How to Find the Right Real Estate Agent?

Selling or buying a home is one of the crucial decisions of your life and you will always want someone reliable, transparent and trust worthy as your real estate agent. As such, we will be looking at few of the important aspects you need to check when selecting a real estate agent.

How to select the right real estate agent?

Look for Referrals

Apart from checking the review and rating websites that give you an idea about how good a real agent is, the best thing you can do is look for referrals. The biggest compliment any real estate agent can get is from a past client in the form of referrals.

If your family members or friends recommend an agent who helped them buy or sell their property, you can safely assume that you are appointing the right person for the task.

Check Experience

Real estate transactions tend to be very complicated and there are different disclosures to be made and documents to be completed. Moreover, buying or selling the property for right value is quite important. Thus, you need to select a real estate agent who has good experience in helping people sell or buy properties in your preferred location.

Moreover, you need to ask the real estate agent some questions such as what is the average sales price to list price ratio, average time for which the property is on the market, and what is the total time it takes to close a deal. The aim of such due diligence should be to judge whether the real estate agent has good track record of getting the right deal for its customers.

Fiduciary Responsibility

Examine whether real estate agent seriously implements his or her fiduciary responsibilities. This means that the agent should always give his or her client’s best interest higher priority.

This means that apart from the usual details such as the number of bedrooms you want in your new home to attached garages and other similar details, the agent will keep note of other details that you may miss out on.

For instance, an experienced real estate agent will check for other probable issues such as roofing problems, leaks, furnace and mold issues. If you get information about these problems early on then you will be in a better bargaining position and be able to save thousands.

Similarly, when selling a home, you will have a broad idea about how much your house is worth. A good real estate agent will have data about comparable sales in the locality and tell you the approximate price for which you will be able to sell the home.

Lastly, local agents will have data about demographics of the neighborhood where you want to buy your new home, schools, crime rates, and similar other factors.