Selling Tip #3: The 3 C’s of Choosing the Right Agent (Part 3)
Remaining on the real estate 101 topic of choosing a real estate agent to sell your home, this video is entitled ‘The 3 C’s’. It’s difficult to know who to choose, so unless you’ve had a personal recommendation from a friend or a trusted advisor, it can be tough to go through the interview process yourself. However these are the sorts of things you can look out for when an agent comes into your home so that you know who to select.
We always ask our prospective vendors what they’re looking for in an agent think you may be somewhat surprised that not everybody says, ‘An agent that will get me the best price.’ That’s a given; we expect that anyway, so lock it in. It’s things like:
- Someone who communicates with me
- Someone I can trust
- Someone honest with me
The ironic thing is that the agent can’t then say, ‘You’ve come to the right person.’ It must be a recommendation, so choose carefully who you bring into your home in the first place.
The first of our 3 C’s is character. Use your antenna to determine whether or not this agent is a person who honours their word. Is their ‘yes’, yes and their ‘no’, no? Do they do what they say they’re going to do? Character, honesty, reliability, punctuality, integrity – all these things are up to the individual to develop. Yes, we’re all born with a personality, but character is what we grow, and you’ll be able to detect it.
The second C is competence. Are they any good? Are you confident that they’ll get the job done for you? Will they deliver a sensational outcome on the sale of your most valuable asset?
The third C is chemistry. You’ve got to be with your agent, an individual, for a number of weeks until the settlement is final so you need to be able to get on well with them. Something else to consider when you have the likes of ourselves – a small independent company: you’ll be assigned one lead agent and the other couple of agents working for the company can also help sell the home.
With a bigger company and large number of agents, are you necessarily getting the might of every sales agent thrown into your cause? Unfortunately the statistical probability is that the person you’ve dealt with around the kitchen table will have their name on the board as well as on the internet. They’ll be your go-to person which implies that you probably won’t have a team of hungry sales agents backing you to the max to get the job done. It’ll most likely be one or two agents at best. So look into it all – that’s a question worth asking.
Although they’ve previously been mentioned, there are little things to consider: What time is the appointment with your agent? Were they punctual? Did they call you if they were running late?
You will be able to determine those elements of character because that’s an important ingredient, followed by their ability to get the job done and their ability to work with you from start to finish.
In closing, if you have any queries on your checklist or about how to choose the right agent, ask around. Better still, come in and have a chat to us. We’ll give you some sound perspective about making the right decision. Would we like you to choose us? Of course we would but, by the same token, the intent of this video series is to put forward an honest, unbiased perspective to genuinely aid your decision making processes. Thank you and we’ll chat again next week!
