I'm SO disappointed with my Realtor

Let me start by stating the following:

1. I am aware that the real estate market is not what it used to be.
2. As my husband continues to point out... I really don't know what a realtor does behind the scenes.

I am having a problem with my realtor. In fact I am having a problem with all Realtors. Near the beginning of Sept. my husband and I met with a realtor about listing our house. This realtor arrived at our house with a thick duo tang filled with printouts of every bungalow for sale in our area and every bungalow that has sold in our area in the last month. The realtor went through the duo tang with us and when she reached the last page it had a summary:

Highest sale price: $ X
Middle sale price: $ X
Lowest sale price: $ X

Average sale price: $ X

You should sell for $ X.

It sounds reasonable, except all the numbers were the same because only one bungalow had sold in our area.

Here's the problem. I'm a math teacher and average is not the only way to assess data and is in this case not the best way to interpret the data. Median would be important. This is the middle point between highest and lowest. But at the end of the day I would like to know the mode. What is the price that occurs most often.

I had a bigger problem with this. ONLY ONE HOUSE HAD SOLD SO HOW CAN YOU MAKE ANY CONCLUSIONS ON THAT? AND HOW CAN YOU RECOMMEND I SELL FOR THE SAME PRICE AS THAT ONE LOWLY HOUSE?

In the next breath this realtor told us we would need to lower our price after the first week and probably lower again after another week or two. She also told us that she no longer did realtor showings (when they bring all their colleagues over for a showing) since the big boom they stopped doing that and she had never sold in our area.

I wanted a second opinion. The house next door had recently sold so I called the realtor. She was going on holiday's and wanted us to meet with her after she got back. Ok. That was our first mistake. We agreed to wait. She met with us. She lived up the street and had sold many houses in our area. She suggested a price that was closer to what we were thinking and she did realtor showings. And we signed up with her. However, she doesn't do open houses because in her experience people don't buy from open houses. Also since the market is a bit slower she wanted us to sign up longer than 60 days. Ok. That was our second mistake. We signed up for a looooong time.

We were only on the market for a week before she asked us to lower our price. She sent us an email with all the bungalows for sale in Northwest Calgary and we agreed we were listed at the high end and didn't have the granite counter tops to support it.

In the mean time our friends and family that were looking at our house on line we saying things like... there are a lot of spelling mistakes in the write up... the pictures are really dark.... what a bad picture... I can't see your house in this picture because half your neighbor's house is also in the picture.

We told her about the spelling mistakes. She said she would fix them. We told her were getting negative feedback about the pictures. She said that she asked around the office and everyone felt they were fine oh and by the way she thinks we may need to lower the price.

After five weeks we get an email from our realtor. She thinks we should lower our price. We told her we couldn't do that and could she change the pictures since we were still getting negative feedback. We also asked if we needed to have our house staged and were told no. We double checked to make sure our house was still priced similar to the other bungalows and it was. She said she would come and take some new pictures. That was last week. As of today, one picture has been changed but not the one we were most upset about. The spelling mistakes have not been fixed. I realize that spelling mistakes wouldn't chase a buyer away. However the write is written very sloppy, has spelling mistakes and bad pictures. I must ask DOES SHE REALLY WANT TO SELL OUR HOUSE? She has us for a loooong time. .

So here is my opinion of Realtors in Calgary based on my experience with these two. They lived the easy life during the boom and now they don't know how work to sell a house. When the boom was on... they would put the house on MLS and set a time and day to receive offers. They would show up on that day and there would be a line up of buyers who were willing to pay more than the asking price. The realtor would look at all the offers and take the best one. At the end of the day they had made huge amounts of money. During that time they forgot how to work. Now that the market has slowed down they don't know what to do. They put the house on MLS and wait for the buyers to come. They don't network with realtor showings, they don't do open houses, they don't send out flyer's... they don't know how to find buyers. So they pressure the seller to lower the asking price and an update gets sent out to all the other Realtors to remind them that there is a house for sale but now at a lower price. If that doesn't work then they ask the seller to lower the price again so they can send out a new update. When we lower our price by $30 000 she loses loose change in commission but we loose years of mortgage payments.