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In today’s market, hiring the right agent to sell your house has never been more important. Hiring the wrong agent can delay the sale of your house for months. You need to interview an agent to learn about their background, to see what they know about your neighborhood, and to find out if they are a good fit with you and your lifestyle.
Here are some important questions you should ask each agent you interview.
1. How many years have you been involved in real estate?
2. Are you a REALTOR and do you have any special real estate accredited designations or certifications? How would those designations benefit me?
3. Is real estate your full-time career or a part-time career?
4. What makes you a better choice for me than your competition?
5. Are you a member of a team? Would I be working only with you or would I be also working with other members of your team? Who are the other members of your team? Who is responsible for what?
6. Do you or a member of your team speak a foreign language?
7. How accessible are you? Will I be given your cell phone, home phone and any other phone number where you can easily be reached? How often will you contact me?
8. Do you just work with sellers, or do you represent buyers too?
9. How many clients are you currently working with? How many are buyers and how many are sellers?
10. How do you deal with disclosed dual-agency?
11. What areas of town do you specialize in?
12. What can you tell me about the demographics of my neighborhood? How will you use this information to my advantage to market my home?
13. How will you determine the appropriate sales price for my home?
14. How are you going to advertise my home? How often will you hold open houses? How will you promote it?
15. What does the listing agreement entail? What are the starting and expiration dates? What’s your commission and how negotiable is it?
16. What haven’t I asked you that I need to know?
17. One blog reader recommended that you ask the agent for a list of the homes he/she sold near yours, call those homeowners and ask them how they liked working with that agent.
18. The most important question you need to ask is…
Looking for an agent that recognizes there rights? Find out who the top-selling agents are in your area now.
Now that you have all this information, what comes next? Read over all the information they gave you. Read over the contracts, look at their handouts and compare each agent. Ask the agents questions if you do not understand anything. You can also email me directly at bpetrey@agentharvest.com too if I can be of help.
What Should I Do Next?
Look At Your Interview Notes
Look at your notes. What did you like about that agent and what did you not like about that agent.
Go To The Texas Real Estate Commission Website
Here is the link: www.trec.state.tx.us – Texas Real Estate Commission – At the top of their home page, you can look up the agent and find information like the classes they’ve taken, their license status and number of years they’ve had that license.
Choose Your Agent
Remember that agents recommended by AgentHarvest are chosen based on their track record in your area. That agent or team was one of a small number of agents that sold the highest amount of houses in your area. Given this information, you really can not make a bad choice. Feel comfortable in knowing that you are only interviewing qualified agents that are capable of selling homes in your neighborhood.
Now Go Out And SELL THAT HOUSE!
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This is an amazingly good blog and thanks once again for posting this kind of information! This is good stuff!
These are really good questions. I would say I wish I had them when I was looking for help, but I was really, really lucky to have a real fighter on my side. He was the most attentive, determined guy I could have imagined beforehand. For everyone else reading this, it looks like you’ve given away gold here!
Tillie:
Thanks for reading and commenting. Without doing an in-depth interview, if you hire a good agent, consider yourself lucky. With AgentHarvest working on your behalf to discover the good agents that sold your neighbors’ houses, and if you use the information we provide on our blogs, and do your homework, you’ll have confidence that you’re making the right choice when you ultimately hire your agent. The work you put into finding and hiring will pay dividends with the convenience and efficiency of working with a great agent.
I think the most important things to ask in an interview is how many houses that agent sold in the homeowner’s neighborhood, and rather than ask for references. I’d ask for a list of houses the agent sold in my neighborhood and call those clients instead. That way, I can find out how the agent behaved selling houses in my neighborhood and price range.
Fred Homes
Architect
Fred:
I certainly agree. Can’t believe I didn’t have it in my list since AgentHarvest preaches about finding local agents everyday. Will be adding that tip first chance I get. Thanks Fred. As far as references, I can’t imagine anyone giving a bad reference, can you?
By talking with neighbors that used that agent, you can find out lots of interesting details, and it’s even better if you know the neighbor. That’s why AgentHarvest only considers agents that sold houses within a 5-mile radius of your home. We’re not really interested in the sales they made on the other end of town.
Thanks again for the addition to the list. I’m sure many homeowners will benefit from your comment.
These are all very helpful questions. I’d have to agree with what Fred said. It’s important to know how many homes they have sold especially in the local area. Thanks for sharing this!
Bill Arnoldi
Owner of FireBall Tech
Hello. I really find your article interesting and useful. I’ve been wanting to hire some agent that can sell my house in months tops. This article is of great help to me. I will follow your suggestions.
Samantha
What can I do about a realtor who just flipped out and said I do not quailify. I need to file a complaint but she is not a licensed real estate agent but has been very nice and knowledgeable but she wanted my personal info to get me pre-quailified but never even called for over a week after getting the info. So I finally called her. I knew I would pre-quailify but she just yelled at me and said since I am collecting SSI and working part time I won’t and don’t call her. Isn’t she breaking codes of ethics by taking my info for mortgage companies and then not contacting me or not telling me who has my info or if anyone does at all??? She knew all about my income and the house I want would be very manageable (less then the one in now)! HELP! did she break codes of ethics?
