Massachusetts Real Estate Agents with Pocket Listings

Do you know of any real estate agents or offices that keep pocket listings? In case you aren't following, a pocket listing is a listing that an agent has that he doesn't want to list on MLS or some other listing service and doesn't share with other real estate agents because he wants to find a buyer himself without having to pay a co-broke. I'd like to hear about your experiences with agents that keep pocket listings. How successful were they with their pocket listing? Do you think it's an acceptable practice?

I won't get into the legal issues because I'm not a lawyer but it's not very ethical and if you've been hired by somebody to list their building for sale or lease some vacant space, that's your first priority and frankly your client deserves access to every resource you have. So what if you are going to give up half of your fee, half of a fee is better than no fee which is what you'll have if you think you can sit on a listing and wait for the prospective buyer to come to you.

I think the first and most important thing you can do when you get a new listing is to get that information out to the brokerage community and also in the case of a commercial listing to the local business community. In some cases, you even want to connect with some regional and national brokers if your listing potentially has some appeal to some regional or national companies that you don't have access to.

There is a grey area when you start sending out emails to hopefully hundreds of brokers if your database is that large because you don't want to be caught in a spam situation. You always want to put a disclaimer on the bottom of your email letting the recipient know that they can opt out of future mailings. If they don't want to receive an email from you the worst thing you can do is send them more. First it's illegal, and second it's not good business sense. You want people reading your emails that have some interest in them and can possibly share them with people that you never would have been able to contact directly. You never who knows who and where your next lead is going to come from.

Let me know if there are any other specific areas of commercial real estate that you would like to discuss. I want this site to be a resource for business owners, real estate professionals, and anybody interested in commercial real estate. I'm also interested in networking with other real estate professionals in Massachusetts so drop me a line.