Realtor interview Questions

Carefully interviewing a Realtor should be one of the most important things any home seller does when considering selling their home yet many do not.

Having been in this business for almost twenty five years I have found this to be pretty fascinating. There are lots of folks that will make contact with a Realtor from any number of sources including seeing a for sale sign in their neighborhood, visiting an open house, getting a post card in the mail or maybe even from a recommendation from a friend or relative.

One of the problems I have found is that many consumers think that all Realtors do the same things to sell homes. This could not be further from the truth!

In most businesses 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. The old 80/20 rule. In Real Estate it is a mind boggling 94% to 6% ratio! That is just an amazing statistic. Given these figures is there any wonder why there is so much dissatisfaction from consumers? It is really easy to get stuck with a Realtor who does not do much business or have a great work ethic.

Unfortunately getting into the Real Estate industry is very easy. Take and pass a Real Estate test and you have made it. It shouldn’t be that easy but that’s the way it works.

So how do you avoid getting stuck with a poor Real Estate agent? Ask great Real Estate interview questions! Trust me when I tell you, these questions will make an unskilled Realtor very uncomfortable.

There is no better recommendation than a track record of success. As a home seller you will be paying a Realtor quite a bit of money to sell your home. Why not work with a top producing agent? There is a reason most agents continue to be successful year after year.

In most circumstances it does not cost you anymore to work with a terrific agent than someone who does very little Real Estate business. The interview questions below will go a long way in determining whether you are hiring a pro or not!

Time in the Real Estate business and production level

• How long have you been selling real estate in Massachusetts?

Experience is important but does not necessarily mean that a newer agent couldn’t be a rising superstar. Many of the other Real Estate interview questions below, however, will help determine this.

• How many homes did you sell last year as a seller’s agent?

This is a very important question! Do you want to work with an agent who sells 5 homes a year or someone who sells 25? Do be fooled by the agent who does very little business telling you that you will get better personal service. That is a bunch of hogwash! There is a reason why they only sell 5 homes a year.

• Of the homes you sold last year, again as a seller’s agent, what was the average number of days from the original list price to the accepted offer?

This is a very telling statistic because it speaks to how well the agent did their job from day one when they recommended a list price to you. Don’t get caught with an agent that gives you an inflated value just to get your business. “Buying a listing” is a very common thing that agents do when competing with other Realtors.

• What was the average ratio between the listing price and the selling price?

This question boils down to two things. Pricing the home correctly from day one and the Realtors negotiating skills.

• What kind of market share do you and your company have?

This is not extremely critical but you should at least be working with someone who has some general knowledge of the area and has sold other local homes in the past.

Personal service to the seller and testimonials

• Do you have a personal assistant?

Busy Real Estate agents have a hard time doing everything well on their own. When a Realtor invests the money to hire their own staff member you know they care about personal service. A Realtor can’t be in two places at once. A helping hand and good team work says a lot about a skilled agent.

• Can you provide me with at least 3 recent references?

A good Realtor should be able to provide you with references that you can call. Of course every Realtor is going to want to give you a hand picked list that they know the client will say wonderful things. Instead ask them for the last three homes they sold and look up the owners names and call them. This will give you a better picture of the clients satisfaction level.

Internet marketing and advertising

• I have read the Internet is an extremely valuable tool for selling homes. How will you market my home online?

This quite possible may be one of the most important questions you ask the Realtor! You want to align yourself with a Realtor that has a strong understanding of both online and social media marketing. Over 90% of all buyers find their home online. The Realtor you choose should be marketing your home EVERYWHERE!

• Do you have your own personal Real Estate website for marketing homes and if so does it come up in competitive Real Estate searches such as State, City and the worlds Real Estate or homes?

This is a very important consideration when hiring a Realtor. A great agent will invest in having a great website that not only looks fantastic but more importantly attracts buyers for local Real Estate searches. Most consumers will type things like the city, state, and the words Real Estate or homes for sale. As an example Hopkinton MA Real Estate.

