I had an unfortunate start to my career as a real estate agent. They advise us to knock on doors in the neighborhood to contact people and invite the neighbors to the open house, suggesting they might want to be involved in picking their new neighbor. You see, it gets people thinking about who they want to move in their so that the neighbor will call their friend. And so on…
I heard a bit of advice suggesting that when door knocking, I didn’t need to worry about ‘no soliciting’ signs, because I wasn’t actually selling anything, I was just inviting someone to a party.
That felt pretty shady to me, but I trusted and admired these people (multiple), and I’m used to taking direction from people I respect that know so much more than I do.
For the most part I got away with it too. No one really seems to pay much attention to my ‘No Soliciting’ sign at home either. I think to a large extent people take them as a suggestion and most of us are either too kind to care, or ignore the caller. But some of us are mean.
My mean one was an elderly lady in a 55+ neighborhood, who wouldn’t bother to cross the room to yell at me at the door. And what she said was right. I agreed with her.
Somewhat later I started working with a new mentor and we had a quick discussion about soliciting and he said flat out that of course that was soliciting. Then I felt like I was in the right place with my integrity.
For what it’s worth, Oregon law states that soliciting is coming on to the property to communicate verbally or in writing. Which means that whoever mentioned that leaving door hangers was considered canvasing and not soliciting either knows something else I don’t, or is uninformed themselves.
