I am fairly lucky investor to have a very good seasoned broker who does spend time with me. I recently have been looking in far away areas to invest in and had to look for another agent.

Every time I drive by a house there is a for sale sign with a real estate agents information on front. I have tried to call these agents numerous times to check out these properties. Real estate agents usually respond within about a week. I can understand they are very busy and have to find time. Lately I have been getting responses back after three weeks. That is plain ridiculous and at that point they should have not called back at all. When you are talking to an agent if you are polite they will usually tell you why it took them so long to call you back. The main reason is the overwhelming number of bank owned properties. It is getting to the point that real estate agents have minimal time to deal with their clients at all. The banks require so much leg work many agents don’t have time to sell. They only have time to list and watch the bank owned properties they control.

I sat down with my agent to find out why most of the agents do not respond back. she basically told me that she spends all of her time getting the bank owned properties ready to list like most the agents out there. The bank not only require initial setup time but reoccurring time and continuing updates on all their properties. Every agent out there has such a large inventory and are beginning to hire more help to stay to just stay on top.

A Realtor I know with the help of her assistant has over fifty listed bank owned properties listed. That number would be a lot if you worked in a large office, but no she is the only agent in her office. She told me that almost all of her time is just on preparing and maintaining these properties for the banks. When I was there she was on the phone with a temp agency trying to hire a couple of more people just to catch up.

All of the real estate offices around me just keep on getting more listings from the banks every week. If they could at least sell a few here there that wouldn’t be bad. If they are lucky they can sell a couple in a month at most.

I really don’t understand why these agents are working so hard for these banks with very little compensation. I guess it is the only way to survive in this game.

I give some credit to these agents they are working really hard to stay alive. You can now see who is a real real estate agent not just some one chasing the dollars.

There are still a lot of great realtors out there today willing to help you, but it is getting hard to find. It is not their fault they are so busy. People are only capable of so much.

In the past number of years the number of real estate agents increased exponentially. Anyone could practically make money selling real estate. I am still finding a lot of great real estate agents out there it is just taking more time and work to achieve.