You want your home in the spotlight which can be achieved when the agent you hire understands search engine optimization (SEO) and gets their site on the 1st page of Google for keyword searches buyers most often use.

• Do you have a Massachusetts Real Estate blog to market your clients homes and if so is it ranked highly by Google? Do you use your blog as a marketing tool to drive traffic to my home?

Like a website, Real Estate blogs are great vehicles to promote properties. You can create entire blog articles about a single home that promotes their best attributes using multiple photos and descriptions.

• Do you use social media marketing sites such as Facebook and Twitter to reach a wider net of Realtors and potential clients?

Sites like Facebook and Twitter are becoming remarkable tools for a Realtor to use to cast a wider net to reach potential buyers and sellers. With Facebook you can have your own business page to promote your business including properties you may be marketing.

• Do you use video and virtual tours to market your homes?

Video is another important medium that has really caught on in recent years. Buyers love to see a video tour of a home they may be interested in viewing. A video tour can be especially helpful to a relocation buyer. The tour used be the agent should be quick to download. Another consideration would be syndicating the video tour to Youtube which gets quite a bit of traffic.

• Is my home “enhanced” on the most visited Real Estate websites such as Realtor.com, Trulia.com and Zillow.com?

This is an extremely important interview question. Real Estate marketing is all about presentation and standing out from the rest of the competition. It is not enough just to be included in the most visible Real Estate sites.

The agent should be presenting your home with numerous photos, detailed descriptions highlighting your homes best attributes, and an embeddable virtual tour. Survey after survey says that buyers looking online skip the homes with a couple of photos and no descriptions. This is a huge piece of the marketing! Make sure the agent shows you exactly what your home will look like online. It is obvious that many sellers do not check on their agent. Trust me folks, you would be flabbergasted if you knew what a poor job some Realtors do marketing homes.

• Do you have a good camera?

Not only is having lots of photos important but the quality can not be overlooked. You should be looking for an agent that has a good camera with a wide angle lense.

Preparing and staging a home for sale

• Can you show me how to make my home more marketable?

A Realtor should be able to give you some simple advice on how best prepare your home for the market.  Things like whether or not it would be worthwhile to make an improvement or properly staging a home for sale. The general rule on improvements is to make them when they are really going to enhance the saleability or give a large return on investment.

Communication and feedback throughout the home sale process

• When a buyer calls on my home will you ALWAYS be the one they speak with?

It makes sense that the Realtor you hire is the one who speaks with the buyer when an inquiry is made. At many Real Estate offices this is not always the case. Often times there is an agent who answers the phone and they get the lead. This is not ideal if the agent has never seen the home before and the buyer is asking specific questions about the property.

• How will you communicate with me regarding your efforts?

One of the biggest complaints against Realtors is a lack of communication. You will want to nail down how the Realtor will keep in contact with you. It it by phone, email, text? A Realtor should be flexible and work however the client desires. Above all else there should be regular communication. See Realtor communication skills.

• Do you have a feedback system and if so, how does it work?

Anyone that I know that has ever sold a home wants to know how the showings go. The Realtor you hire should be prepared to call the buyers agent after the showing to find out what the level of interest there is and the buyers general thoughts.

• How readily accessible will you be? Do you have a cell phone that I can reach you on when I need to?

Real Estate is a business that people should be able to reach the person they hired to sell their home. A Realtor who has a phone that can receive email is a real plus.  You want to make sure your agent will be taking your calls as they come in. For some reason many agents never answer their phone. This is not a good sign!

• Once the offer is accepted will you be attending all the inspections on my home?

A full service Realtor should be at the home inspection, bank appraisal, etc. You are paying this person a lot of money. Make sure they earn it! They are your fiduciary.

• How will you verify that the buyer is qualified to buy my home?

The Realtor should be verifying the the buyer is qualified by making sure that there is a legitimate pre-approval letter accompanying the offer and speaking with the buyers lender.

• What are your fee structures and why?

The Realtor should be making sure they explain to you how they get paid and what exactly they do for the money earned.

