This content was produced by AgentSavvy, a free service empowering consumers to choose the best real estate agent.

If you own a home, odds are it’s your most valuable financial asset.

Selling your home is a big deal. Whatever your reason for selling — whether you’re moving cities, upgrading, retiring, or for some reason — how you go about the sales process is a huge decision that can stress you out.

This is where real estate agents come in. A great real estate agent can take that weight off your shoulders. A quality agent guides you through every step of the journey, taking away the workload while keeping you in the loop on everything you need to know. A full-service agent takes the lead on repairs, staging, open houses, offers, negotiations, closing, and beyond.

So how do you find a great agent?

Thousands of people every day set out to find a real estate agent. But if you’re not clear on how you’re “supposed to” do it, you’re not alone. A lot of people (we think too many!) go with someone they’ve used before, or someone a friend said was “okay.”

Why? Because it seems too complicated to figure out a better option. After all, there are over 100,000 active real estate agents in California alone.

That’s something we can help with. 

We want to help you pick an agent. But we also want to help you think about how to pick an agent.

What inspires our approach to picking an agent:

• Find an agent who’ll make you the most money. Whatever your reasons for selling, there’s a good chance you could use an extra $40,000. And studies show that’s the level of difference that a good agent can make: an agent in the best quarter of agents can sell your home for 5% more than an agent in the bottom quarter. Making the most money tends to align with other factors that go into picking an agent, like having a good rapport and a well-outlined sales strategy.
• Think like a business professional. As experienced small business people, we think of choosing a real estate agent similarly to how we’d approach hiring a professional service provider for an important project. It’s too common for someone to come in, talk a good game, present a compelling pitch, and then once they’ve won your business not follow through with the same persistence. But good service providers — and good agents — are out there. The goal is to figure out who can talk the talk and walk the walk.

At our core, we want to help you find an agent who is high-performing, trustworthy, and well-organized.

To find a real estate agent who’ll sell your home for more, there’s a set of steps we suggest you follow.

The five steps for finding the best real estate agent to sell your home:

1) Ask around to gather suggestions

Being an informed consumer starts with coming up with a list of options. This is your “long list” of any agent who you have any positive signal on. You wouldn’t commit to the first home you see, so why commit to the first real estate agent you hear about?

When it comes to filling out this list, there are several sources to start from. An agent you’ve used before and had an alright experience with? Put them on the list. Recommendations from friends or neighbors? Add ‘em. 

Recommended by a trusted news source? Good Yelp review? Saw their sign in front of a home like yours? List.

How long should your list be? That’s up to you and the situation. In a small town with fewer options it may be shorter. If you have a bunch of friends vocally recommending their agents, maybe it’s longer. You’ll be narrowing it down in the steps below, so more options is more work but the best option isn’t always who you expect.

2) Review track record & other available information

Now that you have your “long list”, the goal is to get the minimum amount of information on each to know if they’re worth serious consideration. If you’re a seller you’re trying to answer questions like: do they sell homes like yours, do they do a good job of it, and do they leave folks with a good impression while doing it.

Some sources to consult at this point include:

• The agent’s own site:

  Can indicate the geographies and home types they focus on, as well as give you a sense for their personal style. Keep in mind an agent will always be their own biggest fan, and it’s possible they talk a better game than what they deliver.

• Review sites like Yelp:
  

  Can tell you in general whether they’ve left a positive impression. Keep in mind that review sites tend to have a few biases for agents like for other businesses: only the most and least satisfied customers tend to leave reviews while those with a middling experience don’t, agents who are “pushier” at getting good reviews may have more of them, and there’s no guarantee that a review comes from an individual in your situation—they may a seller, a buyer, a bystander, or even a competitor!

• Data on an agent’s past performance:
  

  This is where AgentSavvy comes in! Selling a home is repeatable skill and expert research has shown that it’s not an accident that some agents outperform others when it comes to selling homes from the best price. An agent’s information page on our site can tell you if they tend to outperform other agents in the area by evaluating each sale against a custom set of comps adjusted to sales timing and individual home characteristics.

• Complaints with regulators:

  If the Department of Real Estate, or your state’s equivalent, has received complaints about an agent, that’s something you should know. Many states make this easy to look up, and some outside sites like AgentSavvy may also incorporate it. If you’re in California, the state lookup system is here. Keep in mind that not every complaint means the agent has done anything wrong — and you may be able to see when they were rejected. But multiple complaints is a bad indicator.

