Every once in a while, a buyer or seller becomes totally dissatisfied with his or her real estate agent.

In a single recent week, Alan May of Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty in Evanston, Illinois, received two calls from sellers who were disappointed with the lack of service from their listing agents. After a brief conversation with each, in which May outlined what he would do differently, they both decided they would like to fire their agents and hire him instead.

Beyond griping that their homes haven’t sold, unhappy owners complain largely about a lack of communication from their agents, according to most of the realty pros who recently discussed the topic on industry website ActiveRain.

That’s what May’s two callers were beefing about. One “complained that he would call his listing agent and would not get a return call for two or three days,” he said.

That, alone, is grounds for dismissal, responded Richard Iarossi of Coldwell Banker in Crofton, Maryland. “Two days is absurdly long by any standard,” he said.

Candice Donofrio of Next Wave Real Estate Investments in Bullhead City, Arizona, agreed: “I’ve said it a hundred times -- this is not a sales business, it’s a communications business.”

So if you’re not satisfied, how exactly can you dump your real estate agent midstream? Turns out, there’s a proper way to accomplish this.

First off, you are bound by what’s in your listing agreement, including items such as the length of the contract, how the agent plans to market your house and under what conditions you can terminate the deal. That’s why you should always read what you’re signing and balk at things you don’t like.

“Don’t take these terms for granted,” Katie Johnson, general counsel for the 1.3 million-member National Association of Realtors, advised in an interview. “Discuss them with the agent and articulate what both parties agree to.”

For example, some contracts last a year, but in that time, the market could completely turn. If you try to minimize your risk by pushing for a shorter contract, though, the agent and broker won’t be willing to spend as much to market your house.

If you’ve given the agent a decent amount of time and he has not performed up to your expectations, you might think about ending the agreement prematurely. If your listing expires in a relatively short time -- or if you just don’t like confrontation -- then sit tight and allow your contract to run its course.

If there are still several months to go, though, tell your agent you want to part ways. Do it nicely -- no yelling or obscenities -- and put your reasons down on paper so there’s a record. Consider hand-delivering it.

This is a courtesy step, because it’s not your agent who owns your listing; it’s his or her broker, the person whose name is on the door. The broker can, if they so choose, overrule the agent and agree to break the contract. Under some listing contracts, though, you may be required to reimburse the agent and broker for whatever marketing expenses they have incurred for your property.

Under the standard contract in Florida, sellers must sign a withdrawal agreement, pay back what’s been spent on their behalf AND pay a cancellation fee. The amount of that fee is left blank, to be filled in when the listing agreement is signed, so it can be any amount -- or nothing at all. Another reason to read carefully and negotiate before signing.

The broker can waive all this. But in Florida, at least, brokers can play hardball because the agreement also states that if the house is sold between the time the pact is terminated and the time it would have expired on its own, the seller must pay the agreed-upon sales commission -- less the cancellation fee, of course.

Brokers might try to hand you over to another agent in their shop, or cut you loose altogether. But they can also refuse to release you from your contract. And if that’s the case, you’ll just have to gut it out. Maybe.

If you believe the agent acted unethically, and he or she’s a member of the local Realtors’ association, you can take your complaint to that board, which can sanction the agent if it agrees with you. Admittedly, though, this can be a slow process.

While you are going through all this, start looking for another agent: one with far better communication skills. That way, as soon as you are able, you can sign with them and lose little time on the market.

Agents aren’t allowed to initiate contact with buyers or sellers who are under contract with another agent. But if you call them, they can make full-blown presentations, if that’s what you want.

Some agents won’t talk to anyone who is currently listed with a rival. Kimo Jarrett of WikiWiki Realty in Huntington Beach, California, is one. “I make it a policy not to discuss any business issues with anyone under contract with another agent, regardless of the circumstances,” he said.

May, and others, respect that position. But as May pointed out, “The rules say that as long as I didn’t initiate the contact, and they contacted me, we are allowed to talk.”

When Marilyn Wilson’s mother moved to California not too long ago, Wilson was tasked with selling her mom’s house in Buffalo, New York. She dutifully listed the house and waited for buyers to come calling.

