George Berry, Residential Area Manager, asks how to choose an estate agent when selling your home.
How should you choose your estate agent? In many cases a vendor will ask at least three estate agents to give a marketing value of their home and this is very sensible for a variety of reasons, not least you may get a wide range of values but also if you just have one, you may not like them.
In the first instance, what criteria makes you choose the agents to call in?
Often the first, and most powerful is, personal recommendation. If a family member or friend has used a particular agent and they have been happy, then this is often seen as the best endorsement and equally applies to many trades within the service industry.
Secondly, the appearance of success. Looking on the portals for who is selling around you is clearly a good indicator of an agent who may have a strong database of buyers for properties like yours.
Thirdly, there is reputation and loyalty. If you are aware of a long-established brand that you see as synonymous with good service or you have used them before and been happy then, that it is a big pull to calling them back in again.
These reasons make you choose an agent to call in initially. What then drives you to pick your agent of choice?
There will always be some people who have their head turned by big values and low fees but these are rarely the best credentials for choosing an agent and often it backfires down the line. The best reason and it always has been and still is, is gut instinct. People buy people. A brand gets an agent through the door but the valuer is the person we buy into and gets us to sign the terms of business.
The individuals that genuinely care, and it is easy to tell those from agents that are disingenuous, are the ones that you know will look after you. The agents that advise you as if they are advising their friends and family instantly convey an integrity and create a feeling of loyalty. Stop and really focus on what and how a valuer speaks. If everything revolves around ‘I’ and not ‘we’, then you know they see themselves as an island in their company and not part of a team. The agent that references their team shows they not only care about you as a client, but the people they work with.
Loyalty used to be such a powerful word and have real depth of meaning and significance. However, it seems to stand for very little these days. An agent can give excellent service and be praised by a client when buying or selling a property and then suddenly ,when they come to sell, it appears with another agent and that original agent wasn’t even called in. Agents often give free advice to many clients over the years and yet that can count for nothing when they appoint another agent to act for them without any real genuine explanation. Why is this? As a society we have become very fickle and that infiltrates so many environments. It permeates workplaces and even at home, affecting decisions we make.
So going back to the basics and ditching superficiality, we should make decisions on facts and gut instinct and not what we are led to believe. Base your choice of agent on the reality of what is in front of you and how you feel. If an agent is sitting in front of you, in your home and looking you in the eye and you feel a strong sense of warmth and caring rather than vacuous sales spiel then that is the agent you should choose. They can’t control the market but you know they will have your best interests at the forefront of their minds and that is all you can really ask for.
This article was first published in the Diss Express.
