Long & Foster Lake Roland Baltimore, MD

Nancy Levesque _{on Google}

Jun 24th, 2016

We had an unfortunate experience with an agent in this office and the office manager when selling our home in Baltimore. The agent did not represent us well--to the point where we had to use our buying agent outside the area to get feedback, as well as review contracts and other documents.
The listing agent from this office was behind the times in marketing strategies used by most agents today, particularly online. This may not be the case of all agents in this office, but one would think the sales manager would arm her team of agents with the most updated marketing strategies, particularly in the digital space to make sure the office as a whole remains competitive.
From the get-go, we feel we didnt get sound advice from our agent. She asked us at what price we wanted list the house, and we randomly suggested a number, seeking feedback. She did show us comps, and so she believed it was a reasonable price, but we were never asked what our goals were and the fact that we needed to sell the house fairly quickly so we needed to price competitively. In hindsight, I wish that we did research ourselves on the market so that we went into this process informed.
It turns out our house was overpriced, (we learned this by speaking with several agents after signing with this office), missed items on documents that with a nit-picky buyer would have cost us money, made the process so personal and emotional to the point where we felt we needed to watch what we said and how we said it. Recommendations we made were sometimes met with defensive reactions, and when she was asked to present an itemized list of marketing activities for our home we were told that no client has ever asked her for that.
We elevated our concerns to the office manager. They were met with empathy, and we were reassured that any future concerns would be immediately be resolved by her personally. The office manager was copied on all future email communications. She claims that she reviewed all of them, however when I sent emails directly to her, they went unanswered and calls were ignored. Several months later and about $35K under our initial asking price, we eventually sold our home, but what a stressful several months it was.