• As far as production goes if I called the owner of your company would they tell me you were one of the top producing agents in the company or a middle of the road agent?

In life you get what you pay for. Why not hire the best if it costs you the same!

• Will you allow me to terminate our contract if I am not completely satisfied?

This is an important question because a Realtor that is confident they will get the job done should have no problem with this clause.

There are some truly great Real Estate agents out there. It just takes a little bit of time and effort to find them. Don’t settle for any Realtor that walks through your door or you will end up disappointed.

Related Real Estate articles:

• Massachusetts Realtors are not all alike
• Picking the wrong Massachusetts Realtor

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About the author: The above Real Estate information on how to interview a Realtor with great questions was provided by Bill Gassett, a Nationally recognized leader in his field. Bill can be reached via email at billgassett@remaxexec.com or by phone at 508-435-5356. Bill has helped people move in and out of many Metrowest towns for the last 24+ Years.

Thinking of selling your home? I have a passion for Real Estate and love to share my marketing expertise!

I service the following towns in Metrowest MA: Hopkinton, Milford, Southboro, Westboro, Ashland, Holliston, Upton, Mendon, Hopedale, Medway, Franklin, Framingham, Grafton, Northbridge, Shrewsbury, Northboro, Bellingham, Uxbridge, and Douglas.

It is a fact that 90% of all home buyers start their search for a home online. The days of buyers using newspapers and magazines as a viable means to find a home are over!

Keeping this in mind, the goal of any Realtor that is worth their commission is to make darn sure the vehicles they are using to market a clients property come up in Google for local keyword searches. This would include a well indexed website and Real Estate blog!

If you are selling a home in the Metrowest Massachusetts area the kind of search terms you can expect a buyer to use to find property are the city, state, and the word Real Estate or homes for sale.

For example here are a few highly competitive Real Estate search terms you could expect a buyer to punch into Google:

Ashland MA Real Estate

Holliston MA Homes for sale

Hopkinton MA Homes

Metrowest MA Real Estate

These are the types of the most competitive search terms for Real Estate. There are companies that pay optimization experts thousands of dollars to make sure they are on the 1st page of Google for these search phrases.

Why? The reason is simple….this is how consumers search for homes! This is why when you do a Real Estate search you are going to find all the national players such as Realtor.com, Trulia.com, Zillow.com, Homes.com, Yahoo Real Estate, ect. These people pay big money to get onto the 1st page!

When an individual Realtors website gets onto the 1st page guess what happens? That Realtor generates quite a bit of consumer traffic!

It makes a lot of sense to hire a Realtor that is going to give your home massive amounts of exposure online!

Take a look at the video below and see how powerful my website (http://www.sellmyhomeinmetrowestma.com) covering all of the Metrowest area and beyond has become in Google and other search engines.

There is not another Realtor in the area that provides their clientele the kind of internet exposure I do!

Besides my website here is all the other sites I market on as part of my Metrowest Massachusetts Real Estate marketing. In 2010 which was generally regarded as a very tough year for Real Estate, I was ranked the #3 RE/MAX agent in Massachusetts. Part of this success was attributable to the online exposure my website and multiple Real Estate blogs provide.

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About the author: The above Real Estate information on picking a dominant online Metrowest MA Realtor was provided by Bill Gassett, a Nationally recognized leader in his field. Bill can be reached via email at billgassett@remaxexec.com or by phone at 508-435-5356. Bill has helped people move in and out of many Metrowest towns for the last 24+ Years.

Thinking of selling your home? I have a passion for Real Estate and love to share my marketing expertise!

I service the following towns in Metrowest MA: Hopkinton, Milford, Southboro, Westboro, Ashland, Holliston, Mendon, Upton, Hopedale, Medway, Franklin, Framingham, Grafton, Northbridge, Shrewsbury, Northboro, Bellingham, Uxbridge, and Douglas.

If you look at any of the National Real Estate surveys the number one complaint from consumers against Realtors who are representing home sellers is the lack of communication skills.

