Choosing the Right Listing Agent to Sell Your Home

There are several areas that you may want to consider during the interview process, which are addressed below. When you decide to interview an agent, this serves as a great list of talking points to discuss.

1. Experience: How long have you been in the real estate business? Do you have additional experience in related fields? Do you work full-time or part-time? How well do you know the area? In what type of sales (luxury homes, foreclosures, commercial, etc.) do you specialize, and in what locations do you work?

The time on the job isn’t the most reliable factor. An agent with less time as a Realtor sometimes actually has more experience, because they close more transactions. That is why the additional questions listed above will help you to better determine experience versus job time. The key is to find out if the agent’s experience and expertise mesh with your needs.

2. Knowledge: What expertise do you have? What is your knowledge of the area and the market? What are homes like mine selling for right now?

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How to Maximise Your Property’s Value

Tips for Selling a House

If you are selling your property then it’s natural to want to try and secure the best price for your house. However bear in mind that you probably don’t want to pay more for a property than it’s actually worth – so why would someone else want to do the same?

The trick to maximising your property’s price is to secure as many viewings as possible. The more viewings you get, the more likely you are to secure an offer. The more offers you get, the more likely you are to get two or more buyers to bid to purchase your home. And if you want to get the best price possible for your home, you want two or more people competing to buy it as that’s the time when most people will pay more for a property than it’s potentially worth.

In a slow market it’s tough to get one person offering to buy a property, let alone two. So to maximise the price, it is vital to understand what buyers want. For example, post the credit crunch, buyers seem to split into two types of purchasers.

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Real Estate Training – Short Sale Lead Generation Tips

In providing real estate training, I’ve been asked many times by agents, “How do I get short sale listings?” Well, there’s more than one way to get them. Right now, I’m only going to focus on, perhaps, the easiest way there is to get short sale listings.

The answer is working your database of people you know for distressed home owner referrals. Since you have a relationship with your database it’s much easier for those in your database to trust you enough to refer distressed homeowners to you. The people in your database already have relationships with those they know that are struggling with their mortgages. They’ve done that work for you already. Doing this is more effective than other methods of getting short sale leads because you end up contacting fewer people before you get a short sale listing.

So, why is that? When you contact a distressed homeowner directly, they automatically have a thick wall around them that you have to break down before they will even start to listen to your message, no matter how great your message actually is for them.

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