Is there a reason for bad public image for real estate agents?

Ok, I have to admit it.  I pretty hopping mad right now!  Mad because sometimes misconceptions can be validated!

Here is the scenario. I get a call from a gentleman who has a couple of properties to lease.  He says that his previous agreement with another agent has expired and he would like to find out about someone else listing them as he didn't find his agent very easy to get a hold of.  So I talk with the man for a little while and tell him that I'll do some of the preliminary stuff like comps and see about why he was unable to lease his properties for the last three months.

 There starts the adventure.  The homes were NEW CONSTRUCTION so the tax records were not created yet and the property could not be located that way. So I look for the previous agent's listings in the MLS.  I look for about 15 minutes and just can't find that the homes were EVER listed.  Finally, I stumble across the homes while pulling general comparables for the area. I couldn't find them because the other agent put BOTH homes in the MLS and misspelled the address! 

Ok, mistakes happen.  That is a pretty major one, but ok.  So I talk to the gentleman again and he decides after our conversations that he would like to hire me.  I draw up the contracts and get ready to have them signed and in the meantime, I pull up the previous listings again.   Here is a laundry list of things wrong with  the listings in the MLS:

1. Property address was misspelled!
2. Minimal pictures of the homes (the Houston MLS allows 16 pictures, yet not all agents use them!)
3. The properties expired at the end of January and the agent NEVER told the owner of the properties. So they have been off the market for 2 weeks and the owner was never notified of the fact.
4. Extremely poor descriptions of the homes.
5. The agent did not bother to look up school zones for the homes.  This is important because some people search by the elementary school or the high school.  To not look that info up and include it is just plain lazy!
6. Finally, if everything else wasn't bad enough, the directions to the property were TOTALLY WRONG!  If anyone had followed those directions, they would have ended up on a dead end street in the middle of an undeveloped area!  No wonder they hadn't had any showings or feedback on the homes in three months! 

So all that time, the agent was NOT doing what he was hired to do and the owner was paying the payments on the home, losing $$$! 

Oh and the owner's first compaint about the agent not being easy to get a hold of was also a  detriment to SHOWING the properties because he was taking all his OWN appointments.  Personally, I hire a showing service to handle my appointments because I NEVER want to cost my client an opportunity to sell their house just because I missed a phone call. 

I guess part of the perception of the public is that a real estate agent is over paid for the work they do.  In the case of the agent I was just speaking of, that not only is true that they were overpaid for their work but actually COST the landlord money.  I can tell you with a certainty that a GOOD real estate agent is worth their fee but a bad one can cost you so much more than a comission! 

I don't mean to rant and I certainly wouldn't want to call this agent out in a public forum like this, but I explained to the property owner that while no one can guarantee success in selling or leasing your house, you have virtually NO chance with all the things wrong that were wrong in this scenario!

 One of the most common complaints I hear about agents is that they do not communicate with the seller/landlord.  In this case, it's been 14 days since the property fell out of the MLS (known as an expired listing) and the agent had not notified the owner!  For a real estate agent, not answering the phone would be like a Bank Teller not counting down their till, or a mechanic not tightening the lug nuts on your wheel when they rotate your tires.  I mean, take any profession and you have a set of "required daily duties" you do.  If you did not do them, everyday, you would be fired!  That's what I think about agents who do not answer their phone and if they are unable to get the phone right then (I mean there are always circumstances that could prevent an immediate answer) at least return the phone call in a reasonable time frame (like less than 3 hours!).

Ok, I'm done ranting but I though you should know that I am as dead set against incompetent real estate agents as you are and I ENCOURAGE you to complain to the appropriate people if you get treated like this man did.