What should I look for in a real estate agent?

[John Kary]

Hi there! I am still ramping up toward buying my first property in the Kansas City area where I live. What should I be looking for in an agent or broker partner? What does YOUR agent help you with most?

For example, does your agent pull rental data for neighborhoods faster than a gunslinger?
Are they your sounding board for deal analysis and running the numbers?
Or is their focus on the logistics of buying and selling smoothly?

I want to make a good choice but am feeling some analysis paralysis. The few agents I've talked with seem like yes-men and yes-women all too ready to help because I'm looking to invest in several properties in the near future.

[Kim Tucker]

I am like Dan - I am a broker, but when those marketers call to help me get more buyer and seller leads I tell them I don't want them - they don't get it.  I am a broker for my own investing business and I advise anyone investing in real estate to become their own agent as well.

Why - first being a buyers agent or sellers agent for a 3 to 6% commission is not an economically sound proposition.  Selling to first time home buyers is awesome because they know exactly what they want - a house in this area, at this price with this many bedrooms.  Listing for an owner occupant is fairly easy, as is listing for the investor.  

But being a buyers agent for an investor is VERY HARD.

What does the Owner Occupant Want - a very specific property, which is very easy to put into a computer and then go look at and make an offer, yes the market is fast, but for owner occupants not nearly as fast as it is for an investor.

What does the Investor Want - anywhere in the metro and a good deal. Now some agents will get "a good deal" but most will not, and it's hard to put that in a search in MLS. As an investor when I bought off MLS, I put in EVERY PROPERTY in AREAS I bought, period and look at every listing, photo, and text to find the houses that might make a good deal - as an investor, working with an agent, you have to do all the work, the agent can set up the search for everything, but you as the buyer would have to pick and choose and guess what, most buyers will not. The buyers' agent, unless they are brand new and have no clients does not have time. So you might look for a brand new agent and work with them.

Owner Occupant Offers:  As an agent, you go look at a few houses and make an offer and negotiate it and usually you end up with a house, at most you make a few offers till you get one on the hook.  And the owner occupant is looking for a house to live in with a certain price tag, not a "good deal"

Investor Offers - As an agent for an investor, you go look at a lot of houses, you make a lot of offers, and usually, they are low.  So either your buyer is low balling the sellers in which case a lot of offers go nowhere, or it is a hot property with a lot of competition and you the offers again go nowhere.  That's a lot of offers to never earn a commission.

Investor Agents Are Not All What they are supposed to be - now this is not the average agent, but my own personal experience.  Before I got my own license I worked with a couple of "Investor Friendly" agents, I was new, I took their advice - one helped us buy some good deals, but omited a lot of info and once he made his $40,000 commission he went on vacation and we never heard from him again.  Another investor called me because his buyers' agent told him that the house she helped him buy was a great deal - which it was, as it sat for a rental, he wanted to rehab and flip, too bad it was not an area where one would actually flip a property.  So, search long and hard for an honest, ethical agent, who will represent your interests and not their commission.  

We finally decided being our own agent was the best course

1. full access to MLS so we can set up searches, go look when we want and spend our time writing as many offers low ball or otherwise as we wanted. You could get this with a buyers agent as well, but you might need to pay them by the hour to do so, and once you have done a few deals, possibly cut them in on some profit to keep them interested.

2. run our own comparables, we spend hours on MLS searching - the average buyer's agent just does not have the time, unless you pay them, and giving you access to their MLS is against the rules.

That said there are a lot of good buyers' agents who work with investors - but most have developed a relationship over time and possibly started as a brand new agent with the investor and learned the investors business.  Most experienced agents are very very very cautions to taking on a new investor buyer client because it takes a lot of time and effort to build the relationship and start doing deals.  Time that that agent could spend on a regular owner occupant buyer and get paid a lot more a lot faster.

Hope that helps and in Kansas City, you will find agents who do want to work with real estate investors who attend the monthly MAREI meeting in Overland Park.  Fairly close to Lawrence.