Who Do You Pick To Sell Your Home?
December 14, 2009 | By Kelley Koehler | Filed Under Home Selling
I was very painfully dragged through a thought exercise the other day by my friend Rob Hahn. He likes to ask tricky questions and then turn them around on you and act all innocent like he didn’t mean to start a ruckus. But he totally means to do exactly that. Trust me.
Anyway. The question was thus: Who would you pick to sell your home, assuming you can’t sell it yourself?
It was a harder question to answer than I anticipated. Who do I pick? The person who sells the most homes – because they spend all day getting more clients instead of taking care of the ones they have? The girl who makes her sellers feel good but may not negotiate all that well? The woman who seems to have a lot of clients but then trashes them in the back office rooms when no one is looking? The guy who has a lot of listings, but they take forever to sell because they’re always priced a little too high?
Who, in my market, would I pick to sell my own home?
And then, once I answered, I had to answer why I picked that person. It was hard to pick. Oh man, it was hard to pick. I really really really wanted to sell it myself, according to my own standards of how things should be done. In an ideal world, I really wanted to pick myself. But that was against the rules of the game.
For me, in the end, it came down to two things: integrity and market knowledge.
I picked the person who I knew wouldn’t be gossiping about me to coworkers or other clients. The person who I thought would always be telling me their complete and honest opinion, even if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. The person who would take the time to listen to me, to understand my goals and needs, and would tailor their approach accordingly. The person who had demonstrated clear market knowledge, by pricing properties correctly. Who I knew could discuss housing conditions in my area clearly and with confidence and substance and real market data to back up their answers. The person who would tell me what to fix now and how to best prepare my home for sale.
Other than myself, of course. 
It was an interesting exercise to determine what I believe makes a good agent. What criteria would you use to pick an agent to sell your home?
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Trustworthiness would be the most important factor for me. I’d pick the agent whose advice I could trust to be honest and in my best interests.
The more I think about this, the more I realize what a pain in the a$$ client I would be!
[...] Who Do You Pick To Sell Your Home? – Interesting conversation between Kelly Koehler and Rob Hahn – who would you pick to sell your [...]
What a great exercise! Being an effective communicator is one trait that is important to me. (You’ve really included it already.) It can be tricky to deliver some needed messages, especially related to house condition and pricing, in way that the seller will hear and respond too. It’s the basis for successful negotiations, too!
[...] they would use to sell their own homes if they could not do it themselves for some reason. The answers were interesting, but so were some of the emails and DM’s I got in [...]