It has been over two months since I have started making offers on properties in my hometown of Knoxville, TN.  I have not made as many offers as I would like but I have made enough to gather some very important information.

One thing I have noticed, something that really irks me, is that a lot of REO agents never change there listings from “Active” to “Pending” when they have an accepted contract.

I could understand if they want to continue to show the property but when you call they say “We have an accepted offer on the table” and imply that you should not waste your time to go in the house.  Sure a lot of pending properties fall through the cracks and can be hijacked by the experienced and sneaky investor.  But if you are going to tell me not to waste my time then you might as well list the property as pending.

The reason I am really irked about this is because of one property in particular.  It was the property that forced me to get a letter along with my proof of funds stating that business A (my money guy) agreed to loan my business the funds to buy a property.  We called the listing agent and she told of this along with the fact that they had already received an offer that day and that we needed to get our offer in by the close of business….which we DID NOT!

I could not get the paperwork together fast enough and thought…ok, lets move onto the next.

So a week or two has passed and I see the property still listed as active and I call up my realtor.

“Let’s go look at property A and B and submit an offer on the property we saw before.”

So my agent called the Realtor and she said to send the offer over…so we did.

A few hours later we get a call from the listing agents office and are told that the property is already pending with an accepted contract.

There are certainly some extenuating circumstances that played into this scenario but if the property was marked pending, like it should have bee, then my Realtor and I never would have wasted 45 minutes drawing up all the paperwork!

Just writing about this gets me worked up…..

Ross Treakle

I am out the door to grab a few drinks with friends before going to a birthday party for my Realtor!

Enjoy your New Years!