9 Questions to Ask When You Hire a Real Estate Agent in Gig Harbor
Hey, Paige here, top Gig Harbor real estate agent, popping in to give you the lowdown on getting all you deserve when you sell your home and hiring an agent is the first step.
Do I hire a discount agent or not? It’s a sellers market…I could save money, sell my home myself, and save tons. This is the question that sellers ask themselves or friends when they start to consider who to hire to sell their home. The truth is, even in a HOT market you can leave a substantial amount of money on the table.
When I went to sell my own home I considered taking an early offer at what I thought was a great price of $850,000. Then I stopped myself and took the advice I give to every seller: prepare it right and let the market decide what it is worth. We accepted an offer at $910K, $60K over what we expected to get. The small amount of savings in agent fees was nothing compared to $60,000 more than we thought we could get.
The current economic status of home purchase power is seemingly unlimited, interest rates are incredibly low, AND there is a ton of liquidity in funds for buyers to guarantee purchase price, making comps rear view mirror statistics that should be for informational purposes only. The price of your home is merely a starting point for an auction-style sale, and you need a full-time agent in your corner to help you through the negotiation, contract nuances, low appraisal challenges, and protecting yourself from future lawsuits. Plus, a quality agent will present your home in a way that is a heart-stopper for buyers—the type of listing that buyers can’t stop thinking about and buyer’s agents cry when giving the news “we won” after making earnest money non-refundable, paying tens of thousands over ask, and waiving all ways to exit the contract….and probably giving the seller a free rent back for months. This is what a good agent can do for you, all while protecting you from any further litigation.
And the runway to getting your home ready doesn’t have to be overwhelming if you hire the best agent for you.
Here are 9 questions you can ask to make sure you are hiring the best agent to represent your home, brought to you by top Gig Harbor real estate agent, Paige Schulte.
Here’s a quick story before we get to the good stuff.
I represented a buyer on a For Sale By Owner recently and got a $22,000 reduction in contract price 5 days before closing. You read that right…SO MUCH MONEY off the price that the seller was counting on.
Here’s how it went. The seller listed their home, received 3 offers, and my buyer’s offer was THE BEST. What the seller did not do is negotiate a low appraisal contingency. When the appraisal came back it is was lower than our contract price, so I was able to re-negotiate with the seller and get a lower price for my buyers. Had the seller had their own agent they could have avoided this hiccup in the transaction process and pre-negotiated how to handle this situation.
MLS contracts are binding contracts and are complicated if you aren’t reading them everyday, plus they literally just changed the language on over 20 forms so you want a FULL-TIME agent on your team that knows the ins and outs of the contract language to protect your price.
If the seller had an agent we would not have been able to reduce the price of that contract, but they just simply didn’t know the terms they were working with.
Selling your home is the easy part…getting the contract to close is much more difficult than most people realize.
Now, the good stuff:
1. What area do you specialize in?
This is incredibly important and here’s why: a local expert will have physically been inside homes that are comparable to yours and can get you to that magic listing price that helps you get the most amount of money in the least amount of time. Overpricing in any market feels like catching a falling knife. It’s dramatic, I know, but trust me when I say you want someone local to help you price your home so you don’t linger on the market or leave money on the table.
Hiring local will help you prep your home in record time. Our team has a VIP spot on every contractor list you can think of—we network and support local so you can drop our name when you need a roofer, carpet stretcher, landscaper, window washer, plumber. Heck, we even have our own Facebook sales expert to help you unload your items or store them in our local storage space. Hiring a local full-time agent will help reduce overwhelm when you are getting your home in tip-top shape.
A local expert will also know how to sell the neighborhood, micro-area, and overall city. For example, once I know the intricacies of your home and share them with buyers and agents, I also have stockpiles of blog posts and videos that help sell Gig Harbor and what makes it special about living here and I can share these with out-of-area buyers and agents. A modern digital marketer will have backlogs of information to help sell the lifestyle that your city provides and that your home is built in.
Finally, a local agent will have local relationships. They will know the other agents in the field, they will know the agents who have the buyers, and they will know from working with their own buyers what buyers are looking for and the temperature of the market. Understanding the local nuances will help you negotiate a sweet offer at a great price.
