Jonathan Marks makes his living as a real-estate agent. Lately, he's been babysitting rats.With the housing market in a dive and homes lingering unsold for months, the relationship between real-estate agents and their clients is beginning to change. Both buyers and sellers are demanding more from their brokers, and getting it.
Jim Perry, an agent in St. Helena, Calif., spent most of an afternoon vacuuming up thousands of flies from one client's guest house. Mary Hartley, in Albany, Ore., organized a garage sale for one seller, spent 10 hours painting the side of the house for another and recently enlisted her grandchildren to help clean out the debris in a crawl space for a third. And to help Sandra Le Buhn sell her $1.2 million, four-bedroom home in Mill Valley, Calif., Mr. Marks agreed to board her nine-year-old daughter's cherished brown-and-white rats, Zack and Cody, who had been living in a cage in the bathtub.
But some agents are drawing the line. Kirsten Lindquist, a Sonoma, Calif., agent, says she made a marketing pitch to a seller a few weeks ago. Two days later, he called her from the hospital and asked if she would drive him home from his colonoscopy appointment. She declined, even though it cost her the listing. "I'm licensed to practice real estate, not medicine," she says.