I recently lost out on a listing to another local agent, which is fine, and part of the nature of the business. There are a lot of agents out there and this gal knew the prospective client for 40 years while I had known them for 5 years.
What did kind of throw me off as the client told me about their decision was his interjection that the other agent claimed that her firm had the highest volume of business in the area and that was part of his decision making. I don’t know about other agents but I track pretty closely that kind of info because I’m highly competitive and I work for one of the largest real estate organizations in the world. In the King County area the RE/MAX offices that I’m affiliated with (Metro Realty and Eastside) are usually #1 or #2 for volume of listings sold so I was intrigued when he tried to make it sound like an undeniable truth that the Windermere folks were the biggest around these parts.
I’d love to see the data that she provided. The stuff I read comes from the NWMLS and is part of their reporting tools for brokers and isn’t manipulated by individual agencies.
As a consumer – how do you compare agencies and agents? I’d love to get your comments.
I’m personally very focused on what the track record of an individual agent is and not just their office. With today’s internet almost all agencies have the ability to leverage technology and some are better at it than others. RE/MAX has 50% mind share in the USA because of their brand awareness and advertising. They also are still one of the fastest growing agencies nationally and worldwide even though they’ve been around since the early 1970’s. Plus, our track record of sales is phenomenal.
The old days of each office having their own listings and keeping those within their ranks is mostly gone because the cooperative brokerage model has taken over and now all exclusive listings go into that bank of data and are available through data feed to all agency websites if the individual agency chooses to receive it. This prospective client told me he was impressed by a lot of things that, frankly, are old school and not true anymore. It doesn’t really matter if an office has 90 agents. How many of those are part time agents and don’t have a large pool of prospective buyers to help sell your home to? I work with a brokerage with 250+ agents but I also know that we have some of the highest volume sellers in the area working in our firm – hence why we are ranked #1 or #2 at any given time. I am happy to say that I am typically up in that high volume threshold but usually within the top 2-5%. I don’t claim to bring in $1M in revenues (yet) each year, but we do a mighty respectable bit of business.
Anyhow, my main question to all of you is the same as what I typed above… How do YOU compare agencies? What is important in your mind when hiring an agent?
