Questions about working with realtors

[teachermom2834]

We are on our third home and hope to sell and buy our fourth and hopefully forever home in the next few years. I can’t move on it yet but I am a planner and making plans helps when I am impatient. 
 

Some questions about choosing and working with realtors. We’ve done it before but most recently with ones assigned to us by a relocation company so we didn’t really choose. The first time we were super young and used someone Dh had incidentally met. The second time we just went with the biggest name in town. 
 

Some questions- 

1) how do you choose? Word of mouth? Online reviews? Someone you know from church/neighbor/homeschooling etc?

2) what if you are unsure of your destination? We currently live in small city 35 miles from medium size city. We do not know for sure what we want. We are interested in investigating downtown of medium size city, suburban areas of that city, or staying in our current small city. We don’t know and would likely look in all those areas. I feel like an expert in the downtown market won’t also be an expert in our current location (although I realize they could handle the transaction). How do you choose a realtor when you are open to looking throughout a region? 
 

3) We plan to buy first and then list current house. We don’t want the pressure of trying to coordinate both sales. We did that before and felt like it didn’t lead to the best decision making. We want to make sure this purchase is what we really want and not just what we were able to find under pressure. So is it cool to use someone to buy our new house and then someone else to sell our current one? I guess I felt like we would be using the same person for both but maybe that isn’t standard or necessary?

 Also- if we want to start checking out some open houses in the meantime (which might help us narrow the area)do we just make it clear up front that we are just looking and not ready to buy? (I would definitely not take up the time of anyone or be in the way of other potential buyers). But if we just wanted to help narrow our search by dropping into an open house is that ok as long as we aren’t leading anyone on? 
 

We have always bought and sold under duress and we want to be able to go through the process on our own terms this time. So I’m trying to be thoughtful about how we do about it (has always been a combination of crisis and impulse in the past). 

[Bootsie]

We have always chosen a realtor based upon recommendations/word-of-mouth.  If you are looking over a broad area and are not sure exactly what you want or where you want to be, make sure that you are up-front about that and are working with a realtor that is OK with that.  Some realtors want to show you several houses in one day and you pick one of those or they want to move on to another client.  We worked with our last real estate agent for five years before we bought a house!  She was very patient, knowing that we had some quirky, unusual needs; we had a friend who had been in a smiliar situation a few years earlier and recommending the agent we used.

[Loowit]

The first realtor we tried to work with had been a friend of DH's.  He was not very helpful, not sure he was all that motivated to be honest.  We were young and looking for a starter home so he wouldn't have made a very big commission.  We never did find a house with him.

Our second was great.  We did online research and went with one who specialized in first time home buyers.  She was wonderful to work with and went above and beyond when the seller (a bank foreclosure) was trying to play games.  We tried to use her again when we moved a few years ago but she had retired.

Our last agent was an older guy that I found online.  I emailed several agents from different agencies and he was the only one who got back to us.  He wasn't the most personable, but he was great at communication and was a hard worker.  For us the communication was a huge thing.  I wanted someone to keep us informed and get back to us in a reasonable time frame with questions and concerns.

We had to sell/buy at the same time because it was the only way to do the down payment.  It was a very stressful time, and we plan to do things different next time.  We used the same person to sell/buy and it was helpful because he could coordinate both sales.  We closed on both houses the same day.  If we were to sell first next time, which is likely, I don't know if we would use the same agent or not for buying.  I don't think that there is an expectation on their part, but I could be wrong, and it could also vary by location.

When we were in the process of getting our house ready to sell, which took months (years), we did go to some open houses to look around.  We were clear up front that we were looking, but not quite in the market yet, and everyone was fine with that.  I am not sure if that would be the same with the covid protocols and such now.

[Carol in Cal.]

I would start by monitoring Realtor.com and trulia.com for the areas that you are interested in.  Learn what is available, whether it’s selling at listing price or above or below, how fast homes are selling, and what they are truly worth.

I did that the last time we bought real estate, and thankfully it was a slow market with low interest rates, but it really paid off. By the time I started making offers, I knew the true value of the homes in the area at least as well as the realtors did, and I could be pretty stubborn about walking away if the counters were unreasonable.  Over and over I noticed which realtor listed way too high and ended up selling for much less after ages on the market, and also that I would put in an offer that was truly reasonable and what the house was worth, have the selling realtor express contempt for it, and see it sell for that exact price or a little less up to two years later when they got realistic.  

Hence I also knew a bargain when I saw one, and that’s what I ended up getting.