Thursday, January 04, 2007
Picking a competent realtor
Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to get serious about selling this money pit house. We’ve spoken to three real estate agents so far in an effort to get the best one.
Agent #1: Claims the title of actual REALTOR®. Go to any REALTOR®‘s website and they are quick to remind you that they are the only board-certified whatevers, licensed by the whatchamahoozit, and therefore better than all the others who are merely real estate agents. I found her online while trying to search for top-selling agents. I read in several places that 80% of all successful home sales are done by only 15% of the pool of agentsI don’t recall the exact percentages I read, but you get the idea. Anyway, she seemed well prepared and knowledgeable about our area. Since meeting with her last week she’s been pestering us about meeting with us again, obviously afraid we’re going to go with someone else.
Agent #2: This was actually a husband/wife team of agents, recommended to me by a coworker of mine. They were very friendly, impressively quick to respond to my email inquiries, and seemed genuinely concerned about our situation. He even suggested, more than once, trying to find a refinancing option that would get us out of our bind. They weren’t pushy at all. However I found it strange they were only able to find one comparable home listing in our area when the other two agents found pages of them. I think their areas of expertise were in other neighborhoods, not ours.
Agent #3: This guy was recommended to us by one of my sweety’s coworkers. I wasn’t expecting much from him because we’d already talked to two good ones, and the recommendation came from a person we didn’t really like that much. However he was very well prepared with a neatly bound report of the houses for sale in our area. He also said he would talk to the bank and find out what they were willing to do, get a listing up by the weekend, and was overall very energetic, confident and knowledgeable.
We chose #3 on the spot, for the following reasons:
- He was the only one who volunteered to scan through our encyclopedic volumes of loan documents to find more information about the penalty fees.
- He was the only one who asked questions about the status of our loans payments, and who mentioned calling the bank at all.
- He was the only one who said his commission was negotiable, to help us break even (since there was a good possibility we would be losing money if we sell now).
I think we made the right decision. It feels right. Either that or he’s very, very good at selling himself.
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