How to choose the ‘right’ real estate agent to sell your home is a great question! It’s a quandary that many sellers find themselves in.
Allow me to share some insider tips to selecting the right agent for YOU.
What is a Real Estate Agent
Real estate is a big business! Real estate agents make a living, and quite often a good one, by helping people like you buy and sell homes.
It’s usually optional to get an agent to assist you to sell your home, especially if you already have some experience in the field of selling and buying homes. For some people, this may be a new field and therefore they may want or require a professional to assist them in doing so.
To reduce the hassle that comes with buying or selling a home, many people choose to go through a real estate agent. Having a real estate agent handle all the legwork saves the seller or the buyer a substantial amount of hassle, for a fee.
With a real estate agent, all you need to do is ensure your home is well staged and shows at its best, instead of spending your time putting up signs, writing and purchasing ads, and fielding calls from those who may or may not be truly interested.
The real estate agent will do the rest.
Pros and Cons of Using a Real Estate Agent
Like anything in life, there are pros and cons that come with using a real estate agent.
Pros may include:
- Real estate agents possess market knowledge that the general public have no idea about, and in many cases, have little or no access to. This is quite helpful in determining a proper, more accurate and workable asking price for your home.
- They are good negotiators, since they know the language, and may be able to help you get a higher selling price than you would get by selling on your own. Remember that an agent’s main goal is to ensure that your home sells. They have no particular attachment to it, and so will not panic if a sale flops. They will just move onto the next buyer.
Some of the cons include:
- You’ll need to part with a few extra dollars in terms of commission. It’s usually a percentage of the home’s selling price, which is paid directly or indirectly by the buyer.
- Even with an agent, there’s still more work that you have to do in the sale of your home. You still need to market your home, take calls about it from interested buyers, showcase the home and settle the final deal.
- Whether you go through a real estate agent depends on whether you have the time, patience, and confidence to do everything yourself.
Although it is becoming somewhat easier to sell your own home, listing your home through a real estate agent can save you lots of time, effort and the hassles that come along with it.
By selling your own home, you have the advantage of not having to pay fees to a real estate agent, you get to keep the full amount of the final selling price, you have the upper hand in manipulating the deal since you can lower the asking price to reflect the lack of fees, or you could ask the same amount that you would with a real estate agent and make a larger profit.
Role of a Real Estate Agent
It’s a fact in the real estate industry that 20% of real estate agents account for more than 80% of property sales. That top 20% also tend to achieve the best price results for their clients who are selling property.
If you decide to use an agent to assist you in the selling of your property, their primary role should be solely to protect your interests in the sale.
This includes giving you accurate information regarding what the market needs or is like, attaining the highest price that your property can sell for, marketing it and ensuring it’s at the frontline to sell as fast as possible. It also includes ensuring that this process runs smoothly.
A good agent will always do everything in their power to powerfully and consistently promote the features and benefits of your property to the marketplace. They are aware that their reputation is also at stake.
You need to be very selective and careful while selecting an agent to assist you in the sale. The less skilled and committed your agent is, the lower the price your property will sell for and the longer it will stay on the market.
How to Source and Evaluate a Real Estate Agent
There are indeed a great many agents out there. How do you select one that will put your best interests before their own need to make a name for themselves and get a commission?
The following might just help you do that.
Sourcing an agent
- Make a list of all the agents you perceive to be most active. They will be on most of the property listings. Friends and family might also recommend some.
- Next, rank each of the agents on your list by checking on their profile how often they turn the “For Sale” signs into a “Sold” one.
- Analyse their marketing strategies; for example, use of flyers and brochures in letterboxes and how strong or effective their marketing strategies are.
- Check out their online presence. What online marketing strategies do they use?
- What is their success rate? This is easily measured by asking for a “list to sell ratio”. This is the number of properties they have listed, compared to the number they’ve actually sold.
- What is their average discount rate? This is the difference between the advertised price and the price the property ends up selling for. Commonly this is expressed as a negative percent. The lower the figure – ie. the closer to zero it is – the better their accuracy in pricing properties.
- Stay away from sites such as Open Agent and Local Agent Finder, as they won’t give you the best agents in the area; they are normally connected with agents that have agreed to pay up to 20% of the commission rate for referral business.
Evaluate your agent’s marketing expertise and record of success
Any agent you consider to assist you in selling your property should be conversant with the evolving marketing trends of recent years, especially due to the incredible impact of digital communication technology.
Your agent must be able to access and utilise up-to-the-minute marketing tools and strategies to attract as many suitable buyers as possible for your property. The use of things like professional photographs, virtual tour software, database marketing and social media marketing might be an indicator that an agent is keeping up with the trends in the market and you will not go wrong choosing them.
Once you identify an agent you want to work with, be sure to enquire about their track record. How successful are they in giving results? Ask questions such as where they live, how long they have lived there and why. Ask about their work tenure within the industry, the sales they have made on similar properties and for what price range.
Find out how long it would take them to sell your kind of property and how many prospective buyers they have for your kind of property. Discover what their marketing methods are and whether they have a network of trusted trade and professional suppliers who can assist you in preparing your home for sale.
Don’t forget to ask them what their agent fee would be at the end of their sale. Remember the cheapest agent can often be the most expensive in the long run – to secure business they have to offer the lowest fees, as they are not strong negotiators.
Be sure to engage in the best sales agent who displays professionalism and a passion for what they do, and deliver results for homes or properties in your category.