Selling your home can be nerve-wracking, especially if you’re looking at neighbors and friends who have recently received excellent offers and sold their homes for more than they bought them for.
However, if you’re not in the real estate business, it can be a challenge to find a realtor that you trust. The realtors all seem charismatic and interesting, but you want someone whose process really sells houses quickly and at a high price.
If you’re in the market for a buyer’s agent, you want a realtor who understands your needs in a house, can find all the available options in your area, and can help you get everything you want for the price range you can afford.
So how do you separate out the realtors who aren’t as trustworthy from the ones who are? Here are three good strategies, drawn from insights that HomeLight has gathered over time.
Draw From Among Top Agents
Real estate agents make it easy to find them, but not always easy to find their statistics. Great real estate agents beat the averages when it comes to how many days their properties are on market, how many homes they’ve sold in the past year, and how long they’ve been working in the particular neighborhood where you live.
Finding these kinds of stats can be daunting, but HomeLight’s “find an agent tool” lets you evaluate profiles of real estate agents in your area who have already stood out for their high performance. It’s a shortcut to successful agents, and it saves you a lot of time.
Talk To Them About Their Data and Results
Once you get in touch with a real estate agent through the Homelight contact form, you still get to talk things through! You want to know more about the agent’s approach to marketing the home and what they think they can do given your home’s unique features. Are they already positive that they can put the time and effort in to make your home’s sale a success? You’ll get a lot from talking to them, especially if you talk to them about the facts of the past year and the market in your particular neighborhood.
Don’t Settle For the First Person You Talk To
If the first real estate agent is very personable and professional, you should still stick with your gut and try talking to one or two more agents. It’s hard to evaluate what you’re looking for in the interpersonal aspect of the real estate relationship until you’ve seen how a few people handle it. One of the best ways to find a trustworthy agent fast is to fill out a quick contact form for three agents in your area that look promising – even a short phone call or meeting for coffee can really give you a ton of insight into the agent as a person.
With these tools, you can narrow your pool of possible agents in less than 30 minutes, with only a little bit of due diligence to find the perfect fit after that. With high-performing agents, you can rest assured that they’ve effectively sold houses in similar areas very recently, giving you peace of mind.