There are countless stories of sellers signing a listing contract and then never hearing from their Realtor again unless they initiate the contact.

Obviously if you are a Realtor and your are harder to catch up to than The Road Runner, you are going to gain a poor reputation pretty quickly!

As a Massachusetts home seller how do you avoid picking the wrong Realtor? How do you know when the Realtor you are about to choose is going to do an effective job of communicating with you?

While it is impossible to know for sure, there are some clues that may help you determine if the Realtors communication skills are going to match your expectation levels.

Before you even meet the Realtor you are going to consider choosing you should pay careful attention to how quickly they respond to either your initial phone call or email. If they do not get back to you for hours after your initial attempt at contact that could be a red flag.

If you have indicated in your message that you are interested in selling your home  most Realtors will be highly motivated to make that return call immediately! Most tech savvy Real Estate agents today are going to have some kind of phone that allows them to check or receive their email instantly. A Realtor with strong communication skills is more than likely going to have that phone/Blackberry attached to their hip and checking it frequently.

You would also expect that they would be checking their voice mail as well. In Real Estate you never know when a call may be coming in so a good agent knows they should be checking it at regular intervals.

There will be times that an agent just may not be able to respond such as when they are already in some kind of business meeting or with other clients already.  You may need to cut the Realtor a little bit of slack but you also need to make sure this is not a pattern that will constantly be repeated.

When you set the appointment with the agent you are considering hiring they should be  on time or even slightly early. Communication skills and placing a value on someones time usually go hand in hand.

Another key trait of a Realtor with effective communication skills is the ability to listen. The listing interview should not be dominated by the Realtor telling you how great they are. While it is important to choose someone with a good track record, the agent should possess the ability to determine exactly what the clients goals are in the transaction. This often times will include the motivation for selling and where the clients want to end up upon the completion of the sale of their current home.

One important consideration is finding out how a client likes to interact and following that preferred method. While most people today like to communicate by email or even text messaging there are some folks that would just like you to pick up the telephone and call. A lot of older folks are not tech savvy and don’t use email regularly if at all. A skilled communicator will be able to adapt to the clients needs.

An important thought for anyone selling their Massachusetts home should be finding out how the Realtor is going to let them know how things are going with the sale and what buyers are thinking about the property. Simply stated what is the buyer’s feedback?

There are a number of different ways this can be done. Personally, my preferred method is to call the buyer’s agent and find out exactly what they and their buyer client thought about the property. I can ask specific questions such as the buyer likes and dislikes as well as how they thought the home was priced compared to other homes they were viewing.

One of the things my seller clients love it the fact that I give them a feedback report. They actually access this information by visiting a password protected website. The client and I are the only ones that can see it. After every showing the feedback is entered and the client can see what the market is saying about their home. Of course we are looking for patterns so advice can be given on how to improve the chances of a timely sale.

In Massachusetts there is a system that many Real Estate companies use called MA Pass which is a showing appointment scheduling service focused on the real estate industry. After the showing is completed MA Pass sends out an email to the buyers agent. It is an automated showing feedback system. Personally I don’t think it does a good job unless the agent changes the standardized questions that are asked. Most agents do not take the time to do this.

For example a question like “what did the client think of the exterior of the home” with answers you can check that says good, average, poor does not give a lot of information the client can use. It is far too basic! Getting substantial feedback can go a long way in helping to give sound advice and MA pass will not cut the mustard without customization.

As always, I would recommend asking good Realtor interview questions when trying to assess if the agent you are considering hiring will get the job done or not. Asking for some addresses of homes the agent is currently listing and calling the sellers to find out how the communication has been would be a great idea. If the agent starts to squirm with this inquiry there could be a problem!

Related articles: What kind of Massachusetts Realtor do you want?

• Top producing Metrowest MA Realtor
• Picking the wrong Massachusetts Realtor

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About the author: The above Real Estate information on Realtor communication skills the number one complaint was provided by Bill Gassett, a Nationally recognized leader in his field. Bill can be reached via email at billgassett@remaxexec.com or by phone at 508-435-5356. Bill has helped people move in and out of many Metrowest towns for the last 24+ Years.

