Choosing the right real estate agent can be a daunting process for those new to selling in the Rockhampton and Gracemere property market.
With so many agents to choose from, it’s hard to know if you’re making the right choice with all the noise of review sites, awards and testimonials flooding your feed.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but you’re not going to know if you made the right choice until the end of the transaction!
This is especially true in a hot market.
A hot market entices droves of green agents chasing the ‘property gold rush’ and also gives inexperienced agents the ability to fly under the radar with property selling faster with little effort.
What they don’t understand is how much work is really involved in achieving an outstanding experience and result for their clients.
While you may have a pleasant experience–and yes you achieved a result–do you really know whether it was the very best the market was prepared to pay?
How would an extra $5K, $10K or even $20K+ in your back pocket sound? I reckon that would come in pretty handy! This is what separates outstanding agents from average ones.
An experienced agent has the skillset and training to go that extra mile and negotiate a better deal for you. After all, that’s what you are paying us for!
What can you do to ensure you’re not getting a dud agent to sell your property?
Read on for my 3 tips to help you choose a great agent to represent you!
Tip #1 – Do your research and interview multiple agents
Not all agents are equal! Some may be shouting they’re the best, but once you dig a little deeper into their stats, they’re not as crash-hot as they make out to be.
I suggest you shortlist a few agents (3-4) you see that are making waves in your local market. Note how they present themselves and their strategy to get you a great result.
Do you connect with them, do you feel comfortable around them, do they respect your time, do they demonstrate excellent market knowledge?
These are all things that can be indicators of how they will act around buyers of your property as well. Trust your gut — If something sounds or feels off, it usually is!
Keep in mind that once you’ve signed the Form 6, you’re locked into a legal agreement for up to 90 days!
While most agents are ethical and will let you out of the agreement if your issues can’t be resolved, it’s the dodgy ones that will use the 30-day notice period against you to stall the change to another agency.
This means even more lost time that is critical to your campaign!
So I can’t stress this enough… Do your research before making that final decision and signing on the dotted line!
If you read to the end, I’ll share a bonus tip on how to research agents’ performance to help you determine if they’re a “Serial Overpricer”.
Tip #2 — Check through honest reviews from the agent’s past sales.
With the rise of agent review sites, it seems like just about everyone is a 5-star agent.
Reviews come in as the second most-trusted source in the decision-making process — just short of word-of-mouth recommendations.
When it comes to millennials, they trust online reviews MORE than they trust recommendations from friends and family!
So, reviews are great for giving insight into how an agent operates. In saying that, be mindful of sites like Rate My Agent. While they ARE genuine reviews from verified past clients, they don’t always tell the full story.
Did you know that agents are able to cherry-pick who to send the review requests to?
If the transaction goes pear-shaped, they can choose NOT to send it out the request to avoid spoiling their track record!
Clients also can’t leave a review here on their own accord — it must come from an agent request. That doesn’t sound very unbiased, right?
I suggest you check out platforms like Realestate.com.au to research your agents. It is an open, unbiased platform that allows only verified people that were involved in the transaction to leave their feedback — good or bad — without agent influence!
Tip #3 – The Overpricing Trap: Be mindful of the smooth-talking agents promising values that sound too good to be true.
When you’ve booked a property appraisal, agents will have different prices of where they believe your property value sits in the current market.
After a walk-through to assess the property condition and any improvements that have been made, the agent should supply you with a detailed Comparative Market Analysis (CMA).
A CMA is a report of similar properties that have recently sold and others currently for sale that will essentially be your competition — should you go to market.
From here, you will receive a price range estimate with recommendations to help maximise the saleability of your property.
The Overpricing Trap
Be wary of the “Overpricing Trap” from agents that provide drastically inflated values in the hopes of winning your business — also known as ‘buying the listing’.
If your property is unique to what is currently available and the agent can genuinely justify how they reached the higher figure AND present a plan that backs up their recommendation, then go for it! Test at the higher price point to see how the market responds.
If your home has a more common layout with other similar properties sitting on the market, then it is hard to justify pricing high with the hopes that a unicorn buyer will appear.
Look, we all want the best price for our property, but sometimes it’s just not quite worth what we think in the current market.
Try to keep emotion out of your decision-making. That’s easier said than done when it comes to decisions about what is likely your greatest asset! The best thing you can do is to logically process all the information and recommendations presented to you.
When you see a higher price, the emotions can start running wild and excitement builds when thinking about how that extra money could help.
You sign the Form 6 and now you’re locked into an exclusive agreement. Marketing gets paid and the property launches with an OK response, but over time no one is making offers or showing up to the open homes anymore.
The market just isn’t seeing enough value for the higher price point!
Then the agent starts hitting you with price reductions until someone finally makes a lowball offer.
With no other interest or offers to negotiate with there’s no leverage in the transaction. This is a sad reality for many sellers — getting backed into a corner financially and having to accept a poor offer.
This is how overpricing can cause severe issues to the impact of your campaign and hurt the final sale price.
It’s far better to list at a competitive price that generates buyer interest in the first few weeks of your campaign. It protects your list price and gives us agents the ability to negotiate with multiple parties to achieve a higher sale price!
The whole “price higher because the buyer will try to lowball me” might be great for Facebook Marketplace, but it’s a terrible strategy for selling your home.
Buyers in the market are educated more than ever. They know what properties offer value and what’s unrealistically priced, so you don’t want an agent that’s out of touch with what’s happening in the marketplace representing you.
In closing…
I hope this has given you a few tips on what to look out for when choosing your real estate agent. In the end, you want to be confident they have your best interest at heart.
For those who made it this far, here’s my bonus tip for researching agent statistics in your local property market!
Visit Domain.com.au and click on the SOLD tab. Search for your preferred Suburb or Region — I’ll search for the Rockhampton Region for this example.
In the search results, click on the recent property sale you’d like to view and scroll down to “View full property history.”
Then scroll down to the property history section!
This will show you what the property was initially listed at versus what it was sold and how long it was on the market for.
For this property, I was able to achieve our owners $11,000 above the list price — a great result!
Price alignments are sometimes necessary to bring it in balance with what’s on the market. But if you’re noticing a trend of higher launch prices versus a lower sale price over many listings, you might be better off looking at another agent with better statistics.
If you have any questions about the current real estate market, I’m just a phone call away. You can also “Get an Appraisal” right here for an honest and accurate market appraisal on our property!
– Melinda
