Experience is Key to Success in Real Estate

The agent you hire should have at least five years experience as a full time Real Estate agent.  Our industry has a high turnover because it’s like starting your own business.  Most new businesses, (80%) will fail in the first year and 80% of the those remaining will fail within the next five years.  If the agent has survived the first five years than he or she has worked hard.  This agent has had easy transactions, difficult ones, ones from hell and they are still in the Real Estate business. This agent has most likely has seen market swings or at least changes in market supply and demand.

Some agents will “wow” you with the number of transactions they have done in the last year or their company’s “market share”.  This can be misleading because this agent might be a Broker of record for this office.  So any agent in the office is working under this Broker.  The Broker is responsible for all of the agents and their deals, the fact is that those are the Brokers deals, but this fact can be used to sell themselves.  I recently showed a listing for a buyer investor.  I was floored by the number of listings this listing agent team had signed, 58!!  I did some research and found that these listings were located all over the state.  No one agent knows the market in the entire state.

The listing agent didn’t accompany the showing, the property was not prepared for sale and was grossly overpriced.  My guess is that this agent works very hard to get listings and does a tremendous amount of marketing to get those listings. However, not servicing the listings for sale.  Is this what the home owner is expecting when they agreed to hire this agent?  I don’t think so.