Stacy:
Sorry to hear about your experience, but if she’s not licensed by the state then she’s not a licensed real estate agent and not be a member of the National Assoc of Realtors. Are you sure she wasn’t a licensed loan broker? If she’s none of these, she’s an imposter if she led you to believe that she was an agent or was acting as an agent. If she performed the role of agent, and was not licensed, depending on the laws of your state, what she did could be described as illegal, rather than unethical.
Given your description of the events, you may be a victim of an identity theft phishing scam. I’d call the credit bureaus and report the incident if you agree with my assessment. Ask them to put a “theft alert” on your report so they can watch closely for unusual activity.
If she is legit and not trying to fraud you, she should be rewarded for declining your business because it sounds like she did you a great favor. I don’t think you would have liked working with this rude person.
I am in Texas and she works at an agency under a broker. I have been working with her for 3 months and she has been very nice and knowledgeable until today. Her speciality is to work with people like me who want to use programs like MAP.
Stacy:
Glad to hear it isn’t a phishing scam, however, if she’s not a licensed agent (real estate or loan officer), she is not allowed to service you other than in a paper-pushing, clerical work kind-of-way without a license. She can not provide advice. She may be “practicing without a license.” That’s the legal term for it. That may be something you may want to bring up to her broker, if I understand the situation correctly from what you described earlier.
If she’s not willing to work on your behalf, you’re best served by going somewhere else. Just be glad she was honest enough to tell you rather than string you along with weeks or months of bad service.
I have already spoken with the lender and will be getting my prequailifying letter and just found a new realtor!! YEEEE! I think the problem is the other woman should not be taking my info to present to mortgage companies. This seems unethical if she is a realtor.
Stacy:
She shouldn’t present your info to anyone without your permission. Distributing your information without your authorization is a serious violation of your trust. She’s required to protect that info, not distribute it. Depending on the circumstances, she may be doing something that could get her and her broker in serious trouble. You should inform her broker of this situation.
Please keep in mind that I am answering your question based solely on the information you provided so I can only answer based on vague assumptions. I do not have the entire story, but one thing’s for sure is that you need to have this discussion with your current agent and you should consider talking with her broker too. The broker needs to be aware if she’s doing things that could get the broker in trouble.
I went through you extensive list of questions to as my broker, there were a few that I would not have thought of asking. Great information,thank you
Harold:
Glad they were useful. I hope you downloaded the questionnaire that had answers that I would want to hear your broker give. The best part of using a list of questions is that you can be sure to conduct the same interview for all of the agents you talk to and that gives you a method of comparison.
Best of luck with your agent. Remember, you hired them and you’re the boss.
For me, being a real estate salesman sounds like one of the hardest jobs in the world. I worked in HR department and this questionnaire is superb and will help get the best agent when all these questions fit certain applicant criteria.
This is a good guide. Having these can speed up the process. It really difficult to ask question you are not familiar with. With these tips it can surely help lots of home owner pick up the right agent.
This is really good guide for us, I totally love this post how you’ve written, I would say I wish I had them when I was looking for help, but I was really, really lucky to have a real fighter on my side. He was the most attentive, determined guy I could have imagined beforehand. Thank you so much for taking the time to discussing it.
Do I need a license to become a real estate agent? Once my mom told me I’d better have a formal training on this because there are this friends who always constantly call me to help them find a house or a land. Is there a proper training to become one?
You need a license before helping your friends find houses. Licensing and educational requirements are different in each state so check with your state’s real estate licensing board’s website for specifics about your state.
Don’t do anything agent related until you become licensed otherwise you’ll be breaking the law.
Nice list Bill. I’m not the most trusting person and so I’ve never really trusted Agents..lol I mean seriously how do you really know that the Agent isn’t simply putting up my house on the MLS and that’s it. How would you truly know if the Agent is aggressively trying to sell your house. I know I had no clue with my first house and come to find out later that after 8 months on the market that’s basically all he did..lol
Stacey:
Sure you can trust an agent, but do it the way President Reagan trusted Gorbachev. “Trust but verify.” I have a hard time trusting agents too. There’s a term used in the real estate industry called “puffing.” Puffing means stretching the truth or exaggerating to get a sale. The fact that it happens so frequently in our industry that we can name it should say something.
My thought is to believe what is verifiable and indisputable. In this case, it’s past sales. If an agent sold the most in a particular area last year, they’ll probably be able to sell a lot this year in the same area. Rather than believe what they say, I like starting my search with proof of what they did.
However, once you hire the agent, you’re not done yet. You have to set goals and measure progress. You have to treat them like employees. Let them know what you expect then hold them to it and follow their progress.
[...] of questions to ask as he interviewed each of those real estate brokers. So, I compiled such a list of questions I thought he should ask each agent he was [...]