While telephone solicitation isn’t the most popular form of marketing for Realtors, most agents do need to get in touch with former clients, contacts, prospects and other sources of leads or information. Thanks to new no-call legislation that has swept the United States, including a new Federal Trade Commission proposal that has yet to get funded by Congress, your next call could get you reported to the attorney general by an angry consumer.

According to the National Association of Realtors’ Realtor Magazine, 31 states have put some kind of no-call regulations into effect, many with fines for noncompliance and double or triple fines for targeting seniors. Most no-call regulations are overseen by the state attorney general or public safety commission, and include curfews (no calls before 8:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m., fines for non-compliance (up to $60,000 in Illinois, $25,000 in Indiana.), and exemptions.

Many states have chosen to echo the proposed FTC rules which disallow many exemptions allowed to Realtors in other states, and that’s a problem for some Realtors.

According to Jeanne Delgado, NAR’s managing director for regulatory and industry relations, the FTC regulates companies that are making interstate calls, a situation that doesn’t apply to most Realtors who are licensed in and tend to work in their home states only.

”We are covered by an exemption where sales aren’t completed until after a face-to-face meeting,” explains Delgado. “You can’t call after 8:00 p.m., or before 8:00 a.m., and you have to disclose up front what you are calling about.”

In addition to creating a company-specific list, where companies will have to maintain their own do-not-call list, “they can’t call the consumer again when they have been told not to call,” says Delgado. “In addition to the company-specific list which isn’t very effective in eliminating unwanted calls, the FTC is creating a national registry, and it is up to the consumer to put them on the list. The FTC will develop and maintain the registry, and every telemarketer will have to purchase the list and scrub it every three to four months to make sure new people haven’t been added, and the people who have requested not to be called have to be taken off the company list.”

More important, “they removed the exemption for the face to face meeting. Under this new rule, most real estate professionals will have to comply with the federal rule,” says Delgado. The federal rule deals with interstate calls across state lines, so a Texas Realtor working in San Antonio isn’t calling Oklahoma, so that Realtor doesn’t have anything to worry about, but you do need to look at the state law.”

On a practical level, the new law has hurt telemarketing by Realtors, says Pennsylvania broker, Neal Baldwin, and that is because of time consuming paperwork and administration and the continued risk of offending consumers.

Baldwin explains, “We had to subscribe to a list (sent on CD ROM) that has 2.6 million people on it. The file on the CD ROM is so large, it takes forever to load. You must also use MS Access to open it (another potential cost to the brokerage). You may be interested to know that those clients agents have a current business relationship with are exempt, except that if the agent has not contacted them for over 12 months, the exemption expires and they must seek permission (presumably in writing or in person) to continue the calling contacts.”

Baldwin is also daunted by fines imposed for noncompliance. “These numbers are not easy to sort,” he says, “and there is a $1,000 fine per incident. The consumer calling in the complaint gets up to $100. If the consumer is over 60 years of age, the fine goes to $3,000! Yikes!”

Typically, no-call lists are provided by a ‘list administrator,’ and sanctioned by the State,” says Baldwin. “They update the list quarterly. The website to opt-in’ is at Nocallsplease.com. I have not noticed any area on the site where one can ‘opt-out.’ Actually, anyone can sign up anyone (for example, I signed up an office colleague). Telemarketer businesses not already registered with the state (as real estate brokerages are) also have to post a $50,000 bond.”

Baldwin says he purchases the no-call list for his brokerage, which is under $500. “The people in our office,” he explains, “must check the list prior to calling (some use assistants to do this). If there are only a few numbers (say 3 FSBOs), they can go to Nocallsplease.com and check the phone number in there. If a FSBO is on the list, we are not able to call, because the FSBO is inviting buyer calls, not calls for brokerage services.

There’s no question that the no-call lists have put a damper on marketing.

”Some offices in our area have banned cold calling for the time being,” says Baldwin. “Our marketing is affected in that the time it takes agents to cull the list has increased tremendously. I'm doubtful, also, that the typical agent would be able to deal with the list in the form that it is sent.”

”We use Access to pull area codes and cities and then create easy-to-use MS Word files for the agents, in that many of them do not have Access,” says Baldwin. “It takes a lot of time. Also, street names are not provided in the data, so pulling them (if you want to call around a Just Listed or Just Sold) is impossible without first getting the owner names from tax records, etc. Seems to me that a lot more mailings will be done as a result of this legislation (the post office will get more revenue!)

”Some offices are ignoring it until they get their first fine,” he says.