Real Estate Mystery Shopping

Prior to us having kids, my wife and I wanted to fix up the cape cod I purchased before we got married. We knew at some point we'd want to move, and it needed some improvements. We would do some of the work ourselves, but needed contractors to do concrete work, as well as some design and carpentry work. Luckily for us, my father was an electrician by trade and was able to help us out.

In order to defray some of the costs of home improvement, I found a little gig doing Real Estate Mystery Shopping. This was something we could do either individually or together. One of the national Realty companies started this program to see if their agents were doing what they were supposed to do during open houses, and how they could use the information we provided to improve their service and bottom line. I don't remember how I found out about it, but we applied and they accepted us as mystery shoppers.

The idea was, we would get assigned an area to "shop" each week. The area could be anywhere in the South to Central New Jersey or Philadelphia and surrounding suburbs areas. All of the Realtors would have open houses listed in the Sunday Inquirer. Anyone who lives/lived in this area knows that half of the Sunday Inquirer comes out Saturday night and the rest on Sunday morning. We would get the Saturday night edition which contained the Real Estate section and look for the open houses in our assigned area.

This was in the mid 1990's, there was no GPS or cell phone coverage at the time. If you did have a cell phone, it was most likely either hard wired and installed in your car, or a bag phone which only had telephone capabilities, and they were pretty sketchy at that. If you don't know what a bag phone is, take a look here.

After getting our assigned area and looking for our open houses, I used an actual paper map (yup, we knew how to read maps back then!), to map out a route from open house to open house. We would try to get the maximum of 10 houses shopped every Sunday within the normal 2-3 hour open house window. We would get paid $10 per house plus mileage. The agents had certain criteria they had to meet, specific things they should say to or ask of us. They were to hand out informational flyers on the house, real estate "rules", among other things. We also had to sign into each open house and couldn't use fake names or addresses. The agents were supposed to follow up with us during the week either by mail (that would be snail mail) or phone.

We ended up with a pretty good system and mostly did this together. It was so much easier having one person drive and the other navigate with the route I mapped out. It was fun and we got to see some really nice homes. It also provided us with great home shopping experience so we knew what to look for when we went to actually buy a new home for ourselves. There were times we would leave some of these open houses thinking, "Hey, we could actually buy that house! It has an inlaw suite so our parents could maybe move in with us, it's on a lake in a nice area! Yea, we could do this!" Then we would come back to earth and do our job.

Sometimes we would go into these multi-million dollar mansions and just be in awe. At this point we were just actors telling them that my company was moving us to the area for work. They would ask if the house was in our price range. . it was sometimes difficult to keep a straight face and say yes when the houses, in real life, were way out of the range we could ever afford, but we managed. After each house, we would complete a report card on the agent. Any materials that we were given would be included with the report and everything would be shipped to the home office each week.

There were a couple of times when the agents would do things that were. . . shall we say. . .less than desirable. We went into a town-home in Northeast Philadelphia one Sunday. The agent had a friend there who was working on his computer and watching the Eagles game. I didn't mind that the game was on, but it was way too loud. The guy also looked like he could've used a good bath! Additionally, the agent smelled of beer. It was pretty clear he'd been drinking. Of course, we had to report it and I found out that he did get fired.

It wasn't uncommon for us to visit some areas more than once and see the same agents. One woman was very suspicious of us being shoppers. Now, you'd think if she thought we were shopping her, she would do everything in her power to get a good report. When she followed up during the week she left a very strange message on our answering machine basically saying that her and other agents in her office were leary of us and didn't understand our intentions. Why would someone leave me a message like that? I told the woman at the home office about it and she made me play the message for her. I almost wanted to call the agent back and ask her why she would do something so dumb. What if we weren't shoppers, you think I would want to buy a house from you after hearing a message like that?

Most agents used the MLS (Multiple Listings Service) books back then. They came out every month and were really only supposed to be for the agents. One of the agents we shopped gave us the MLS book to take home with us. Apparently this was a violation of some kind and the home office was not happy about it, I had to send it with my other materials for the week.

There are a lot of companies that mystery shop their employees. When I was an Optician, our company did it as well. Here's a little tip if you're in some kind of service industry. If you have any suspicion that you're being shopped, do everything by the "book". Be the best salesperson/employee you can be. Use commons sense and don't be dumb.

We mystery shopped for several years through our pregnancy with Josh. We were able to get quite a few of the things done around the house that we wanted to do with that income, it was really a pretty good deal at the time. Once we had Josh, we tried shopping a couple of times, but it was fairly difficult to do with a new born. We would often drive a block or two between houses and strapping him into his seat and taking him out again was just slowing us down. There were times when one of us would go into the house and the other would stay with the baby, but it also made us more noticeable to the agents. We decided that our real estate mystery shopping days had come to an end at that point and we stopped.

The experience we got from this was invaluable and I would do it again in a heartbeat. As I said earlier, it made actually looking for a home easier because we knew what we were looking for and what we were looking at. If you ever get a chance to do something like this I'd highly recommend it. And remember, if you ever think you're being shopped, BE SMART!!