Kids go online to assess their parents’ seller’s agent, revealing ‘startling’ posts; owners wonder whether to take a step backward or move forward

We are about to enter into a listing agreement to sell our home where we raised our children. We agreed to let our eldest daughter, who recently had a bad experience with her seller’s agent, “investigate” our agent online. The next morning, our out-of-state children were emailing a chock-full of startling examples of the seller’s agent’s improper social network postings. In person he is charming and well-mannered. He always wore a face mask at our meetings, kept his social distance and wore disposable shoe coverings in our home. Yet online he mocks the concept of face mask usage and the validity of COVID19 while using curse words and exclamation points. The youngest son, who lost his house this year to fire, shared how our seller’s agent made a profanity-laced rebuttal that the more than 9,000 fires in California this year were not due to climate change but solely due to the lack of forest management. Yesterday, it seemed implausible that the overqualified person to sell our house has personally, and maybe even professionally, we don’t know, created a firestorm of controversy. Raised never to discuss one’s politics, we thought we were inching toward normalcy by moving and relocating near our children. Will the buyers and their agents be emulating our children’s online investigations of a seller’s agent? If so, how would it reflect on our listing if this man hired to list and sell our house is online socially interacting with profanity and exclamation points? Any ideas on moving forward or taking a step or two back?

How a salesman deals with a customer, client or prospect ideally should be no different than how he treats vendors, support staff, women or children. Since we’re not in a perfect world, there’s a type of salesperson who is sickeningly sweet to paying customers, and behind the scenes, perpetually revamps rudeness into an art form. As a result, the consumer never knows to pose the question to himself or herself, “I wonder if my salesperson gets along with others?” Before the internet, it would have been nearly impossible to find out if one’s salesperson is respected or loathed by their colleagues. It’s an expensive proposition if the consumer is a home seller or homebuyer, and the salesperson is a seller’s agent or a buyer’s agent. Real estate licensees can enthusiastically promote the advantages of doing business with well-mannered professionals to their clients and dissuade them from engaging with the unprofessional. Again, not a reality that would cross the mind of a real estate consumer. Your kids’ due diligence sparked their political, medical, social and environmental awareness in your particular situation. The result should only ignite your financial wariness. You would be right to envision embers in your nest egg of equity.

Last week, producers of a blockbuster movie in production fired one of its movie stars for inappropriate activity outside his industry. A practice not uncommon in business and professional sports. Not to be left out, and responding to unacceptable behavior by licensees, memorialized on video, the World Wide Web, and audio devices, the National Association of Realtors updated its 107-year-old ethics code this month. It states, “This new Standard of Practice is effective immediately. Standard of Practice 10-5: REALTORS® must not use harassing speech, hate speech, epithets, or slurs based on race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, national origin, sexual orientation, or gender identity.” Selling a home is a production. The seller’s agent is the lead actor. You have a firehose of information to extinguish the firestorm of controversy that this seller’s agent could ignite in and around your home’s listing. Replace this lead role with someone who can adroitly put out fires, not start them.