First things first: this is not meant as an attack on a specific brokerage, nor an exoneration of the agent that brokerage fired. I’m intentionally not naming names here, as it doesn’t matter; it could be any company. Instead, this is an exploration into why said agent felt justified sending the email he did, and how firing this one person and saying “this is not acceptable and we won’t stand for it” completely misses the point. While this one agent “crossed the line,” all brokerages have agents guilty of the same tactics, tactics often encouraged by the brokerage itself.
So what happened? Last week, an agent in South Florida sent an email blast that showed pictures of cars on fire in NYC next to pictures of Miami beaches with the headline “Looking for change?” and asking whether viewers wanted to live in chaos or comfort. It led to the agent being exited from the company, whether because the press picked it up or because it was brought to the attention to senior management via complaints I’m not sure.
But while this was the only example that drew national attention, resulting in the agent being removed from his company, this is happening on a very regular basis and has been the entire course of COVID. While hundreds of New Yorkers were dying from COVID every day, while friends were working in Bronx ER’s coding patient after patient in grueling shifts, while we huddled in our apartments hearing near-constant sirens replace the sounds of normal traffic, I received daily emails from strangers in the real estate community offering incentives if I sent them my “clients fleeing from NYC.” I saw tone-deaf Instagram posts from agents in towns like East Hampton and Aspen about how much better it would be to be quarantined there than in whatever shithole apartment you were currently subjected to, a message I found just as elitist and out of touch as the broker blast that got this agent fired. And while not directly racist (racism being the reason listed for the earlier agent’s dismissal), the subtext here is clear: you and your life will be better and less full of stress if you can afford to live in these elite, generally all-white “resort” areas. You shouldn’t declare loyalty to a place you live
Again, I’m not going to defend this agent’s choices. The email he sent was inappropriate. But I’m also not going to drag him through the dirt when I have seen tons of other agents behave essentially the same way, not be called out, and continue to act as they always have. I’ve written about this before, but because this industry has a low barrier of entry and fierce competition for business (since a low barrier of entry means an over-saturation of agents), we are pushed to market ourselves aggressively. And sometimes this marketing is poorly thought out, offensive, and/or factually wrong. Like cops, we are dealing with complex subject matter we may not be entirely educated about. We are told to know everything about the specific market where we work (to impress rich buyers), the habits of rich buyers, and money (to talk to rich buyers). That’s pretty much it.
Agents are actively told to ignore current events, as the news will bring them down and get them out of work flow. They’re largely white, older, and rich, so they can feel secure in the knowledge the news doesn’t generally affect them, unless it’s about their retirement funds. They’re being told that mass email is an effective tool and that they need to be on social media getting in front of a new generation of wealth. And while this true, if you don’t know what’s going on (because you don’t read the news and you fled to your country house as soon as things looked bad) you should not be advertising on social media right now. There was even an instance of agents sharing support of the protests with both #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter beneath it, completely unaware of the meaning of what they were saying.
While one agent has lost his job and damaged his reputation over an email, the systems that led to this email blast going out are still firmly in place. And now all the big real estate companies and agents can sit back in their collective smugness, thinking “this has nothing to do with me” before sending out another mass email to thousands of agents they don’t know, clogging inboxes, interfering with work, and offering to help my clients relocate to a “better” place than NYC. Because if you have money (and remember, agents are often taught only to care about people with money), why on earth would you want to stay in NYC rather than a beach house or in Aspen? Loyalty to a place is for the have-nots, not the haves. And the have-nots don’t buy houses.
xo
Anna