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4 Signs You Need a New Real Estate Agent
By Leslie Cook MONEY RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
Is it time to break up with your real estate agent? Here’s how to decide.
Hiring a good real estate agent means having a trusted mentor in your corner, ready to guide you through the ins and outs of the housing market. Hiring the wrong one, on the other hand, can lead to frustration, wasted time and heartbreak.
Like many people, I found this out the hard way.
After my mother passed 10 years ago, my brothers and I brought in a listing agent to help sell our childhood home. We knew we were in trouble when the agent casually remarked that she got into real estate to see (and judge) strangers’ homes. Worse, she aired this detail in front of two veteran buyer’s agents, making it clear that we were at a disadvantage.
Real estate agents have a fiduciary duty to their clients, meaning that loyalty, providing full disclosure of transaction details, taking reasonable care of and listening to their client are part of the job description. Still, accidentally hiring a lousy one — and the head-scratching experience like the one my family encountered — are all too common.
The truth is, it’s hard to suss out whether an agent is worth your time and money if you’ve never worked with them before, especially if you’re a first-time home buyer or seller. But in today’s tough market, where inventory is limited and prices are high, it’s crucial to find a skilled and experienced agent — and recognize when you’ve hired a dud.
“Not all professionals with the same license are created equal,” says Alex McEwen, founder of McEwen Realty and broker associate at Selling Utah. “Having the right professional in your corner is worth its weight in gold.”
Here are four signs it’s time to let go.
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View RatesThey lack polish
Here are the nuts and bolts of how the early stages of a home sale typically goes down. If you’re the seller, your agent will book some time to explain every step of the process from listing to closing. They’ll have you walk them through any upgrades you’ve made to the home, outstanding maintenance issues and how much you’re hoping to get for the home.
Next, they’ll do some market research on similar properties in your neighborhood and come up with a reasonable listing price. Even before your home officially hits the market, your agent should be working diligently to make the sale as quick and efficient as possible; creating a tentative calendar of showings that works for your schedule, coaching you on how to artfully arrange your belongings before the open house and, ideally, hiring a professional photographer to take listing photos.
If you’re the buyer, your agent will guide you through everything from setting a realistic budget to navigating the closing process.They’ll find properties that match your needs, help evaluate your options and negotiate on price and concessions to land you the best deal.
In either scenario, you should always feel like you’re in good hands. If your agent makes you feel uneasy about their ability to do what you’ve hired them for, or you’re doing a lot of legwork yourself to bring the sale to fruition, you need to hire a new one.
They’re bad at communicating
Maintaining consistent and open communication is paramount to building strong relationships with clients.
When you’re in the thick of a home search or sale, your agent should touch base with you by phone, text or email on a near-daily basis. For sellers, that means letting you know as soon as you get an offer, and helping decide what to counter with. For buyers, it means checking in with you periodically with updates on any offers you’ve submitted, and recommending strategies to make them more attractive.
If, on the other hand, you always have to reach out to your agent for important updates, or leave message after message before they finally respond to you, it’s time to make a break for it.
They’re pushy
If you’re a buyer, your agent should kick off your home search by asking you to create two lists, one for essential features your new home must have, and another for features that would be nice to have.
Once these lists are complete, your agent will use the local multiple listing service (MLS) to find homes that match your criteria. While you can search the MLS yourself, your agent has access to a wider range of listings, including off-market properties..
Your agent will then schedule showings of potential homes. During these tours, they should highlight the property’s strengths and point out areas that may need to be updated or repaired. Ideally, you should tour several homes to find the right fit. No matter how many properties you visit, your agent should never push you towards buying a particular home, especially if it doesn’t fit your criteria.
“A real estate agent is not [there] to sell you a house,” says Bret Weinstein, CEO and founder of Guide Real Estate in Denver. . “They’re there to ensure you buy the right house for you and your family.”
They don’t know how to negotiate
When it comes to negotiating, there’s always some wiggle room.
A knowledgeable agent can tell you about every potential concession at your disposal, and take the reins when lobbying for one. They have expert knowledge in local housing market trends, and the ability to rattle off data points on everything from your neighborhood’s median home price to the average number of days it takes to sell a property on your block. And they can confidently evaluate whether a purchase offer is on point, and what kind of offer to counter it with.
“If your real estate agent is not giving you the proper expert advice or helping you assess the risk and upside, you’ve got a bad apple,” McEwen says.
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Leslie Cook is Money's lead real estate editor, covering news stories about mortgages and how rate movements affect the housing market and writing and editing stories that inform our readers about real estate trends and how they affect homebuyers and sellers. Leslie writes a weekly newsletter, Money Moves, that covers a wide range of real estate topics in addition to her weekly articles. Her work has been featured on Apple News, MSN and ConsumersAdvocate.org. Leslie has been covering the mortgage and real estate industry at Money since 2019 and has interviewed industry leaders, such as Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, and Glenn Kelman, CEO of brokerage Redfin. She has been a guest on the This Morning with Gordon Deal radio show, interviewed by The Mortgage Note, and served as moderator for ServiceLink’s State of Homebuying webinar. While at Money, Leslie has contributed to several of Money’s rating and ranking features, including Best Places to Live, Best Places to Travel and Changemakers. She has also played a major role in researching and selecting Money’s Best Banks rankings for the past four years. Before joining Money as a staff writer, Leslie was a reporter for Caribbean Business Newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, covering human resources, telecommunications and computers. She graduated cum laude from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in history. The research and interviewing skills learned there have contributed to Leslie’s ability to provide accurate information on her area of expertise and elicit informative responses from her interviewees.