Most Advice On Picking An Agent Misses the Mark

I was recently on the dumb little man blog which gives good money saving tips. I came across a post on 10 questions to ask an agent before listing your home with them. I have no great bone to pick with the 10 items (they were all sound interview questions), but I do with what was missing.

Like most of these “how to” lists, this list completely missed identifying the single most important quality your new agent must possess for him/her to serve you well…

Experience. You can’t fake experience. You either have it or you don’t.

My definition of experience is not the number of years an agent has been selling homes or his sales volume, but by the number of listing successfully sold.

The National Association of Realtors’ own numbers show the average agent only makes $35,000 a year which equates to about 4-5 deals a year.

By the way, 5 deals at $200,000 each is $1,000,000 of sales volume. So when an agent says he’s a “million dollar producer”, it means he’s average!

After 10 years, the average agent would only have “experienced” 50 transactions. Hardly a number I’d would equate with a seasoned veteran.

If you needed your appendix out, would you want a surgeon who after ten years of surgery, had only done the operation 50 times?

So my advice would be to start by asking the very simple question, “How many houses did you list in the last 12 months and how many of them sold?”

You’ll be surprised by how many agents you can eliminate immediately when they start hemming and hawing on that question. You won’t need the other 10 questions.

I wrote an article which contains more tips on agents called, “How NOT to Pick a Real Estate Agent”…Google it.

It’s everywhere …

Good Luck!

Author: Rob K. Blake
Published April 21, 2007