If your real estate agent isn’t helpful, they can be more of a burden than anything else, causing delays and making the process more stressful than it needs to be. You may think an easy fix for this would be to filter your search for a buyer’s agent from among some of Illinois’ top real estate agents. While doing this may filter out some of the state’s worst real estate agents, top real estate agents aren’t always the best real estate agents; that’s why you still need a checklist to use as a guide when interviewing your realtor.
What to Look For While Interviewing Top Real Estate Agents
If at all possible, try to meet any real estate agent you’ll be working with for coffee or lunch to ascertain if they’re the right fit. Then, instead of asking them a series of questions, look to determine the following through normal interactions.
Communication Skills
You can start assessing their communication skills even before your meeting by determining their responsiveness to emails, text messages, and calls. When analyzing these skills, ascertain how quickly they are to respond. Do they respond in a manner that answers your questions and is reassuring, or is it a quick, vague response? Do they initiate contact if they want to clarify something or get back to you if they didn’t respond before?
Answer all these questions before the meeting.
Negotiation Skills
You have one of two options to ascertain their negotiation skills, either ask them about it or test their skills.
If you choose to query your top real estate agent’s negotiation skills, focus your attention on how many buyers they’ve helped achieve a sale lower than the asking price and how they went about doing that. You can simply ask them “how comfortable are you at negotiating?” Before pivoting into, “how many examples do you have of negotiating on behalf of clients where the client achieved their desired outcome?”
However, if you want to test their abilities, you should try negotiating with them about their commission. Most top real estate agents pretend that commission is non-negotiable, but it is. As buyer agents, they typically walk away with 2.5% but ask them if they’d be willing to reduce it to 2% and examine their response. Do they provide a reason why they don’t want to decrease it? Is the reason valid? Or did they accept your suggestion with very little pushback?
Willingness to Help
As a buyer, you need support to help navigate this process. Therefore, you should ascertain their willingness to help with other aspects of the search, like researching or recommending schools in the district, finding out about HOA rules, and contacting sellers who have FSBO listings.
This is also the time when you should query whether they have or are willing to work with FSBO sellers.
More homeowners in Illinois are listing their homes using flat fee services like Houzeo, which means your ideal home may not have a seller’s agent, which means you should ascertain if they’d be willing to deal with a seller directly.
Availability
This is another aspect you can test before the meeting. A buyer’s agent that’s willing to make themselves available or is eager to meet you will likely continue that behavior while you’re a client. But an agent that’s constantly inaccessible will probably not have any time to help afterward. But if they do make it to the meeting, check how attentive they are, are they constantly checking their phone, excusing themselves, or trying to rush the process? You should also ask them about how many clients they have currently. Ideally, you don’t want to be the only one as this can signal they’re a terrible agent, but you also don’t want to be one of ten, as they’ll definitely be stretched.
Area of Expertise
During this segment, you want to gauge if your top real estate agent has significant experience representing buyers and how they go about sourcing homes for you to view.
Ask them about the homes they’ve helped acquire, their average selling rate, the neighborhood, and so on, as this will give you an idea if they have any experience dealing with the kind of home you’re looking to buy.
Now that you know how to assess top real estate agents, you should consider an alternative that will help you bypass this process and the commission that comes alongside buying with an agent.
Finding a Home Without a Buyer’s Agent
Just like sellers are using flat fee MLS Illinois companies to sell their homes without paying unnecessary commissions to agents, buyers can use the same flat fee MLS Illinois sellers use to find the ideal homes and get rebates.
One such site is Houzeo.
Using Houzeo, you can browse homes listed for sale by sellers. These homes are typically reasonably priced — something you can appreciate in Illinois’ hectic property market — because sellers don’t have to factor in the real estate agent’s commission.
You can then approach them using Houzeo’s online platform, where you can schedule a viewing, negotiate, and close the deal, cutting out real estate agents and getting a sizeable buyer rebate. For more information, you can check Houzeo Reviews.
This simpler option has become far more appealing to buyers, who realize the benefits of using flat fee MLS Illinois companies to find a home that doesn’t require a buyer’s agent to acquire.