Thinking of selling your home? I have a passion for Real Estate and love to share my marketing expertise!

I service the following towns in Metrowest MA: Hopkinton, Milford, Upton, Southboro, Westboro, Ashland, Holliston, Mendon, Hopedale, Medway, Franklin, Framingham, Grafton, Northbridge, Shrewsbury, Northboro, Bellingham, Uxbridge, and Douglas.

There is a lot of talk in Real Estate circles about how Realtors should run their business in regards to returning either another agents or clients phone call.

There are of course some pretty differing opinions amongst Real Estate agents themselves on what they should be held accountable to.

There are quite a few including myself that think Real Estate is a 24/7 business. Real Estate is a service industry where the clientele relies on their agent to be ready, willing and able to help at a moments notice.

Lately, I have called a few Realtors and were not able to reach them. On their work voice mail was a message that said “I only return calls between the hours of 12-1 and 5-6 p.m.” Are you freaking kidding me!

Here is another example right on an MLS listing:

“Please note, that we are not in the office on the weekends, we will return calls, emails and faxes on Monday. Thank you.”

If I was a consumer  calling these Realtors with the possibility of using their Real Estate services my decision would be made for me very quickly.  I was frustrated hearing the message because it was just after 1 p.m and I did not want to wait until five o clock to get a return phone call.

Anyone who has been in Real Estate for a while knows that there are issues that inevitably crop up that must be dealt with right away in a  transaction. Sometimes if problems are not dealt with immediately it can be disastrous,  including the chance that the transaction does not even happen.

When consumers are surveyed asking about their experience with the Realtor they hired, is it any surprise to know that the number one complaint nationally is always a lack of communication? Consumers want to know what is going on with the sale of  their home prior to an offer, as well as during the time period it takes to get to the closing table.  There are always a myriad of things to be discussed.

In an age where technology is king, a Realtor that knows how to communicate with today’s savvy consumer is in high demand. Personally, I have a Blackberry that allows me to get an immediate email. My phone is with me at all times and any of my clients can reach me when they need to. I could not imagine it any other way.

When I am hired to sell a home an exchange of all my contact information is automatic. My clients have my cell phone and email and are told they can reach whenever necessary.

One of the things I have found fascinating is the wide discrepancy in beliefs on what is appropriate regarding this subject. For example, I know quite a few Realtors that do not return phone calls after 7 p.m at night. If you leave a message after that time you are out of luck! Some are staunch believers that once they are home with their families the work day is over. This has never been my policy and I don’t think it ever will be. I just don’t roll that way.

In fact the only time I will not answer my phone is when I am being interviewed for the chance to list someones home.

I do not even bring my phone into the potential clients home. I want the clients full attention and they should have mine.

The other occasion where I  may not answer my phone is when I am showing a home. It all depends on the client I am with. Some are very open and tell me to go ahead and take the call. I know that the fact that I am readily available is very much appreciated.

How do I know? Many of the Real Estate testimonials that have been given to me mention the fact that they really appreciated the fact I always returned my calls immediately.  Don’t make the mistake of picking the wrong Realtor!

So what are your expectations? What kind of Realtor do you want?

Related Real Estate articles worth a look:

• Top producing Metrowest MA Realtor

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About the author: The above Real Estate information on Do you want a 24/7 Realtor was provided by Bill Gassett, a Nationally recognized leader in his field. Bill can be reached via email at billgassett@remaxexec.com or by phone at 508-435-5356. Bill has helped people move in and out of many Metrowest towns for the last 24+ Years.

Thinking of selling your home? I have a passion for Real Estate and love to share my marketing expertise!

I service the following towns in Metrowest MA: Hopkinton, Milford, Upton, Southboro, Westboro, Ashland, Holliston, Mendon, Hopedale, Medway, Franklin, Framingham, Grafton, Northbridge, Shrewsbury, Northboro, Bellingham, Uxbridge, and Douglas.