18 (or more) Questions to Ask When Interviewing Your Next Listing Agent

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Published Nov. 5, 2009, in the YourHub.com section of the Denver Post:

I completely sympathize with sellers’ frustration and sense of powerlessness when it comes to putting their home on the market. Should you try to sell it yourself and save on commission? How do you know which agent to hire — and what will it cost? Should you hire your brother-in-law or risk alienating him (and your spouse) by hiring someone more qualified or more familiar with your area?
Perhaps making the process more scientific will help (especially with the brother-in-law issue), so I have prepared a set of 18 questions to ask the agents you interview, including your brother-in-law, which will give you a little more confidence that the choice you end up making is fairest and makes the most sense.

 I’m sorry that space limitations don’t allow a full explanation of all the questions, so feel free to contact me if you don’t understand any of them — such as the first one:

1. Do you subscribe to Showcase service on realtor.com, and will you make full use of it for my home? (Browse realtor.com’s listings in your ZIP code to see how this service can help to promote a listing.)
2. Do you promise to complete every possible MLS field describing my house, and not just the mandatory fields?
3. Will your MLS listing of my house be syndicated to 20 or more consumer websites? (The MLS has a free service called “ListHub” which does this, but each broker must opt into it for his listings.)
4. Will you also post my home for sale on craigslist.org — and how often will you refresh it?
5. Will you produce a virtual tour (what realtor.com calls a “Featured Tour”) of my home? If so, which vendor will you use? (If this agent has any current listings, they should be on realtor.com, where you can compare his “Featured Tour” with those created by other vendors for other agents. You’ll see that their effectiveness varies greatly. I favor visualtour.com’s.)
6. Will you produce a video tour of my home, and can you show me a video tour you have produced for another listing? (If he does videos, they will be on his realtor.com listings if he has “Showcase” service, which leads me to question #7…)
7. May I have the address of one of your current listings so that I can see how it is marketed on realtor. com and elsewhere? (Google the address for “elsewhere.”)
8. How many of your listings sold in the last year, and how many of them expired or were withdrawn without selling? (You may want to have another agent verify this data, since it requires MLS access to do so. This can also help you to verify whether the agent you are interviewing is being truthful with you.)
9. Will you provide a staging consultation to help make my home show its best?
10. Will you do email blasts or distribute printed flyers telling other agents about this new listing?
11. Will you promote my listing at the various weekly Realtor marketing sessions and/or hold a broker open house?
12. (Optional) Will you hold regular open houses for as long as I want you to do so?
13. What is your commission, and will you reduce it if you sell my house yourself (no co-op commission owed to a buyer’s agent)?
14. Will you reduce your commission further if I hire you to represent me in the purchase of my next home?
15. Will I get feedback from you on every showing by you, and will you actively solicit feedback from other agents who show my home and tell me what they say?
16. Will you mail out “Just Listed” postcards so that neighbors and others will know that my home is on the market?
17. Does your company, or you, have a website on which your listings are promoted?
18. How else will you advertise or market my home?

Bonus question: Will you pay a referral fee to my brother-in-law if I hire you despite family pressure?
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The Job of a Listing Agent Is Not to Sell Your Home, But to Get It Sold

Published Oct. 15, 2009, in The Denver Post



There’s a popular misconception that the job of a listing agent is to sell your home. I beg to differ.


The real job of a listing agent — prior to negotiating a contract and representing you through the transaction — is to maximize exposure of your home to buyers and to the agents who represent buyers. Understand this, and you will find it much easier to select the right listing agent, because it’s far easier to compare the marketing skills and practices of different listing agents than it is to compare their selling abilities.

First, recognize that fewer than 10% of listings are sold by the agents who listed them. That’s why we have an MLS. Next, don’t mistake simply putting the home on the MLS (which is all many agents do) with true marketing.

True marketing to other agents as well as direct buyers begins, but must not end, with full data entry on the MLS, beyond those few fields that the MLS requires. It means, for example, putting in room dimensions and locations and using the full public remarks field to describe the home’s selling points. It means uploading ten high-quality pictures, not just one exterior picture. And it means producing a “virtual tour” using a good vendor (I prefer VisualTour.com).

MLS data entry is just the start. True marketing must include non-MLS efforts that are still targeted to agents as well as buyers, such as flyers to the agents’ offices and email addresses. The agent’s listings must be syndicated to 20 consumer sites like zillow.com and trulia.com, and must be man-ually entered on craigslist.org. The virtual tour vendor will do its own syndication, so it’s important for the description on the virtual tour to be more extensive than just captions for each photo.

Then there’s realtor.com, which will carry every MLS listing for free, but only in stripped down format with just four pictures and none of the public remarks from the MLS. The only way to get good exposure on realtor.com is to purchase “showcase” service and then utilize it. Some companies (like mine) buy that service for all their agents, but it’s up to the agent to actually go into realtor.com’s control panel and enter those enhancements.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because most listings are sold by other agents that getting on the MLS is all it takes. It takes so much more, and that should guide you in your agent selection.

How to Evaluate a Listing Agent:
 

Performance Criteria


Of course, you’ll want to know how many listings the agent has (and where), and this you can easily verify online. The real question, however, is how many of his listings have sold in the last 12 months and how many expired without selling. How many homes did he sell himself, including his own listings? But beware: agents know that you cannot verify this data, so you should be skeptical. If in doubt, get a different agent to obtain this data for you.

NOTE: If the agent says he or she has a buyer for your home, make him or her prove it by signing a two-day listing agreement (not on MLS).

Marketing Criteria

Do NOT ask how he will market your home. Instead, ask for the address of one or more current listings. How he markets other listings is an absolute predictor of how he’ll market yours. Google the addresses. Look for them on realtor.com and REcolorado.com and see how they are promoted compared to similarly priced homes.

On realtor.com, make sure that the agent has Showcase service which allows for headlines, 25 pictures, virtual tours, video tours, extensive sales pitch, etc. If he doesn’t have those on his current listings, he won’t have them on yours.