Should I get a Real Estate Agent from the start, or should I look around on my own?

If you are knowledgeable about a region, it wouldn’t hurt to start driving around.  Identify neighborhoods in which you might want to live.  It would be great to visit those neighborhoods at many times of the day, including weekends and here’s why.  Imagine you find the house that  you love and you decide to drive by on Sunday afternoon and stop in on Wednesday afternoon. During both visits, the neighborhood seems peaceful and quiet. You buy the house, and on your first Monday morning there, at 7 a.m., horns blare and tires screech.  It happens that your street is a good rush-hour shortcut around the town’s business district.  There go your peacefull mornings and dinner hours. So, it might be important for you to visit at all hours of the day. In the morning, around lunch time and in the evening.  I am not saying go over there every day of the week in the morning, afternoon and evening.  Just check out an early morning, if you can or if you even care about the issue of a busy neighborhood.  Definitely check out the evenings, especially friday and saturday nights.

If you are the customer who doesn’t want to have an agent in the early stages of house hunting and you have found the neighborhood you want to live in, then give us a call and we can get you into every home that is for sale in that neighborhood, whether the home is listed with us or with another company.  If, however, you are moving to this area and are new and don’t have a clear sense of where you want to live, you can speed up the house-hunting process by asking an agent (that is me ) to take you around.  The agent cannot tell you what neighborhoods are the best or if the neighborhood is high in crime.  That will have to be searched out by you due to legal issues for the agent. Even at the very beginning of the process, it is important to work with an agent you feel you can communicate with.  Search the web if you are out of state or even a current resident, which I believe you already are doing since you are reading my Blog, and learn as much as you can about the agent you might be interested in working with.  You can search their company name, their name, and see what is going on with this agent. (You will be able to read about me following those links.)

Most importantly, when you are looking for an agent, I can’t stress enough that you will not be paying this agent for the work they are doing to help you in your house hunting, negotiating the best deal and closing on your future home!  Your agent, which negotiated the deal to close in your best interest, is paid by the agent’s brokerage.  Some buyers who don’t know this are worried to choose a Realtor to work and be committed to working with because they fear they are paying for them to help.  That is not the case with me.  I have never been paid by our buyers and never will. Just like you interview agents to work with, we interview our customers to work with.  I want to make sure that the communication is good and that way the experience of buying a home will be a joyful one!

If you have any questions, please feel free to call/text or email me.  I would be happy to answer, free, any questions you might have, if I can legally do so. If not, I will share with you real estate attorney’s that can.

COMMUNICATION!

My client doesn’t have this problem with me and is so thankful for it. After listening to what he was saying, I began to think how awful it must be, to be in one of the biggest life decisions, home ownership, and you can’t get a hold of the one person you are depending on…your REALTOR!

I know most of you that are reading this, if you are a future buyer, worry about who you will “hire” to be the one person, or possibly team, to negotiate your transaction and represent your best interests. Many buyers, let’s face it, don’t know how to even begin finding a Realtor or know what their job really is.  Who will they trust? How will the trust be earned? Many are told horror stories about things that went wrong and it is blamed on the Realtor.

When you decide that you want to purchase a home, maybe your having to relocate or maybe you want to downsize or upgrade for more square footage, whatever the reason, you might start off by going to the google search bar and searching “Clarksville Real Estate Agent”.

Vavoom! You have a list of Realtors but how do you choose the “right” one for you? Let’s face it, when searching for that description there will be pages of Realtors and Brokerages. The best one for you might not always be on the first page but maybe the last! I remember when we were at Ft. Rucker, AL and got orders for Ft. Campbell, KY I went online and searched for Realtors.  I found a lot of them and contacted many that caught my eye with their site.  I emailed them and only 1 offered me their information package. She called me once before we arrived to search one weekend but that was it.  We decided to just drive around and see what areas we would like to live in. I had this Realtor’s phone number, so since she wasn’t contacting us we would look around and find what we wanted and then call her, since she is the only one we really had contact with.

That is how we met the Realtor that eventually helped us. She drove into the first subdivision we were looking in. We thought we could do all the work ahead of time and not waste anyone’s time.  Little did we know that is part of the Agent’s job.  It did make it easy to get in the car with her and drive us around to areas we weren’t familiar with.  By the middle of the second day, we were all getting a little tired of looking at homes and decided on a new construction. She helped us get our first home.

But getting back to communication.

With our clients we let them know that they can always reach us and we will get back with them a.s.a.p.  During our interview, we let our customers know what we will do for them and how we will communicate to the end of the closing and then even beyond, if you need us.

I would suggest, again, that you search for Realtors and interview them.  Have them show you their resume or “brag book”. We love the interview process, to share what we will do for our clients.  So if you are ready for an Agent that is reliable, give us a call, text, email or app us today!