Hiring a Marketing Agent to Sell Your Home

In my two most recent articles (see Staging Your Home to Sell and The Danger in Over-Pricing Your Home), I shared my thoughts with you on the importance of correctly pricing your home to sell, and ensuring that it is attractively staged, or “merchandised”. Both of these steps are critical to the timely sale of your home at the highest market price possible – under any real estate market conditions. Yet the most critical ingredient for success is the agent you select to sell your home in the first place.

What selection criteria should you use? The problem is that most of us know at least one person – likely a friend or relative – who is in the real estate business. Even more of us know several real estate professionals. I’ve often heard folks struggle to decide who among their friends, relatives and acquaintances should get their listing – and their main concern is that they don’t hurt anybody’s feelings. Please stop and think: is this how you would select a doctor, an attorney, an accountant or another professional? Hopefully your answer is a resounding “no”! Therefore, doesn’t it make sense to similarly apply a set of stringent selection criteria to determine the most qualified professional to sell, that which for many folks is your largest financial asset, your home?

Here are a few truisms for your consideration: real estate professionals are not all the same! They are not interchangeable. Each does not have the same education, skills and experience, or marketing and negotiating ability. In fact, there are some fundamental prerequisites you should look for to help you begin eliminating candidates for your consideration:

• Your agent should have a Realtor^® designation after his/her name – at a minimum. To become a Realtor, an agent must take an ethics course every three years – and pass an exam. Does this mean that a licensed real estate agent who is not a Realtor is unethical? No – but it’s noteworthy that some agents go the extra mile to be held accountable to a higher set of professional standards than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts requires to maintain a license to practice real estate. Advanced training (you know, the other funny letters after the name) is even better. Additional training is proof that the agent values continuing professional education and ongoing self-improvement.
• Your Realtor should be in full-time practice. He or she should not be someone who dabbles on the side to supplement their income from their primary full-time job. Why? Because they won’t necessarily be available to show your home privately in a timely manner while at their full-time job, or develop a strong network with other full-time Realtors who will help sell your home by bringing their qualified buyers to see it. Skill and competence develop over time with a good deal of sales experience – not a mere fraction thereof. If “practice makes perfect,” lots of sales experience makes for an even better agent! Part-time practice on the other hand: well, I think you catch my drift.
• You want a good listing agent, right? Wrong! You want an outstanding marketing agent!This isn’t a matter of mere semantics. Marketing agents develop thoughtful, customized, marketing proposals. Listing agents are more apt to give “listing presentations” that are usually more about them, the number of properties they’ve listed and the virtues of their firm’s “brand name” as opposed to their own strategies to get your house sold as quickly as possible while netting you top dollar. (Caveat: “Top dollar” should be interpreted in the context of current market conditions).
• A listing agent is primarily interested in one thing: getting listings. The more the merrier! While this in and of itself is not a bad thing, have you ever asked one of these folks how they plan to market your home? Do they know the difference between marketing and advertising? Who will show it privately, and within what time period following a request from a buyer agent? We’ve all seen agents who advertise a multitude of listings at the same time. If your listing agent is overwhelmed, you suffer the loss of potential buyers!
• When I’m not showing my own listings, I’m invariably working with buyer clients. I’ve not always had good luck in getting my calls promptly returned by agents with – in my opinion – too many listings to be able to effectively market each one of them. If and when I do get a return phone call, I’m invariably told – especially in some notable suburbs – to “get the key from the lock-box”. Or, worse yet – “come to our office to pick up the key!” Folks, I’m here to tell you that your agent, or a very well trained team member, should be present at each and every private showing.
• Note that I stated a very well trained team member. An agent who is “covering” for your primary agent should be as familiar with every minute detail of your home as your primary agent. A buyer agent and his/her client will otherwise walk into and out of your home with no more information than they’ve already gleaned from the MLS or LINK description. A good buyer agent has many detailed questions to ask. So if your agent isn’t there in person to answer the questions while simultaneously emphasizing the positive attributes of your home, he or she is simply not doing a good job. Of course, this then begs the question: exactly what is being done to earn their professional fee? A “for sale” yard sign and a key in a lockbox are not sufficient, especially in a buyer’s market.
• Demand to see what your agent has written in MLS and LINK, and demand to have them augment the information if there are fewer than 10 photos, a weak lackluster description of your home that does not set it apart from others, and/or the lack of a visual tour or dedicated website. Additionally, ask your agent about the strength of their online presence. On how many national and international websites will your home be marketed? A sharply increasing number of buyers now look exclusively at online for homes as compared to hard copy newspaper advertisements.

One final truism: You get what you pay for. Hire a discount firm and you will receive discount services. Pay your agent less than the norm for your community (I’m not promoting any kind of price-fixing), and unethical buyer agents will show other properties similar to yours – rather than yours – especially if the supply of available homes exceeds the demand. If you successfully convince your agent to lower his/her professional fee, congratulations! You have just hired a weak negotiator! Any professional who is readily willing to cut their own income will invariable encourage you to settle for a lower offer, rather than strongly negotiate a higher sales price on your behalf – count on it. Finally, since all agents have fixed costs, what line item do you think suffers most when you ask them to reduce their professional fee? If you guessed correctly that the marketing budget for your home will suffer, I’ve made my point. If not, I gently invite you to read this final paragraph once again.