exclusive rental arrangements

From experience I have found rental managers very reluctant to offer anything but an exclusive rental period when starting to look for a tenant.

My thoughts are the best approach would be to have your property on as many rental lists at agents as possible and whoever finds the right tenant wins and gets the finding fee and ongoing management. The way agents work is the opposite of this as it stops competition and allows them to take their sweet time to find tenants.

One property I have had for rent for some time has had the exclusivity period expire so I decided to engage another prominent Melbourne eastern suburbs agent and see if they had any interested potential tenants looking for my type of property. They advised they don’t do anything but exclusive rental. I asked why and they said because then they may put effort in and not get a fee in the end so not worth their time. My thoughts were it’s a perfect opportunity for them to get a fee by working that little bit harder.

I wonder if this is consistent to certain areas where agents essentially have an unwritten agreement to operate like this or if it is everywhere.

I understand the benefits of exclusive leasing and selling and so on, but there are also benefits in multi-listing.

Any thoughts?