Selling Your Home? Ask Your Agent These 5 Interview Questions
As far as real estate transactions go, selling your home can easily be among the most stressful. When you’re selling what’s probably your biggest piece of capital, there’s a lot of pressure on sellers to get things right — even if it isn’t your first time selling a home.
The job of a Realtor® or listing agent is not only to help you sell your home for its highest value but also to help you feel as little stress and as much confidence throughout the translation as possible.
Identifying a Realtor® or listing agent that can both earn you top-dollar from your sale while making your client experience as enjoyable as possible can be challenging.
To help you out, you can rely on these five questions to guide you through the agent interview process and choose the best real estate representative for you and your goals.
1. What Is My Home’s Current Market Value?
No matter who you hire to help you sell your home, the very first step in every Realtor’s® process should be to provide you with an accurate estimate of your home’s current worth.
When talking about selling a home, your pricing strategy is perhaps the single most influential element of a successful home sale, which is why it’s vital you and your real estate representative develop an astute understanding of your home’s market value.
If you get the sense that your listing agent has rushed their estimate of your home’s value, hasn’t done substantial market research, or is inflating or overestimating your home’s value to maximize profits, you simply shouldn’t trust them to devise an effective pricing strategy.
The importance of formulating an effective pricing strategy for your home sale is crucial to your success. Learn more about pricing and how to determine what your home’s current market worth is here:
2. What Services Do You Provide?
After you’ve settled on an effective pricing strategy, the next best thing your Realtor® can do to ensure your home sells for its top value is to help you enhance its best features and diminish its negative ones. How? A comprehensive preparation plan.
Statistics show that homes that have been thoughtfully prepared for sale — think things like cleaning, decluttering, painting, and staging — end up selling for much more money than homes that forego these valuable preparatory steps.
It’s very seldom that we neglect these value-added services for our selling clients because we’ve seen first-hand just how effective they are at transforming a home and its final sales price.
Whether your Realtor® or listing agent provides these preparatory services themself or they rely on a vetted list of home service professionals to help them out, you should always expect some effort to be made on their part to enhance your home’s look, feel, and functionality.
Learn about the extensive list of value-added services we provide our selling clients by reading our Seller Services page here.
3. How Many Homes Have You Sold Before?
While experience isn’t necessarily everything when it comes to selling a home, it certainly is a useful tool for your Realtor® to have on their side.
Across every stage of a home sale — between pricing, preparation, marketing, negotiating, and ultimately closing a deal — having the wisdom from an experienced agent to guide you through the process always makes things easier for all parties involved.
There are a lot of details that go into selling a home, especially when it comes to selling one for its highest value. Knowing what works, what doesn’t, and how and when to make crucial decisions only comes from experience. Although a younger and less experienced agent might have a lot of enthusiasm, sometimes experience can be more valuable.
Fall is one of the busiest seasons in the real estate industry — especially for sellers. But why would listing your home at the same time as the competition bring better results? Learn more about Why Fall Is The Perfect Time To Sell Your Home here.
4. How Often Do You Work In My Neighbourhood?
Although a Realtor® may have vast experience in selling homes, what’s almost equally as important as their volume of sales transactions is their experience working in your particular market.
While many homes across different parts of your city, town, or region might be similar, every individual neighbourhood is different, and more importantly, every individual buyer within that target market is different too.
That’s why it’s always advisable as a seller to opt with a Realtor® with extensive experience working in your home’s neighbourhood. Ideally, your Realtor® should be able to offer you their seasoned professional insight into the intricacies of what it takes to successfully sell a home in your neighbourhood.
Additionally, they should be able to provide you with detailed information about your neighbourhood’s current real estate climate, and what demographic of buyer is most likely to be interested in your home. All of these pieces of information specific to your home’s neighbourhood are extremely valuable to selling your home for as much money and as efficiently as possible.
Locational excellence is just one of the many factors your should be looking to identify when searching for qualified real estate assistance. Find out some of the other factors by reading our related post about What To Look For In A Brokerage.
5. How Much Exposure Can You Get My Listing?
No matter how great your home selling strategy and preparation has been up until now, it won’t count for much unless your listing appears in front of the eyes of potential buyers. That’s where the power of marketing comes so strongly into play, and a great Realtor® or listing agent will know exactly how, where, and to whom you should advertise your home.
At the bare minimum, you should expect your home to be advertised on public listing services like Realtor.ca and the like, as well as your representative’s brokerage and personal online listings pages. From there, other outlets like social media advertising, paid targeted ads, and client newsletter coverage are also common tools for getting the word out to buyers about your home.
In the modern real estate industry of today, social media is an invaluable tool to help connect potential buyers with new listings and great real estate agents. Get our advice on the best Social Media Tips And Tricks For Real Estate Agents here.
Of course, traditional ‘For Sale’ signs, pamphlet distribution, and other print ads also shouldn’t be overlooked. At the end of the day, not everyone who might be interested in buying your home uses the same few outlets to learn about new listings, so diversity in advertising here cannot be understated.
For premium listings, however, it isn’t always as much about the amount of exposure your Realtor® can get for your home, but what quality of exposure they can. Most luxury, high-end homes don’t benefit from being seen by every buyer currently on the market, just the ones that would realistically be interested in purchasing it. And for the highest ticket homes, that can often mean venturing far outside of your geographically local market for international investors.
Whichever route your Realtor® advises you to take, it should feel perfectly tailored to your home, your target buyer demographic, and your personal real estate goals.
Are you ready to take the next step towards listing your home for sale? Find out how we can connect you with a Realtor® that can help you exceed your real estate ambitions by clicking one of the useful links below!
