However, when we moved, the first realtor we had at our new location was awful. We told her our requirements, one of which was that the house needed to have everything my wife needed on one level since she has arthritis and can’t really do stairs. Her response was “well, do you *really* need that?”, we told her yes…to which she responded “well, that’ll make it hard”. We should have fired her then, but we didn’t. We looked with her for several weeks, and i don’t think she knew how to handle a cold and calculating arse like myself (hey, it’s a lot of money I’m going to spend on a house…I’m not buying it unless its right). She kept saying “you’ve got to be honest w/me on what you think so I know what you want”. But at every house we went into, I always went over what I liked, what was ok, and what I hated…she just didn’t pay attention. It became obvious to us that she had no business acumen, and just wasn’t the right agent for us, so we fired her.

We found another agent a few days later, and emailed him, and said we wanted to interview him. He asked what we were looking for, and he gave us information on about 40 houses that night for us to look at and talk about when we met him in 2 days. Some of them didn’t have everything on one level for my wife…but he put it together quickly, and we hadn’t even met yet to really discuss things, so I wasn’t too concerned. When we went to interview him, we told him the everything for my wife on 1 level so she didn’t have stairs requirement, and why. He took the stack listings from us, went through them and started tossing out the ones that wouldn’t work saying that they wouldn’t. After talking to him and going to look at a few houses that day, we decided he was the agent for us and hired him. We found our current house in a week.

Yes, good agents are worth it, but the bad ones aren’t.