Advanced Personal Finance

Our family is going to be in the market for a new house soon. We’re also selling our current one; that can mean only one thing. Well, two things, really: a real estate agent and lots of fees. The thought process for why we’re using a realtor is for another post, but suffice it to say that’s the direction we’ve chosen.

Since we’re going to be giving the person who sells our house a great deal of money (in the form of commission), we want to be absolutely sure this is the right person to sell our house. Thus, we need to interview agents.

Our search for a good agent was greatly aided by a program offered through our bank, USAA. It’s called Mover’s Advantage (once again, I’m not being compensated by USAA - I just really like them). We used it to buy this house (our first).

Mover’s Advantage does three things, in practice:

1. Provides a USAA coordination person as kind of a project manager to smooth any difficulties
2. Provides a lead on a good realtor, both in your current geographic area (if selling) and your new area (if buying)
3. Gives you money back. They kick back a flat rate based on the sale/buy price of the houses

The Interview Questions

Once USAA got us hooked up with a local realtor, we (ok, my wife) set up an appointment for her to come over. In the meantime, I called her with some preliminary interview questions. Here’s what I asked.

1. How long have you been in the business? You don’t want someone who’s just starting out and has listed two houses so far.
2. Where are you ranked in your office or firm? How large is the office or firm? Obviously, you want someone who is at the top of the sellers list.
3. What’s your list to sales price ratio? The realtor should know this immediately.  It’s a measure of how accurately he or she prices houses, among other things.
4. When was the last house you sold? Again, goes to experience, especially in the current market.
5. How quickly did your last house sell in this (or similar) market? The longest? Gives you a feel for how aggressive the realtor is in moving the house.
6. What’s the commission/fee schedule? No matter what a realtor says, this is negotiable.  However, lower is not always better.  Consider that a home listed for full (7%) commission will attract more attention from buying agents.
7. How will you advertise the house? Especially important are online portals.  Also, will the ads have pictures or other graphic walk-throughs?  If so, who will do the photography?
8. Will you be at closing? The only acceptable answer is ‘yes.’
9. How do we contact each other? You need access to the realtor immediately, not through an answering service.
10. Can you show me local reporting data (especially schools data)? This should be readily available.
11. Give me two examples of a listing of yours that did not sell.
    
12. Can I have the names and numbers of the last three people who listed with you? If the realtor balks at this, keep looking.  You want to talk to people who have sold houses with this person to find out the bad and good.

We’ve used this list to interview just one realtor so far.  She passed the ‘phone interview,’ so an in-person meeting is next.  I’ll let you know what comes out of that.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 10:54 am and is filed under Home & Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.