Realtors these days are a dime a dozen. Heck, you probably have a friend, neighbor or relative that will list your house for you “cheap”. And why not, they are family right? Well think again. If you’re going to pay money for anyone, you’ll want to pay the very best you can find. And while that might be Aunt Susie the selling machine, chances are it’s not. We looked for the best we could find.
How did we find an awesome realtor? We started the process by looking for some of the top realtors in our area. We didn’t want the person pursuing this career on the side selling one house every few months, we wanted the person that sold one a week. We also wanted to make sure they fit our personality and could help us meet our selling goal of getting it under contract before we left Missouri. The best way to do this is by interviewing your potential candidates. Get a feel for them. You’re going to be talking to them almost every day for the next month or two so make sure you like them. And I say like them, not LOVE them. You have to like and TRUST them enough to handle probably your biggest asset. Ask them a lot of questions and take the feedback and use it. We asked ours: How quickly can we get on the market, what kind of sales plan did they have, where would they list us, what kind of marketing tools would they use, could they walk the house and give us some pointers, how much is their sales percentage. When they leave or better, before they get there look at their website. Does it make you want to buy a house? Do they have other homes in your price range or do they only sell million dollar homes?
Basically though, the main things that won us over with our realtors:
1. They brought us a Market Analysis of other homes in the area that we were selling and showed us aa few of the homes in there they sold. They were detailed with prices, features and pictures. This was very different from the 1 or 2 pagers other agents bought us.
2. They had their own marketing person. They focused on their core competency (selling homes, talking to buyers/sellers) and let a marketing person work on her core competency—marketing. That meant there was a person working on marketing specifically for our house versus the agent trying to make time to do it.
3. They had some great marketing tools. Some of the agents just described getting an online presence. These agents went a step farther. They made up packets all about our house for people to take (with full color pictures of the entire listing), they asked us to fill out information about what we loved about the house and what we loved about the community and used this as a free standing display for house shoppers and they sent letters to agents that were showing homes in the area like ours. We felt these and some of their other strategies were the kinds of marketing we were looking for.
4. They weren’t afraid to offer us honest opinions about things we needed to change in the house (yes, that wallpaper really is ugly and needs to go!) and helped give pointers about rearranging things to be more visually appealing.
5. Finally, their rate sounded like a steal for the marketing they did. Basically, when you sell a home part of the profit of your home goes to paying the Selling agent and part goes to the Buyer’s agent. Rates run anywhere from 4% to 7%. So basically if you sell your home for $150,000 you’ve agreed to a 6% rate with your agent they’ll get $9000 and you’ll get $141,000. From that $9000 your agent gets they give a percentage (somewhere around half) to the buyer’s agent. So when you choose an agent ask the rate, but also see if that makes sense for the work they’ll do. When I sold my last house, I felt I didn’t have the best agent out there, but they got 6% and only listed the house on MLS. And now, my fast paced, high selling agent also got 6% and I have no problem paying it.
Join us tomorrow as we explore how to MINIMIZE, MINIMIZE, MINIMIZE!