How to find a good seller's real estate agent

Question

The forum is full of posts about finding buyer's real estate agents and how to determine that they are good at working with investors. These are good at finding you great deals to buy.

Now my question is, how do you find a great seller's real estate agent? If you already had a great relationship with an agent then you would likely use that agent but what if not? What qualities would you be looking for in the agent? How would you interview the agent and what questions would you ask?

John Warren · Answer

@Leo Kotschenreuther as @Bob Okenwa mentioned, good agents tend to also be the ones who respond to you. If an agent doesn't call you back for weeks and weeks, move on to the next one! You can also check out their body of work to see what kind of buy side and list side deals they have done recently. Most agents keep up with their zillow page enough that you can see their closed transactions there.

Leo Kotschenreuther · Answer

@John Warren and @Bob Okenwa thanks for your advice!What I really take away is finding an agent to sell your house is similar to finding a property manager to rent your house to tenants. There are some great questions and blog posts about questions to ask your property manager, I will just adapt them to the different situation.

Bob Okenwa · Answer

@Leo Kotschenreuther

Building a good rapport with an agent is vital and you should be looking for someone who has a marketing plan outside of "sign in yard, list on MLS". You want to make sure this person is responsive as there's a ton of agents that are horrible at returning calls/texts/emails.

Make sure this person knows the area and can point out good comps and good reasoning as to why you home is worth X amount of dollars. I've seen too many listings where the agent looked like they threw darts at the board when deciding on a price and then proceed to list a home with 6 bad cellphone pictures with people and pets in the background and then wonder why the house hasn't had any action in 4 weeks on the market.

John Warren · Answer

@Leo Kotschenreuther you are right that BP is very buy side focused, and a lot of the content seems to miss the fact that you will eventually sell pretty much any investment property. If you have a solid agent who you have built a relationship with, you should probably start there. If you don't have a go to agent yet, it would make sense to speak to several of the top performers in your local market.

You can definitely ask questions about your agent's marketing plan to make sure they have a good feel for how to market your property in your specific market as well. There is definitely more local knowledge that comes into play on the list side of things.