Don’t rely exclusively on friends and family for referrals if you want to find a Realtor to sell your house. Instead, search online for the right combination of low commission rates, track record and overall reputation.
Make sure the Realtor you’re considering is sufficiently experienced by checking out the agent’s deal history and current listings. Lastly, don’t overemphasize perceived local knowledge when selecting an agent. It’s just not that important relative to other factors.
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Your friends and family likely don’t know very much about real estate, nor do they understand how high broker commissions or closing costs can be.
Be especially careful about your friends or family pushing a distant relative or acquaintance on you who happens to be a Realtor. Do you really want to feel obligated to hire your aunt’s son-in-law, Donnie, to work on your home sale, just because he’s related?
Furthermore, it’s way too easy for your friends and family to make referrals based off of first impressions.
After all, it’s not their own home that’s being sold so why would they bother doing a deep dive on the character, reputation and experience of the acquaintance they’re about to recommend?
People always want to be helpful, or at least give the appearance of being helpful. As a result, your friends and family will want to give you a referral even if they don’t actually know whether the Realtor is good or not.
After all, they’ll assume that you’ll interview the guy or girl and do your own due diligence right? Given this logic, why not just pick a name out of a phone book instead?
Just remember, asking your friends and family for help to find a Realtor to sell my house is the worst piece of advice out there, yet it’s the first piece of advice you’ll find on the numerous articles on the web on this topic.
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You’ll need to filter potential Realtors by both cost (i.e. commission rates) as well as general reputation and track record. Without a method to filter applicants, you’ll be overwhelmed with too many choices because there are roughly 2 million licensees in the United States, and over 50,000 licensed real estate agents in NYC alone.
We emphasize both price and reputation because you don’t want to just go with the lowest cost broker if it means settling for an inexperienced or incompetent agent. Nor do you want to go for an agent with a sufficiently robust track record and deal history if the proposed commission rates are simply unreasonable.
One rather effective approach is to build an initial list of agents by filtering for the lowest commission rates. Thereafter, vet each of the Realtors on this list by reviews and track record until you identify the most compelling combination of cost and quality. If none of the agents on this preliminary list have an acceptable track record, cast your net slightly wider by looking for slightly more expensive brokers.
A great way to vet an agent’s reputation is by exploring online reviews. We recommend doing a deep dive on the most detailed written reviews as opposed to comparing agents based on the average numeric rating.
This is because some brokerages still engage in shady black hat SEO tactics like purchasing fake reviews which can artificially increase their numeric review ratings.
Potential giveaways that a Realtor’s reviews are manipulated include the following:
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Most of the agent’s reviews have no written content alongside the rating
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Lots of reviews were written around the same time
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The reviewers haven’t written any reviews for other companies
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Most of the reviews are one sentence or perhaps just a few words
Ideally, you’ll also want to vet a Realtor’s video reviews. Video reviews are obviously much harder to fabricate and therefore carry much more credibility.
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Perhaps the most important way to prove that a Realtor is experienced and is active in the industry is to peruse his or her current listings and deal history. You can easily find both on many real estate search websites that provide profiles for agents.
Not sure where to start? Simply Google the Realtor’s name or the brokerage name and you’ll find tons of reviews, profiles and deal history summaries.
Often times the brokerage will have a profile page on their own website for each agent.
Other times, it might be more reliable to check out popular, local real estate search websites such as Zillow. These sites offer comprehensive summaries for each agent, including a biography, contact information, current listings and completed deals. In NYC specifically, an agent’s StreetEasy Profile Page is particularly insightful.
It’s also important to make sure the brokerage you’re about to work with is busy and has current clients and customers. The real estate market changes rapidly, so the last thing you want to do is hire a Realtor who hasn’t closed a single transaction in the past six months. This is akin to putting a recently retired NBA player who hasn’t hit the gym in six months into your starting lineup for the playoffs! You want to hire a broker who is negotiating deals and showing properties on a daily basis. Not someone who pulls out their real estate license once a year.
Pro Tip: When do houses come on the market? Read our article to learn more about the optimal time to list your property for sale after you’ve interviewed and chosen a listing agent.
Local knowledge is one of the most over-hyped, garbage piece of advice on the internet when it comes to how to find a Realtor to sell my house. The truth is, there’s nothing that a competent real estate agent can’t learn about your neighborhood or building from a quick conversation with you and a walk around the neighborhood.
If you live in a co-op or condo building, don’t be trapped into thinking that you must work with the “building broker,” i.e. the parasitic broker who lives in your building who thinks he or she deserves to sell every property in the building. What’s worse is these parasitic building brokers are often on the board, and as a result may even try to intimidate residents to give them their business. Truly unbelievable.
The truth is, a broker who has never done a deal before in your building can easily learn everything there is to know about selling in your building within 30 minutes. What’s so hard about having a conversation with a broker and telling him or her about the nuances of your building? Plus, coop board packages and purchase applications do not differ that much from building to building, let’s not kid ourselves here.
Lastly, it’s easy for any competent broker to take a stroll around your neighborhood to immediately get a feel for it. Plus, you as the seller can simply tell the broker what there is to know about your neighborhood. Bottom line, you do not need to restrict your Realtor choices to those who live in your building or who claim to be intimately familiar with your street. Frankly, none of that matters!
Pro Tip: What are the best home sale sites for NYC? Read our article to learn more if you’re planning on selling property in New York’s highly specialized real estate market.
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Disclosure: Commissions are not set by law or any Realtor® association or MLS and are fully negotiable. No representation, guarantee or warranty of any kind is made regarding the completeness or accuracy of information provided. Square footage numbers are only estimates and should be independently verified. No legal, tax, financial or accounting advice provided.
