One of the main reasons people give their properties over to agencies to sell is because of their understanding that agencies have lists of buyers in their books. It’s true, they do. All sensible real estate sales people keep a record of all the people who have made enquiries about properties through them. But where do they get the names and telephone numbers of these people? The majority of them come in response to ads on the Internet, advertisements in newspapers and ‘For Sale’ signs in front of properties.

When I was in real estate, I often compared my list of buyers with those of other sales people I was working with and most of us had many of the same people on our lists. If we compared lists belonging to sales people from other agencies with ours, we would have found the same names there too. What is more, if we all phoned everybody on our lists, we would find that at least half of them were no longer in the buying market because they had either bought a property already or had given up trying for one reason or another.

Nobody seriously looking to buy a house will list his or her name exclusively with one agency. Sure, many would prefer to deal with just one sales person whom they liked and trusted, but it is not practical to do so when seeking to buy a property. When you are selling a property, it is a different matter. One may, and often does, stick with one salesperson they trust. But if one is seriously looking to buy, one will keep looking in the papers and responding to properties whose adverts interests them. Not to sales people who interest them.