One of the biggest complaints I hear from people looking to buy or sell real estate is the incompetence of their agents. And I agree, one of the main reasons I chose Real Estate after my abrupt departure from Science was because of the complete lack of ability by the agents I have encountered in my life.
It is, whether you want to admit it or not, partly your fault. As consumers most people do less research on the agent they use then the coffee they drink. I ask two questions in a local coffee shop after noticing this problem.
Where is the coffee you’re drinking come from?
What do you know about your real estate agent?
The first was easily answered by two thirds of those questioned. But on their agent I received answers like, he’s a friend of a friend, I know them from church, and a full list of things few of which had anything to do with their ability to help them buy or sell a house. Ask yourself one question, “ If I had a half million dollars to invest on one stock (a $200,000 loan ends up at $560,088.98), would I simply go up to the first friend of a friend that offered help and allow them to invest it for me?” Buying or selling a house is the only financial decision I have found where people are willing to trust this quarter to half a million dollar decision to someone they do not fully investigate the ability of.
The state only requires a person to have high school education to receive a Real Estate License. For many this is true, but for others (like myself) we have gone well beyond that point. There are over 3000 people with a license to sell real estate in the Birmingham area, but only about 650 of those handle more than one transaction a month. This means that the friend of a friend may not truly be as proficient at handling that transaction as you might like. The statement that “all agents are the same” is as ridicules as the statement that “all Restaurants are the same.” No matter how you look at it there are those that you only go to after a few drinks and then there are those that deserve a 5 star rating.
Do the research on not only the agent, but the agency that you hand over your largest investment. While larger companies do have a larger influence as a whole, you are not buy or selling real estate as a commercialized unit. You are buying or selling a single home and on that you should look at how the agency works as a whole to truly benefit the individual agents and in turn the Clients they serve. I saw an add a couple months ago from one of the national companies, it was boasting about how much property they had sold in the last year. So I took their number and divided it by the number of agents they had working for them, it turned out that most months they did half the property of the smaller company. This tells me that either the smaller company is better equipped to help the agents to sell more property or the best agents have chosen to work for this company (or both). When I looked for an agency to work with I looked at the sells per individual agent and the time it took them to sell a home. And while the average time to sell a home in the market is 214 days, I chose an agency that had an average of 90 days. This showed me that not only do some of the agents do well, but as a whole the company is strong and truly works for the agent, and therefore the Clients themselves.
While nothing here says that the friend of a friend or the member of your church is not an amazing real estate agent, it is up to you to ask the questions and to do the research so that in the end you are no-longer one of the many that hates the prospect of buying or selling a home.
