Choosing an Agent to Sell Your House

Choose an agent in the local area. Do you want to deal with an agent who has to drive 40 minutes any time something comes up?
Choose an agent with local market knowledge who understands daily trends and statistics in your area. Ask them specific questions on the market such as the number of listings in the area, average under contract time frame, average number of days to close, number of current listings compared to 1-2 years ago, list to sales percentage and days of inventory. If they start fumbling their words and have no clue what you’re talking about, do not hire them.
Choose a full time agent. A part time agent with a 9-5 job will not have time to answer 100s of phone calls causing your home to NOT sell for the highest price possible. Did you think about this when you chose Uncle Brad as your agent? You had no clue Uncle Brad rejected the 50th phone call for the day from a buyer because he’s too busy working his other job. Well thanks to Uncle Brad, you just lost an extra $50,000 on your home.
Do not choose a cheap agent. Many agents whip out their cell phones to take pictures and videos of a house. They should lose their license and never be allowed to sell again. This is pathetic on many levels when you’re attempting to sell a person’s highest valued asset in their entire life. Do you want buyers viewing ugly pictures of your home and deciding not to view your property? Thanks to part time agent Uncle Brad taking pictures with his phone, you just lost another $25,000 on your home. Now you’re up to a $75,000 loss but you have no clue. You think Uncle Brad is doing an amazing job. Great photography and videography can make the ugliest house look like a million bucks. Photos lie and that’s the point.
Choose an agent with local trustworthy contractors so in the event you decide to make repairs or receive repair requests from a buyer, you can save thousands of dollars.
Choose an agent that isn’t afraid to ask for the highest and best offer in a multiple offer scenario and pin buyers against one another. There are usually a hundred sob stories from buyers to convince you to sell your house to them. Are you in the therapist business or the making money business? If you want to listen to sob stories and choose a buyer with this strategy, then I have no problem sharing all the stories with you from buyers and their agents. Ultimately, it’s your house and you can do as you please. My advice is to take your emotions out of it and choose the best offer. The best offer is not always the highest price. Terms of contracts go a lot deeper than price.
Don’t choose an agent who offers to list your home as a “coming soon” listing on Zillow. These are snakes in the grass that manipulate ignorant sellers for their own gain. Their goal is to double end the deal to receive commission on both sides of the deal. These snakes will cause you to lose 10s of thousands of dollars in better offers. By marking your home as coming soon on Zillow before listing it on the MLS, these agents are hoping to receive calls from buyers who are not represented by other agents which in turn gives the snakes a chance to double end the deal before it goes on the MLS. By going under contract before it goes on the MLS, these agents are severely limiting the amount of offers you may receive. For example, one of these snakes may say they brought you an offer from an unrepresented buyer for $400,000 which was the full list price but what they fail to tell you is if you listed it on the MLS, you could have received an offer for $425,000.
Don’t choose agents with hidden “transaction fees” to cover team costs. These hidden fees are prevalent with teams.
Don’t choose agents that force you into long term contracts with no exit clauses. All of my contracts allow sellers to cancel the listing agreement any time before the house is under contract with no penalties or fees. This gives sellers a peace of mind to not be trapped into 12 month contracts.

If you want an honest agent, call me at 480-779-8579. Good Luck! S.L Taxes & Real Estate is the best real estate, tax preparation and accounting business in the Laveen, Tolleson, South Phoenix Arizona area.