3) Narrow to a shortlist of agents who best match your goals

This step is where you use information from Step 2 above to cut down your list to a manageable number of agents to talk to and consider. Ultimately we suggest a short list of three agents, but you might want anywhere from two to five. In Step 4 you’ll be interviewing each of these agents, so too few might leave you without enough confidence in your decision but too many could be time consuming.

How do you cut from a long to a short list? If you are lucky then all the information in Step 2 agrees with each other and you’ll have three or so agents who sell homes like yours, get good reviews, and have a strong performance track record.

Otherwise, you’ll have some decisions to make. You might want to consider the agent(s) with the most compelling reviews and the one or two with the strongest performance metrics.

Keep in mind that this is just a first, rough cut. The goal is to reach the stage where you can interview the remaining possibilities before you make a final decision.

4) Interview agents 

You’ve probably never been hired for a job without an interview. So when you’re hiring for a make-or-break role to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars, it makes sense to take the interview seriously.

As with any important conversation, it can be good to take notes so you hae something to come back to. And you’ll probably feel more prepared if you look at an agent’s sales and performance history right before the interview. An agent will likely want to come and look at the home you’re selling in order to have this conversation (and so they get a chance to pitch you in person!).

Here are important topics to ask a potential seller’s agent about before you sign with them:

• Their Experience

  • With comparable properties
    How does this home compare to homes you’ve recently sold? Bigger? Smaller? Newer? Older? What’s special about it and what do you see as the challenges?

• • With the neighborhood
    For example: Tell me about homes you’ve sold recently in the area? What kind of buyers did you target? What’s special about the neighborhood and what do you see as the challenges?

• • Most recent and current listings
    How many current listings do you have? How does this compare to your normal workload? Can I be confident you’ll have enough time to devote to my listing? Do you have any leads on specific buyers for this home based on other recent listings?

• Their sales plan

• • Price expectations
    What price or price range would you expect this home to ultimately sell for? What’s your estimate (or, realistically, guesstimate) based on?

• • Timeline
    How long would you expect it to take from signing with you to putting this on the market? How long would you expect it to take to sell? Is now the right time to put it on the market? Or would there be a reason to wait?

• • Home prep
    What sort of repairs or modifications would be worth considering on the property? How valuable do you think particular aspects might be? How much are they likely to cost? Do you have a contractor or contractors who you like to work with? What about stagers (if the property will be vacant)? Would these costs be due on closing or before?

• • Marketing plan
    How do you typically market a property? Can you show me examples? How do you photography? Do you stand up a home-specific website? How many open houses do you expect to do? If the home is occupied, how many tours should we be prepared for and with what sort of lead time?

• • Listing price & negotiation approach
    What price do you propose listing at? What are the merits of over vs. under vs. transparently pricing in the current market environment? How many offers should I hope to receive? At what point would I consider re-pricing if there are no offers? How do you approach negotiating once there is an offer?

• Their communication approach

  How do you typically communicate with clients? (E-mail, Phone, Text) Do you proactively provide updates to clients? What’s an ideal client for you?

• Agent compensation

  What sort of commission (or other compensation structure) will you request? What sort of buyer’s agent commission do you recommend including and how will that be communicated?

• Any concerns you may have

  If there’s anything you’ve seen in the agent’s background, statistics, or past sales, it’s worth asking about it! Or anything you’ve experienced with past agents and are hoping not to repeat.

• Anything else they want to add

5) Commit to an agent and sign an agreement

You should always read agreements carefully, even if you don’t have the expertise to understand every clause. If your agent is part of a larger brokerage, their agent agreement may be a collection of standard clauses, but don’t skip the step of learning what you’re getting into.

Keep an eye out and immediately flag anything that doesn’t match what you discussed in your interview — if you’re a seller these can be things like the commission rate for the agent you’re signing with, how and how much commission will be set aside for the buyer’s agent when the transaction closes, or when and how staging costs will be paid. If something doesn’t match, it could be a simple oversight, but it could call into question either the agent’s organizational skills or their trustworthiness.

If you have the chance, compare multiple agreements and look for differences. This is another benefit of interviewing and considering multiple agents.

It can also be reassuring to understand the minimum legal standards in your state for real estate agents, so consider looking up your department of real estate and what they say about agent contracts. (Contract provisions that violate the law in your state won’t be enforceable.)

If you’re choosing a real estate agent to sell or buy a home, we hope this suggested decision flow is helpful to you. And AgentSavvy wants to help you put it into action! Learn more here.