Locating The Best Real Estate Agent For Today's Housing Market
There's no doubt the real estate market has seen better days
. In most places of the country, housing prices are as low or lower than they were a decade ago. With the increasing difficulty of landing top dollar for your home, now more than ever people need to work with a top real estate agent to get the home sold at quickly and at a decent price.While most people agree that finding a top tier real estate broker is critical, many are unsure how to go about looking for one. After all, real estate agents at their very core are salespeople, so every one of them will undoubtedly emphasize to you the advantages of working with them. However, there are some ways to tell if the real estate agent you are considering is truly a top tier realtor that is likely to get you the results you're seeking:
1. What trade associations is he/she a member of?
This should be the first question asked of any prospective real estate agent, and it's a great way to weed out the career agents from the part-timers who do this "real estate thing" on the weekends to earn extra money. A real estate broker who is truly committed to his/her career will at minimum be a member of the National Association of Realtors. If the agent you are considering is not a member of this organization, say to yourself "next" and move on.
2. How well do they know your neighborhood?
This is an often overlooked and quite costly mistake many home sellers make-not working with a real estate agent that is familiar with the local neighborhood. This happened to me back in 2006. When we went to list our home, we chose to use a real estate broker from the other side of town because she was recommended by a friend and had a good track record of sales. Problem was, she wasn't familiar with our neighborhood and she over-priced our home by about 10%.
As a result, the house sat on the market for months while the overall housing market began to fall. As prices fell, we kept cutting our prices, but we were always behind the curve. 9 months later, the value of our home had dropped by around 20%. Long story short-to this day, we still own the home and rent it, because right now the market is just too far down to sell. Had we used a real estate broker from our own neighborhood back in 2006, we would have sold the house at a much better price than we could get today.
3. Who are their associates?
A good tell-tale sign of whether or not you are talking to a top real estate agent is who their associates are. A top realtor will surround themselves with a top-notch team of professionals from related industries like mortgage, title, home inspector, stager, etc. If the real estate broker you are talking to does not have a first class team they are working with, it's a pretty good sign they are not as serious about selling homes as they should be.
4. What marketing methods do they use?
This is extremely important in today's housing market. With so many homes and so few buyers, your real estate agent is going to need to use every possible marketing method at his/her disposal to bring qualified traffic through your home. Talk to them, make sure they use a good variety of standard online and offline methods at the very least. But the real tell-tale sign of a top realtor is one that is using not just conventional marketing methods, but a very 'out of the box' methods you've never heard of.
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