Hi Everyone—
Whether you’re buying or selling a piece of property, chances are better than good that you’re partnering up with a realtor—and that’s the right move.
Unless you work in the real estate industry yourself, it’s unlikely your knowledge can match the experience or expertise of a seasoned realtor.
That being said, it’s important to remember not all realtors are created equal.
Some come from different backgrounds.
Some specialize in select neighborhoods.
Some focus exclusively on buying whereas others focus on selling.
The point is, if you want the best results for your transaction it’s not enough to partner with a realtor—you need to identify the realtor who will best meet your needs.
So, in this month’s newsletter, I’m going to explain how you should go about evaluating potential agents by using a few lessons learned from my friends at Top Chef.
-Shannon
The Short Story...
***To get the best results, you need to partner with an agent.***
***But determining which agent is the right agent can be tricky.***
***Your agent needs to strike a balance between talent, skill, and flexibility.***
***Start with what you know—eliminate agents who can’t meet your basic needs.***
***As you whittle down the pool, it will become less about skill and more about connection.***
The Full Story...
Real estate agents do a lot more than people realize.
They…
- Research your market
- Handle listing
- Take care of staging and marketing
- Host open houses, walk throughs, and inspections
- Negotiate on your behalf to secure the best deal
- Cross all the t’s and dot all the i’s when it comes to the piles of paperwork that are a part of any real estate transaction
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg—there’s so much more a real estate agent can do on your behalf.
Unfortunately for buyers and sellers, many real estate agents look and sound the same when it comes to their skills and strengths. Every agent you talk to is going to say they’re a great communicator, a tough negotiator, a strong marketer, and—most importantly—committed to getting you the price or the property that you want.
Such similarly can make it difficult to discern which agent is really the best agent for you and your unique transaction.
Taking advice from the show Top Chef
If you’ve never seen Top Chef you’re missing out.
The program first aired in 2006 and is now in its twenty-first season which in terms of television programming puts it in the top 1% of the top 1%—most programs don’t make it five seasons!
I won’t dive into all the delicious details, but the show basically pits 15 to 20 excellent chefs from different backgrounds and with different talents against each other in intense culinary challenges. At the end of each challenge, all the chefs are evaluated by a panel of judges who send one chef home each week until a single “Top Chef” remains.
The point I want you to focus on here is this: all the chef’s are accomplished in their careers, albeit not in identical ways.
Some own and operate their own restaurants.
Some are the executive chef for a restaurant group.
Some own and operate a fleet of popular food trucks.
Some are classically trained in a Cordon Bleu-type culinary school, while others learned to cook at home from watching their grandmother.
It is truly a mixed bag when it comes to the contestants on the show, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re successful within the world of cooking—make sense?
There are a whole lot of “Top Agents” to chose from
If you live in a big state like California or a big city like Los Angeles, you’re going to see hundreds of agents boasting that they’re a “Top Agent.”
The question you need to ask yourself is, “what are they a top agent of?”
Much like the culinary wizards on Top Chef, real estate agents come from all different walks of life.
- Some focus on low-volume, high-price luxury sales.
- Some focus on high-volume, lower-value condo sales.
- Some are multifamily specialists while others are single-family experts.
- Some are masters of the “quick flip” while others are “buy and hold” investors.
- Some hold a master’s degree in real estate management, while others never even went to college.
All the aforementioned agents can claim to be “top agents”, despite their different backgrounds and different areas of expertise. Therefore, it’s on YOU—the property owner—to act like a judge on Top Chef by eliminating potential candidates until you’re left with a single agent who’s truly the right fit.
It’s easy at first
When you first start looking at the top agents in your area, it’s pretty easy to eliminate candidates right off the bat.
For example, if you’re selling a three-bedroom, two-bath ranch house in Boyle Heights, it doesn’t make sense to list with an agent known for selling triplexes and quads in Long Beach even though they’re a “top agent.”
Much like in the real Top Chef, you need to eliminate those “top agents” who lack that critical experience or obvious skill that’s necessary to obtain exactly what you want out of a real estate transaction. To put it in the context of the show, a contestant might be the #1 vegan chef in the United States, but if the challenge at hand is cooking the perfect steak, there’s a good chance the vegan chef—despite all their professional accomplishments and accolades—is going home.
So, you might talk to an extremely talented and impressive agent, but if they do most of their transactions on the other side of the city, they might lack the local (i.e. neighborhood-level) relationships to facilitate the smoothest transaction possible.
The top 5 is where it gets tricky
If you’ve done your homework and examined a large pool of agents (for simplicity sake, let’s say 20), it’s going to be relatively easy to get your list of candidates down to four or five—but then it’s going to get tricky.
In my experience—and much like the chefs on the show—the realtors who make it into your top five are going to be known for their hard work and creativity. They leverage their dogged determination and ingenuity to help people across markets. Yes, they have a true area of expertise, but they also enjoy widespread success.
In other words, while they may specialize in condo sales in Santa Monica, their accomplishments aren’t limited to that one area; they succeed in different locations, with different property types and different price points.
They deliver for their clients when the economy is good and when the economy is bad.
They represent both buyers and sellers with the same degree of effectiveness.
The trouble is that the differences between these final four or five candidates are going to be few and far between. Put another way, when you get down to your final few choices, you’ll need to look beyond reputation and resume to find the right agent.
Finding the right fit
Unlike the primary judges on Top Chef who spent years working in and around the hospitality industry, you (probably) aren’t a real estate professional. That doesn’t mean you don’t possess enough knowledge to be dangerous, it just means you don’t work in the industry day in and day out.
If you take that reality at face value, it means you’re going to struggle to identify whatever few minute professional differences exist between your top agents.
Therefore, once you’ve taken professional disparities as far as you can, you must make your final decision using the one thing that (almost) never lets you down:
Your gut.
You need to meet with your top three or four agents and get to know them. You need to talk with them about your vision for the future and assess how they respond. You need to learn what makes them laugh and pay attention to how they make you feel:
- Confident?
- Optimistic?
- Excited?
- Calm and collected?
In addition to having a laundry list of credentials and accomplishments, the agent you choose should make you feel all of those things and more!
In closing…
Real estate is equal parts art, science, and hustle.
The top agents are effectively data scientists, advertisers, and hustlers all at once.
They measure sales volumes and search for emerging patterns and trends.
They scrutinize other agents’ marketing materials and open houses to see what’s working and what isn’t.
Most importantly, they don’t take days off in the true sense of the word—they’re always working, always grinding, and always keeping irons in the fire.
In addition to getting you everything you want, a top agent will make your life easier, not harder.
So, with that said, I’m here to help. The sooner you reach out to me with your comments, questions, and concerns, the sooner I can help you along your real estate journey.
Give me a call at 310-853-0335 or shoot me an email at ShannonShue@KW.com.
Talk soon!
-Shannon