2. Do you work full time? How many buyers and sellers are you working with currently, and have you closed homes for clients in the current market?
Is your agent working IN the business or are they simply “licensed to sell homes”? In a tense, hot market you want an agent who has experience with the pressure cooker they will be in when your home hits the MLS. Can they keep up with the phone calls and technology that is now being used in a pandemic era? If your agent is doing this at a discount and as a side hustle, when your home hits the market you could be missing opportunities due to lack of communication with other agents, lack of attention to detail, and lack of experience with the new NWMLS forms that just came out in February of 2021.
Finding out if they have closed homes for buyers and sellers in the current market will help you identify if they are winning with competitive offers, understand the new forms, and are experienced in negotiating multiple offers. A long-time agent in the business can be an inexperienced agent in the current market, as the recent shift in the way we market homes, the climate of the seller’s market, and the intensity of the price escalations could overwhelm an agent who isn’t working in their business right now.
Don’t be afraid to ask how many sellers they are working with and if they have the bandwidth to take on serving your home. If you expect them to provide the best in modern marketing, make sure they have the funds to back up the media and staging. With the inventory being as low as it has been, some agents are discounting their services AND have little funds to invest in presenting your home in the best way to attract the highest offer. Homes are seeing $50,000-$225,000 OVER ask when they are presented in the best way online, so don’t give up a 1% commission to save a little—it can cost you a TON.
3. What are your communication requirements and work hours?
Meeting your needs should be a top priority. Do you work odd hours, do you hate texting, or do you need to meet in-person to sign documents? All of these communication elements are paramount to feel supported through your home-sale journey. Our team’s number-one priority is communication—you’ll never feel ghosted when you partner with Paige to sell your home in Gig Harbor.
4. What is the current state of the market in Gig Harbor?
A local full-time agent will bring you the stats and figures, not just “it’s a hot market” or “it’s crazy out there.” They will come at you with stats like “it’s a 320% sales ratio,” “55 total homes on the market as of 4/3/2021,” and “455 total homes sold in the past 6 months.” There are currently 30 homes below $800K on the market, 33% less than last year, and showings are up 250%….that’s a data-driven agent who will probably be able to nail down the market value of your home to the dollar because they are following the trends. You want an agent who shows you the stats, not just tells you.
5. Who is the buyer for this home?
Once the agent you are interviewing gets a chance to walk through your home and hear its best and worst features, if they are tuned in with the market they are likely able to identify who the buyer is. This will help inform their marketing for your home. Will they be targeting the King County market, California buyers, second-home buyers, or move-up buyers looking for more space? Knowing who they are marketing to will help them with media production and social media reach as well as human-to-human networking with the agents who typically work with the ideal buyer for your home. When you hire a real estate agent to represent your home you want them to treat it like a media production with an ideal target market. You need to hire a marketer.
You want to hire an agent that’s not just great at marketing themselves but also cares about marketing YOUR home. I go into production mode when I sign on a new listing—I love the challenge and experience of bringing a home to market.
6. What do you charge and what does that include? Are there any fees that the seller has to pick up for the marketing of my home?
The top in the real estate business offer staging, professional photography, video, 3D Matterport tours, cleaning, and access to local home prep experts. Some charge additional for these services and some don’t. My business plan includes investing in every home as we prepare it for market and that cost is absorbed into my commission that you pay me.
If your agent is going to stage your home, who pays for that? If they do, look at some photos to see the quality. Are they using the best in the business, or are they checking a box to say they staged but their styles are out of date?
If your agent is not staging, is that the best thing to do to get the most for your home? Sure it will sell, but will it sell for all the money it deserves? Agents stand to gain a lot when your home sells, so they should be investing in every home that they list. If your agent plans to bust out their “newest” iPhone or take photos themselves, think harder about your experience looking at homes online and the ones you are attracted to. Homes with dark horrible photos sell for less, but staged homes sell quicker and for more money every time.
Ninety-six percent of buyers start their home shopping online and they are picky AF about what homes they are stepping into due to COVID and the competition that is out there. No one wants to waste their time on a bummer home.
