About eight weeks ago realestate.com.au started upgrading its email servers, but there was a problem and about 16% of online queries weren’t forwarded on to the respective real estate agents for up to 2 months. Agents across Australia started receiving a glut of emails last week, and promptly started contacting the potential buyers. Unfortunately some of those messages had been sent back in April or May, so those buyers would be thinking that the real estate agent had just ignored their enquiry.
Craig Pontey, director of Ray White Double Bay, explains what this means for the agent:
“I don’t know how many sales it may have cost me – it might have cost me no sales at all but it certainly cost me reputation in my business getting back to these people quickly.”
– The Age: “Agents fume over realestate.com.au glitch”
Look, mistakes happen, and I’m sure realestate.com.au are very apologetic about it all (although there’s nothing on their website about this issue yet). But even so, it is quite careless for Australia’s largest online real estate portal to mess things up in a way that seriously tarnishes the reputation of their clients.
So if you’ve sent a message via realestate.com.au to an agent in the past couple of months, and you haven’t heard back from them, don’t necessarily blame the agent. The cause of the problem may lie elsewhere.