How to Find a Real Estate Agent to Sell your House

We signed up a real estate agent to sell our house in Denver. We interviewed several brokers (I'd recommend that you do too) and decided on this one for several reasons:

1. He was confident enough that he could sell our house that he offered a reduced commission (3.0% instead of 3.2%).
2. Included in his commission is the cost of an appraisal, professional photos, professional staging, and cleaning of the house prior to photos.
3. We liked how he planned to market our house with a big focus on the Internet (which is how we looked searched for houses in Dallas).
4. His firm was listing several houses in our neighborhood so they clearly knew the area.

I recommend asking the following questions when interviewing a real estate broker.

• How long have you been in the business?
• What % of asking price do you typically sell a house for?
• What is the average length of time a house listed by your agency is on the market before it sells?
• How many agents does your firm have?
• How many houses is the agency listing right now?
• How do you plan to market my house?
• What repairs/improvements do you think I need to make to my house before putting it on the market?

I'll keep you posted on how our listing and (hopefully) sale goes.

Real Estate: A Truly Local Market

Well, I was recently reminded about how local the real estate market truly is. As part of our move my wife and I were recently looking for houses in North Dallas. I was fully expecting to see many houses on the market for a long period of time. However, the reality was that there aren't that many houses on the market in North Dallas (I houses for sale are up about 25% y/y in Dallas) and that many of the good houses were selling in two weeks or less. Towards the end of our house-hunting trip we saw a house that we liked. It had been on the market for only one day. We decided to put in an offer and I cringed as my wife basically took the contract from my hand an wrote something just below the asking price on our offer. However, she was right. That house ended up having four offers in its first day on the market. We ultimately ended up pursuing another house, but it was definitely an interesting reminder that national headlines about how slow the real estate market is don't necessarily mean that any one particular neighborhood or market are necessarily slow. I just hope our neighborhood in Denver is as healthy as the one in Dallas was...