A few days later, Wilson, a real estate consultant and managing partner of the WAV Group, went to Zillow.com to check on her listing. What she found was disconcerting.

She saw four agents mentioned as the listing agent, with her name at the bottom of the list. She called the other three, but none knew anything about the house. “All of them were from the other side of town,” she recalls. “One was 45 miles away.”

Welcome to what some call the “pay-to-play” world of Zillow, which charges agents a premium to be named on listings that are not their own. Zillow calls it the “premier broker” program, by which agents pay a fee to secure leads from people inquiring about houses in certain ZIP codes.

According to the company website, when a shopper makes an inquiry through Zillow (or the Zillow-owned site Trulia), the company confirms that the prospect is ready to speak with an agent. If so, it hands the would-be client off to the “premier” agent -- as opposed to the listing agent, who, ostensibly, anyway, knows more about the property than anyone else, save for its owner.

If the premier agent can’t arrange a showing for the home, or if the buyer doesn’t like it, the agent can take them to other houses on the market -- probably his or her own listings first. Now, the listing agent has lost a potential sale, as well as a potential new client.

On its site, Zillow claims premier agents close twice as many sales. And Matt Hendricks, director of broker relations, says it has been not only “an incredible lead generator” for the “tens of thousands” of agents who participate, but also a top revenue producer for the company.

Hendricks maintains that listing agents always pop up in the top spot, no matter how many premier agents are also listed. But the premier agents tend to have a more robust online resume than listing agents, he admits, which is likely to make them more attractive.

House shoppers are free to contact any agents associated with the listing, but consultant Wilson doesn’t like the concept. And neither do most agents who work hard to secure listings and jealously guard them.

“It can be a crapshoot,” said agent Myrl Jeffcoat of GreatWest Realty in Sacramento, California. “More than once, I have heard from buyers who thought they were contacting the listing agent ... but (actually) called someone else.”

“When buyers click on a listing, they have no idea they are not going to get the listing agent,” agreed Kat Palmiotti of Grand Lux Realty in Monroe, New York. “Sometimes they get contacted by 10 different agents. It can be frustrating to a buyer.”

Wilson called Zillow’s program “very annoying.”

Premier agents are “fishing for new clients,” she said. “They’re trying to buy leads, and they’re using someone else’s listings as bait. There’s no way they can represent the best interests of the seller, or the buyer, for that matter.

“They call back quickly, I’ll give them that. But they do not represent the house. Some have never been inside. Some are not even in that market.”

Wilson and some other angry agents have implored Zillow to remove non-listing agents’ names from listings, but she says the Seattle-based company refused. Zillow’s Hendricks says listing agents used to be able to pay to be the only agent whose name is on the “home details” page, but that feature was dropped a few years ago.

Even sellers have been unable to stop the practice. Hendricks says that since sellers want the most exposure possible, most don’t want their agents to be the only ones listed.

So three years ago, a coalition of 65 of the largest full-service realty firms and multiple listing services in the country came together to wrest control of their bread-and-butter listings from Zillow and other third-party business disruptors -- sometimes known as aggregators -- by creating a public portal as an alternative.

You may never have heard of Homesnap, but it is now the No. 1-rated agent mobile app and desktop site, with traffic up 40 percent in the last year. “The industry-controlled portal has become our industry’s greatest ‘overnight’ success story,” says Wilson, who now advises the portal, but whose experience in Buffalo occurred long before she signed on.

Among other things, Homesnap’s technology allows you to take a photo with your mobile device of any house and instantly be shown all its pertinent details: size, number of bedrooms and baths, property taxes, school district, asking price (if it’s for sale) and even its estimated value (if it’s not).

The idea is to give buyers and sellers a better online search experience than the one provided by companies such as Zillow, where agents spend beaucoup bucks promoting their listings.

Better yet, participants adhere to a set of Fair Display Guidelines, which call for search results to be sorted and ranked by the consumer’s search parameters, as opposed to any type of “featured” listing or paid placement. Only the names and contact information of the actual listing broker and agent can be displayed on the “property details” page. No inquiries by potential buyers will be diverted elsewhere.

