent for allegedly failing to protect them from overpaying for a $1.2 million Carlsbad home in August 2005.

The lead plaintiff is a 60-year-old university fundraiser who describes herself as “114 pounds of absolute perseverance.” She spent the past year picketing the agent’s office. With shoot-from-the-hip media-savvy, her former agent says “the lady’s a nut job.”

And of course, the suit is just the kind that drives conservatives nuts, too. Why can’t people take responsibility for their decisions?

But wait. The only problem with blaming the buyers for overpaying is that the rationale for traditional buyer agents’ fees has been to protect buyers from overpaying. As the Times observes, the Ummels’ lawsuit is new in part because the buyer agent is fairly new, too — in the last downturn, agents represented only sellers and so buyers had only themselves to blame.

This time around, no one expects a buyer agent to have a crystal ball. The suit isn’t charging that Ms. Ummel’s agent should have foreseen a future downturn, only that he failed to guide his clients on current market conditions. Two nearly identical houses in the same, nearly new development sold at almost the exact same time for $105,000 and $175,000 less.

And even then, no one expects a real estate agent to be an appraiser either: the plaintiffs’ beef is that the agent withheld an independent appraisal they had requested, which would have notified them before their own closing of at least one of the nearby sales. Since the Ummels had already scotched two deals, it seems reasonable to think that the appraisal would have scotched a third.

Now we could argue endlessly that price comparisons are odoriferous and no two homes are the same, even in Southern California, but that misses the point. For the purposes of this discussion let’s just take a flying leap and assume that the Ummels overpaid, so we can focus on the interesting, difficult question of whether an agent can ever be liable for his clients’ overpaying.

Once a buyer’s agent begins making representations about price, it seems possible for him to make negligent representations about price. This doesn’t mean an agent can’t make representations about price, and can’t be wrong when he does. He just can’t be negligently wrong, by withholding material information that a reasonable person would want to see. If the Ummels’ agent did that, he should pay for it.

Of course, since we have no idea from our seat in the peanut gallery what really happened between Ms. Ummel and her agent, the whole debate is academic. The only undeniable fact is that the lawsuit that Ms. Ummel is pursuing, at greater cost than she is likely to recoup, must be like all other forms of revenge, a hopeless attempt to regain what she lost: her sense of trust and self-reliance.

In this respect, the case just illustrates the perils to both parties when a client outsources her brain to a real estate agent, or a stock-broker, or anyone else trying to sell something. It is why we dislike the paternalistic mindset occasionally used to justify brokerage fees, in which talk of “hand holding” is not seen as condescending, fears about “the single biggest purchase in your life” are stoked, and agent attempts to be persuasive during tense, personal moments are seen as heroic.

That’s messed up. It seems like most clients would prefer a partnership, carefully constructed to avoid conflicts of interest, in which agents provide information, professional judgment and support so as to empower the client to make a few big decisions: Is this the house you want? Does it have anything wrong with it that you didn’t notice? Could you get it (or one like it) for less money?

It is still possible — though we think less likely — that the Ummels could have taken this approach and still paid as much as they did for their house, but somehow I doubt Ms. Ummel would have wasted a year of her life afterwards feeling, rightly or wrongly, like a sucker.

(And no, we don’t think the behavior the Ummels attributed to their agent is at all typical, and we aren’t trying to make any claims against the industry beyond arguing for a different approach to customer service.)

Glenn Kelman

Glenn Kelman

Glenn is the CEO of Redfin. Prior to joining Redfin, he was a co-founder of Plumtree Software, a Sequoia-backed, publicly traded company that created the enterprise portal software market. In his seven years at Plumtree, Glenn at different times led engineering, marketing, product management, and business development; he also was responsible for financing and general operations in Plumtree's early days. Prior to starting Plumtree, Glenn worked as one of the first employees at Stanford Technology Group, a Sequoia-backed start-up acquired by IBM. Glenn was raised in Seattle and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a regular contributor to the Redfin blog and Twitter.

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