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Seeing Other Agents
Cate Engel and her husband had been trying to sell their house in Gaithersburg for nearly six months when they ended the contract with their agent.
(By Katherine Frey -- The Washington Post)
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With so many agents looking for work these days, potential buyers and sellers have plenty of choices. Since the buying frenzy ended, people have been taking more time deciding whom to hire. Many even conduct interviews.
"Before, when the market was crazy, they rushed and made an offer, and it didn't matter who they were working with as long as they got their offer in," Porter said.
You might want to screen would-be agents as carefully as you screen dates.
Natalya Scimeca and her husband interviewed two individual agents and one team before hiring Porter. Scimeca didn't want to make the same mistake some of her friends did when they were house-hunting. They relied on referrals to choose their agents. One friend, she said, switched agents at least three times.
Scimeca and her husband also asked friends for recommendations, but they didn't stop there. They interviewed each agent for about 30 minutes. They asked for a list of all transactions in the past year. They also asked for references -- and called each one of them.
"I just thought it would be easier to do a little bit of work upfront because I had heard of friends who had gone through many agents," said Scimeca, 30, a lawyer.
She and her husband quickly ruled out the team because they were reluctant to provide references. The other agent was bubbly and promised to make the process fun.
Porter arrived at their first meeting with a packet of useful information. They chose her because she seemed the most prepared.
"I said upfront: 'This is a business transaction, and we want to make sure this is done correctly,' " Scimeca said.
Of course, it's not always the agent's fault when things don't go as planned.
Sometimes, said Phyllis Papkin, an agent with Re/Max Allegiance in Fairfax County, it's just a matter of timing. Or maybe it was that the last agent could not persuade the client to lower his or her asking price and the new agent managed to do so.
"If the next agent just got lucky and sold it, the seller is going to think it's the new agent," Papkin said. "But it might not have been."
