Real Estate Agents: dealing with non-buying investors

[Bao Nguyen]

Question for all real estate agents: How do you deal with people who looks at lots of properties, but never seems to buy any?

As an investor, I look at a lot of homes and properties and I go for months, if not a year without buying anything (on the MLS anyways - I do buy off the MLS all the time), and all the while, my realtor is driving around showing me all these properties. I feel bad. I truly believe that no one should work for free.

To be honest, I would be ok with my realtor saying "hey Bao, I'm not going to show you any more properties because frankly I don't want to invest in the gas and time anymore".  I'd be perfectly fine with that honesty, it would make it easier for me to just call up the listing agent of the property, and I'd just hop from listing agent to listing agent, instead of sticking to 1 agent that might sell me 1 property every 12 months, after 50+ showings during those 12 months.

So for now, due to the need to be loyal, I keep calling up the same realtor and feeling bad that this person is driving around showing me properties that I most likely not close on, and this hesitation to look at as many properties as possible might hurt my chances of finding a good property.

So how do you realtors out there back away from people like me?  Perhaps my realtor is already giving me these signals, but I'm too dense to pick up on it.  :-)

[NA Jones]

I'm not much help either, but this is exactly why I got my license - so I could have 24/7 access to MLS - including all the agent remarks - go see thousands of houses and submit as many offers as I wanted without wasting anyone's time but my own. I felt bad enough having an agent show me houses that we didn't like when we were buying our first personal residence ;)

Sounds like what you need is not so much a "buyers agent" but perhaps a partner that is an agent.  If you buy one house per year at around 130k, you'll recoup the cost of a license.  Maybe if there's a Mrs. Bao she might be interested?