What do you look for when looking for a real estate broker or agent?

What do you look for when looking for a real estate broker or agent? It’s an interesting

Saratoga Rock

question. To help frame this discussion  I did some research on-line. As a buyer or seller, you want and need someone with a deep track record of success, a person of integrity and dedication. Of course, just about every broker or agent will mostly fit this description, but as in any business, there are various levels of performance.

Consider this; you walk into a brokerage and most of them have so many agents that meeting and interviewing them all is near impossible. How then do you choose? The answer is you really don’t, it just sort of happens. Maybe, if you’re really working at it, you’ll meet a few agents from a few different brokerages and then you make your decision. Most people don’t. Maybe you’ve seen some advertising from a particular agent. Perhaps, if you’ve asked around,  you’ve heard good things about that person, this is a great start. However, for every good recommendation you may also hear a less than satisfying story. The goal should be to stay objective and do your homework and not let any one data point influence you too much.

But what if you don’t know anyone? You walk through the door of the firm and you’re greeted by someone. Then what? You’re introduced to whomever happens to be available, or maybe it comes down to whose turn it is in the rotation. Or maybe they quickly size you up and one agent steps forward. Or you’ve spoken to someone on the phone and they’re expecting you. If you’re lucky,  you meet the owner or manager of the firm and they assess your needs and match you up with an agent that fits the bill. To you though, it’s still not really clear what or who you’re getting unless you ask.  Real estate can be a messy, emotional business and most of us just don’t want to deal with it. Maybe you’re the rare person and you’ve done some advance work and researched agents on-line and you’ve gotten a sense of who they are based on a little bio they might have on their website or blog. But how do you really know if they’re great at what they do?

In other businesses, if you’re hiring a salesperson, you look at their resume, years of experience, prior experience, and if you’re smart you ask about their close rate — how successful they are at sales — and they back it up with data and references. In baseball, we can look at batting averages and other stats to tell us about who we have in the game. In music we want real rock stars, people who deliver multiple hits over a period of years.
Most businesses don’t want to hire average, they want above average people that deliver above average performance. You want a rock star Realtor.  Realtors should be very willing to post their stats and qualify themselves; some do, but most don’t. It would be empowering to see a display of close rates on websites — how many listings they take per year and how many they close, year over year. Add to this an analysis that shows the average  dollar gap from initial asking price to the final sale price. And, how long on average the given agents’ listings were on the market before sold, or before the listing was pulled and why. I’d also like to be given a list of references. There is a simple gap in knowledge here that can be easily filled to everyone’s advantage, so why not do it?

If you were going for a job interview for a sales position your potential employer would be asking very similar questions. When hiring a broker to help us buy or sell a home we should be just as demanding. After all, you’re hiring this person to perform a specific task  and you’ll have a very close relationship with them so you need to know you can trust them and that they are the best person for the job. Finding out by trial and error can be very damaging in terms of opportunity cost. It’s important for you and for them to set reasonable expectations for a successful and satisfying experience. This cannot happen without complete transparency from both parties.

Most brokers and agents have all this info available and you need do nothing more than ask, so ask. In this age of transparency in business, the real estate industry has some work to do to get caught up, and if other industries are an accurate bell weather, it can only help improve the performance of real estate professionals as a whole. The existing model is the old brick and mortar legacy that cloisters information and knowledge. The digital age, with its free distribution of information and knowledge is the path forward and has already greatly changed the real estate landscape. Savvy brokers today are learning how to turn this to their advantage and I see an emerging trend of sharing performance stats.

There is no reason today to have to dig for this information. Google is giving away all kinds of data and performance analysis, and like it or not, we’ve all come to expect this level of transparency. Trulia and Zillow provide real estate market information by region and point out national trends and it makes us all better and smarter. The same will be true of agent stats. For every broker/agent who has a bio blurb up on their website they should also list their stats, otherwise we are left to guess about how being active in the community and having a family and loving golf, let’s say, translates into being an effective realtor. It’s nice to have a sense of the person as a human being but we need more to work with when it comes to business decisions. Most people are good and the nicest are often great Realtors. So, if you’re good at what you do, why not put your results out front along with your personal interests and beliefs? It can only help you attract more customers.

My observations here are derived from looking at Realtor websites across the country from NYC, to Kentucky and California and Saratoga too. Given the trends in business today, I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that if the current real estate business model is going to remain viable, Realtors are going to need to get comfortable with a greater level of transparency and accessibility in all aspects of their business.

What do you think?