When we were ready to sell our house, we offered the listing to Mark, and had a disappointing…read moreexperience. We had worked with his firm to buy the house and, in retrospect, I think we gave the benefit of the doubt a little too much the first time around. Both times, he was not straightforward with us about pretty fundamental stuff that we'd tried to establish from the beginning. He was also not especially positive to work with, and none of the contractors he recommended were positive either.
On the selling end, what we were looking for was a realtor to work with us as teammates in selling our house, allowing us a little bit of input into how the house would be made over for the sale. We were selling a vintage colonial house in MD, so it made sense for it to be presented just a hair differently than a modern high-rise condo in downtown DC, for example. Of the realtors we interviewed, Mark had the most disagreements with us about how to make over the house, but we thought he would be the most straightforward person to work with. So before offering him the listing, we asked how differences of opinion would be settled, and he said he'd ultimately defer to us.
After six weeks of waiting on his primary stager, Mark finally brought over another one, Bona Gjoni (who has iffy reviews on Yelp). We wanted to be open-minded, and we agreed to at least 80% of what she said. However, she was very hard to work with; she was cold, rarely spoke to us (she mainly just addressed Mark), and she frankly seemed put off that we were there at all. (Mark later explained that they usually just stage vacant homes.) We suggested that if she told us how strongly she felt about her suggestions on a scale of 1-10, we could use that to inform our decision -- but she rejected this idea out of hand and said she's "a 10 on everything." She wanted us to paint our kitchen a specific shade of light brown (!) because "all [her] clients do that". (Shouldn't design be tailored to the property, not the same for all?)
Oddly enough, what was a dealbreaker for Mark was when we disagreed with Bona's directive to paint our whole fireplace a glossy jet black. This seemed way out of character for our parkside country-mouse colonial, and we emailed Mark to ask if we could take a breath before deciding whether to proceed with Bona -- while emphasizing how important it was to us to make sure *he* was comfortable with all the choices made. He said we should leave all these decisions to the professionals, and wrote a long message about how experienced he was. When we said we get it, we just want to be *a* part of the team to some extent, he abruptly emailed us to bow out of the listing because of the fact that we "have your own ideas of how you want to present and market your home." This was a real curveball a month and a half into working with him. We didn't have any particularly zany ideas for our house -- it seemed like the problem was that we wanted any input whatsoever. Then I realized that all 3 of the references I'd called from his recent sales were seniors who had already moved into assisted living and had him handle 100% of the preparation process -- maybe that is his jam.
So it seems like Mark prefers to only work with sellers who do not want any input at all; that's fine if that's his choice -- the frustrating thing was that he was not straightforward with us from the beginning, even though we tried to be very straightforward with him. We had shared all our opinions/preferences on the house during the interview stage, so none of it was a surprise. We had even directly asked about how he'd handle differences of opinion. If he had been honest from the beginning about his "my way or the highway" approach, it would have saved us all a lot of wasted time.
In the end, the realtor we ended up selling our house with was outstanding: very kind, smart, and straightforward; his stager and most other contractors were excellent (super nice, very responsive, and did quality work); and we were thrilled with the results. So all's well that ends well, but much like in our buying experience, Mark did a bait-and-switch. We told him exactly what we were looking for, he accepted enthusiastically, and then he changed things up on us later in a non-straightforward way. Our hope is that an honest review can be helpful to others trying to choose a realtor that will suit their needs.
