My Faith In Toronto’s Real Estate Media Has Been Badly Shaken Recently

We’ve all heard those conspiracy stories… hidden government agendas, commies under everyone’s pillows, spies behind every lamppost… but I really haven’t bought into them over the years.  I believed that what I read in the newspapers or watched on television was reality and could be believed.  Naive maybe but I was a believer in the truth.

Now for the first time, I’m not so sure!

Recently three things have happened to shake my faith in ‘truth in reporting’ and I’m not convinced that it’s a conspiracy but MAYBE just a case of incompetent reporting.

First was the H1N1 scare and the reporting that the vaccine was harmless.  In my limited circle of people I know, there have been three near-fatalities and one death from taking the vaccine.  In one case, the mother called all the big news networks to tell them about how her 22-year old daughter almost died within seconds of getting the vaccine administered and none of them were interested in the story.

The second was the Toyota vehicle recall.  Day after day we heard about all the recalls and the dangers of those cars.  Nowhere did we hear that the type of problems that the recalls were all about happened extremely rarely and almost always to vehicles which had been driven a lot of miles!  Still a concern and something that needed to be addressed, but a needless worry to someone who drove their car normally and hadn’t experienced any symptoms whatsoever.

And then the icing on the cake – the media frenzy about the Competition Bureau’s action against the Canadian Real Estate Association and all of it’s Realtor members across Canada.  The media has been presenting information in a distorted, inaccurate and misleading fashion throughout this entire affair.

The fact is that there have always been alternate MLS commission structures available to consumers right down to practically zero for the lowest level of service.  And that’s OK – home sellers should have a choice.  In fact, owners have always been able to sell their homes for zero commissions by themselves and there are plenty of companies and websites which cater to this type of consumer.

The problem is… for the most part selling properties on their own OR hiring a cheap agent have either failed to get the home sold or resulted in inferior service… a natural result of not being exposed to the best market for buyers (the MLS system) or not having adequate, competent representation.

Be honest, if you were only getting paid pennies on the dollar for a job, would you give out YOUR best work?  Isn’t that why the communist system collapsed in Russia and Eastern Europe?  No one ever did anything or, if they did the work, it was shoddy at best!

The issue which the media have missed entirely with the Competition Bureau’s Tribunal application is it is NOT a commission issue, it’s a representation or agency issue!  They want consumers to be able to list their homes on the privately owned MLS system (imagine going to a GM dealer and saying “I want to park my car on YOUR lot and sell it privately”) and not have anyone to represent them at all.

In reality, the potential for multiple lawsuits coming from all of this is immense.

For example, a seller representing themselves agrees to pay a commission to a buyer agent.  The buyer agent does a great job for their client (the home purchaser) and gets them a fabulous price – certainly possible since most sellers aren’t versed in the art of negotiation – and the seller realizes later he sold his house for too little.

Or a seller, acting on their own, fails to disclose some major defect about his or her home – something which a reputable listing agent would always do – and the buyer finds out after closing.

These are only a few of the consequences of not having representation which come to mind immediately – I’m sure there are lots more.

So… we need a media which FAIRLY and HONESTLY represents the public interest.  Perhaps taking a bit more time to dig deeper into a story to get to the truth and avoid the sensational headlines which they so love to print or announce on the eleven o’clock news.  In fact, they might find that there’s NO sensational story there in the first place.

I came across this video recently and, since it applied to my current distrust with what the Toronto Star or the Globe And Mail have been printing lately, I thought I’d have some fun with it.  With a bit of “tongue-in-cheek”, take a peek.

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