Many people rely on online reviews to decide what to buy. Indeed, research from Nielsen Global Media shows that opinions posted online are second only to personal recommendations in influencing purchase decisions.

But how do you know those reviews aren’t bought and paid for by the outfit in question? You don’t, of course.

This fall, the Federal Trade Commission came down hard on two companies for posting false reviews. One was a skin-care company posting tributes written by its own employees, and the other was a (now-defunct) company that sold fake social media followers and subscribers to various entities.

Unscrupulous tactics like these show why homebuyers and sellers should be particularly careful when selecting homebuilders, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and remodelers. For one thing, don’t rely on evaluations posted on the companies’ own websites; you’re certainly not going to find anything negative. But on gripe sites like pissedconsumer.com or ripoffreport.com, you’re not going to find anything positive, either. Frankly, it’s hard to get anything resembling a balanced characterization of any company.

Fortunately, a quick Google search failed to turn up any cases in which builders resorted to the sorts of underhanded tactics flagged by the FTC. But the story’s not the same when it comes to agents.

One agent reported that she was contacted by a colleague, offering to write a glowing review if she would do the same for her. In another case, a Kansas City agent who was given a poor grade on a website (that has since been taken down) was told she could pay $5,000 to have it removed. She said it was nothing more than a “shakedown.”

Some agents have been called to task for penning their own positive testimonials, and in a few cases, poor reviews were posted by competitors just trying to make another agent look bad.

For the most part, though, fake reviews are put up by disgruntled consumers who, rightly or wrongly, feel they’ve been abused in the process of building, buying or selling a house.

Still, good or bad, “it’s hard to know where (reviews) are coming from,” said Adah Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the Southern Colorado Better Business Bureau, in an interview with local news channel KOAA this fall. “It’s pretty safe to say, through any platform, probably at least 50% of reviews are fake.”

In the housing sector, the major real estate listing sites such as Zillow, Facebook, Yelp and Google all have rules against posting false testimonials, and those who violate them can be banned.

Recently, guaranteed honest reviews by real buyers of new construction have been added to the NewHomeSource website, a top site where builders post their communities and listings. (Full disclosure: I occasionally provide content for the site.)

To date, roughly 27% of the 14,000 communities listed at NewHomeSource have signed on to take part in the review program, called TrustBuilder. The list includes several national builders, including KB Homes, Beazer, Centex, Dell Webb, Lennar and Pulte, according to Jay McKenzie of Builders Digital Experience, the Texas company that operates the site.

In the TrustBuilder program, every person who purchases a house from a participating builder is asked to provide a review -- good, bad or otherwise. Of course, not all buyers will do so. Typically, companies only hear from people who are very happy or very unhappy; the rest don’t bother. But no reviews will be posted until there are at least 10, so future buyers can get “a more complete and balanced picture,” McKenzie says. “A true representation.”

No reviews will be changed. “This is all independent of the builders,” says McKenzie. “Reviews will not be censored. We don’t hide, edit or delete them. They are independent, transparent and credible.”

At the same time, though, builders will be given an opportunity to try to fix any issues raised in negative posts, and aggrieved customers will have the option to alter their opinions later if they so desire. “Problems will occur, so this is a good outcome for everyone,” McKenzie explains.

Tyson Kirksey of Highland Homes in Texas says the value of honest customer reviews cannot be overestimated. “We’ve seen many sites struggle with the problem of fake reviews. A program like TrustBuilder is long overdue,” he says. “We’re excited to participate.”

So is Allan Merrill of Beazer Homes. “By providing access to ratings and reviews from known new homeowners,” he says, “TrustBuilder should become an integral part of the new-home shopping process.”

Meanwhile, whether you are shopping for a house, builder, realty agent or lender, it’s always wise to be somewhat skeptical when it comes to online reviews. The FTC suggests also checking other sources -- the Better Business Bureau, for example, or another impartial expert organization.

Don’t consider just one or two reviews, either. Look at as many as you can to see if you can discern a pattern. And while you’re at it, search the name of the builder or agent followed by the word “complaint” to see what kind of negative experiences people have had.