Was this a Realtor you regularly refer too?

Long story short, she dropped the ball through the entire transaction. I had to play clean-up.

She blamed everyone and everything. Excuse after excuse. To me excuses are failures and anything less than perfect is unacceptable.

This is very interesting series, unfortunately.

What I am doing here is keeping that distance between the mechanics of all this as an insider because I and all who are reading this most probably understand how all this works.

The goal is to offer some insight into the experience through the eyes of Joe Buyer who knows nothing about syndication, portals, expired listings or agents whose listings are sent to places they aren't even aware of.

Seems like we're all on the same page.

Thanks for posting and contributing.

Makes a bit of a case for a unified system so the source can be updated, and at least a "no longer available" message could appear. In the end it creates consumer frustration, and the agency involved probably isn't even aware its happened (listing still being promoted), or that this off-shoot discussion is taking place on another corner of the web.

Very interesting case study in real-time. Keep up the good work.

Your post has provided the muse for part 4 of this saga. I will post tonight.

I imagine this is the same system in many companies. I just hope Buyers and Sellers aren't getting trapped in a dead-end website with no one on the other end receiving the emails, but you've got proof of it happening, at least in this circumstance.

Bad planning, bad system.

Wearing my 1000Watt Consulting hat, I knew this to be true. But for this endeavor, I am wearing a consumer hat only and proceeding as I think they would and probably not have a understanding what a listing book is, that this would be an old listing or that Living Choices is anything other than the agents private brand or her brokers brand.

In thinking about the many avenues for distribution, I second your motion. The agent must be aware of all of them. Prior to entering this industry I owned a PR and management firm in NYC handling the career of performing and recording artists that had major label albums distributed all over the world. I started this firm in the mid 80's before PC's and even back then we had systems in place then to keep track of what radio stations were playing our artists singles, what outlets were selling their music (albums as they were once called) and where all the royalties where coming from. I poured through more reports per quarter than a real estate agent will ever do in a lifetime.

You are dead on! Despite the assortment of destinations a listing travels too, there are ways to track it and ways to make sure that contact forms are all routed to one destination.