7. What is your unique marketing strategy for a home like mine?
Let’s face it: some homes are harder to market than others. A modern real estate marketer will sit with your home and you to really identify the unique selling features they can highlight to gain momentum with buyers. Do we need to throw a broker party to showcase the home, does the listing agent need to be at the showings to highlight hard-to-see features, should we do a video with the owners talking about the history of the home to help sell its character? Finding an agent who will invest the time into marketing your home will help you get the highest profit.
The top agents are busy, so make sure you feel comfortable with how much time they are going to spend nurturing the runway to get your home to market.
8. What strategies do you have when reviewing offers and multiple offers?
The average Gig Harbor home is attracting 4 offers. Listing agents should have the time and bandwidth to nurture the questions from buyers and agents when the home makes its NWMLS debut. The calls are excessive and non-stop, so having an agent who has the time to get the buyer’s agents the information the buyers need to make STRONG competitive offers is essential. Big Tech companies are notoriously horrible at fielding phone calls for buyer’s agents, resulting in missed offers—but hey, they gave you a discount.
How does your agent present offers, how are they protecting you against lawsuits related to waiving sections of the contracts in the current market, and how are they protecting you from fair-housing violations? These are all very important questions as housing is such a large asset and emotional decision for buyers, especially in the current tense market.
You are going to want an agent who has the bandwidth to be a call center, showing time approver, document emailer, and stellar communicator for you so you stay informed and well represented throughout the process, from listing to closing day.
9. Do you have local contacts to help me complete the tasks related to getting my home on the market quickly?
We can actually finance your repairs at no charge, with no interest up to $25,000 to help you get your home market-ready. The most prepared home wins the most offers, and I can help you with that!
Does that agent you are interviewing do enough business to stay at the top of contractors’ VIP list? Will their photographer call them back, or do they have a relationship with a stager who can squeeze them in on your timeline? If a major area of overwhelm is packing your home, do they have a solution for you? For example, we offer an organizing expert to come help with selling items on Facebook and we offer a local storage unit for donations so you don’t have to wait for furniture banks to fit you in. Both of these purging and packing options are provided by our team at no cost to you.
How proactive is your agent? The offers that are garnering the most money are the ones that leave few questions on the table for the buyer. Title info, septic and well info, HOA documents and supporting material, disclosures at the ready—the more a buyer has in hand about a home, the more they will spend. This takes a seasoned professional to gather and present all this information in a way that is accessible to buyers and buyer’s agents prior to accepting offers. This is also how you can tighten up contracts so you can get buyers to waive more times: serve it up in advance and they will put more on the line so you have a smooth-like-butta closing.
I repeat myself here: the current economic status of home purchase power is seemingly unlimited, interest rates are incredibly low, AND there is a ton of liquidity in funds for buyers to guarantee purchase price, making comps rear view mirror statistics that should be for informational purposes only. The price of your home is merely a starting point for an auction-style sale, and you need a full-time agent in your corner to help you through the negotiation, contract nuances, low appraisal challenges, and protecting yourself from future lawsuits. Plus, a quality agent will present your home in a way that is a heart-stopper for buyers—the type of listing that buyers can’t stop thinking about and buyer’s agents cry when giving the news “we won” after making earnest money non-refundable, paying tens of thousands over ask, and waiving all ways to exit the contract….and probably giving the seller a free rent back for months. This is what a good agent can do for you, all while protecting you from any further litigation.
Don’t skimp on hiring a beast of an agent. They don’t have to be jerks, but they do have to be full-time real estate marketers to get your home top dollar and protect your profits. We are already seeing lawsuits out of California and King County due to the squeezing of buyers. Discount agents are less likely to understand how to achieve the highest price for your home, with the best terms AND while protecting you along the way.
If you have questions about listing your home, let’s chat. Call me at (253) 313-4093 or book a call at your convenience—here’s a direct link to my calendar.
Want to learn more about selling your home in Gig Harbor? Call me, Paige Schulte, top Gig Harbor real estate agent. I am here to answer all of your questions (and I won’t stalk you).
If you want to get started on getting your home ready to sell, download my FREE 30-Day Guide to prepping your home for market.
As always, thank you for stopping by!
Hugs and Happy Homes,
Paige
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