What is an "Investor-friendly agent"?

[Drew Sygit]

We see this over & over, again & again - someone posts they need help finding a property and suddenly, every agent out there is "Investor-friendly".

Funny thing is, RARELY do you see an agent sharing what qualifies their claim.

In our experience, +95% of agents only know how to deal with owner-occupied transactions.

So, they have barely an inkling of how to work with an investor to find "deals".

Of course, most of the newbie investors don't know what a "deal" is either, with many of them willing to pay asking, or above asking prices. So, maybe those two deserve each other?

In our opinion, an investor should only work with agents that meet at least one of the following:

1) Own rentals themselves for at least 3 years, at least one of them they bought below market.
2) Have a 3-5 year track record of rental transactions, that they can document.
3) Know how to calculate 1% Rule, ROI, NOI, etc. and demonstrate how to actually apply them to assist an investor client.
4) Have access to tired investors selling their rentals.
5) (what can you add here?)

They should also:

1) Be using the BP Calculators, or some similar type of spreadsheet, to show an investor why a particular property is a good investment, as well as supplying sale & rental comparables to justify what they enter in any Calculator or speadsheet.
2) Know how the Property Class affects expected performance of a rental. Investors should NOT be using a 5% Vacancy Factor on anything but Class A properties!

Looking forward to everyone's contributions & comments...