I recently read and commented on a question posted on Trulia.com which asked,

I am about to finish my MBA and will be moving to Portland to take up a job in the Hillsboro area. Do I rent?

Now it seems the consensus answer was to rent for a variety of reasons. I agreed with the consensus. My main reason for telling someone to rent when they first move here is that they don’t know the area. Adding to that, they have the highest inventory in years to pick from and falling prices which gives some a reason to hesitate. Why not?

Specifically one of the agents in our office moved here in 2003. His brother, an agent, steered him to homes in his Bethany neighborhood. Later the agent wished he had bought in a different neighborhood but picked that one on the insistence of his brother the agent, who has since moved. He realized he liked the other neighborhood in less than a year.

There were two kinds of agent responses that made me cringe. One was the blatant advertising and a disregard of the being asked since they didn’t bother to answer it. This borders on spam and continues the Huckster image some have of us. Social media is new and many are still figuring out the line between promoting and helping. “Give first and then you might get,” should be the understanding of Trulia.com and Zillow.com’s answer section.

The second type of response that made me cringe, seemingly with pom poms in their hands, some agents said, “Buy, buy, buy!” And gave all of the typical reasons such as interest rates and the idea that homes are relatively cheap, etc. I am not going to pick on any specific agent that answered but many of the answers sounded like canned scripts.

“It’s always smart to buy!”

“Renting is just throwing away money.”

Even though one agent said that “we would likely see continued depreciation through a good portion of 2009,” he also said the answer to rent vs buy was, “Wow, simple - buy.”

The people pushing the buy idea didn’t question his finances, the size of the company he was going to work for, if there was a guaranteed contract at his new job,

Those are some of the comments that can cause distrust by the public. If someone talks in absolutes, I am likely to tune out. So if there are many agents out there saying “buy, buy, buy” without caveats and acknowledging that our industry and market is in varying degrees of turmoil the public will tune us out.

hoto via http://flickr.com/photos/rberteig

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