Realtors Take Exception to Group’s Report Card

To hear a consumers group tell it, real estate agents are overpaid, under-worked, sometimes sneaky and poorly trained. But the agents say they are honest and hard-working, they have to hustle to make a buck and their customers like them.

“There ought to be some relation between price and quality, and there isn’t that right now,” Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, said Thursday.

“This market clearly isn’t competitive,” he said as his organization issued a study criticizing the work of real estate agents in America.

The federation said real estate commissions, which typically are 6% to 7% of the sale price of the property, are twice what agents in other countries are paid for the same service. The group urged people to negotiate with their agent over the size of the commission.

And buyers often are unaware that the agent showing them houses and seeming to be on their side is really representing the interest of the seller because that’s who’s paying the bill, the federation said.

“What specific services do agents render?” the federation asked in a summary of its findings. “In the case of those working for sellers, often very little. If a house is properly priced . . . it usually will sell itself.”

The group’s study was based on a survey of about 500 agents in 27 major metropolitan areas across the country.

Dorcas Helfant, president-elect of the National Assn. of Realtors, was unimpressed.

“I’m very very disappointed in the study,” she said, calling it an “Alice in research land report.”

She said the bad economy has made the real estate market tight, meaning that agents have to work harder to make a sale, and sellers often bargain for lower commissions. On top of that, she said, the agent and the agency must invest time and money in bringing buyers and sellers together.

“We don’t earn one nickel on a property until a seller sells,” she said.

The Realtors have their own surveys, and those show a nation of satisfied customers, Helfant said. Large majorities of sellers said they would use an agent again if they had to sell property, and they considered the commission to be money well-spent, she said.

Helfant said agents need special training and licensing and often serve long apprenticeships in agencies run by brokers.

But the federation said the training often was inadequate.

“To qualify for a license, agents must receive special training,” the federation said. “But this training can take as little as a week to complete.”