The biggest mistake buyers and sellers make when hiring a Realtor is that they do not do their homework before hiring a real estate agent.  AgentHarvest can minimize these mistakes by finding the best available agents in your area for you to interview.  We also help you save money by giving you cash back at closing from a portion of our referral fee that we receive when your house sells or when you buy your house.

“Agent Harvesting” is the process of analyzing your neighborhood’s real estate agent market activity; asking probing interview questions to reveal the agent’s true value; and hiring the best available real estate agent to sell or buy a house.  Agent harvesting puts you in charge of the agent hiring process and empowers you to hire the best agent to serve your particular needs.  AgentHarvest helps you with this process as part of our free agent finder services.

When AgentHarvest finds the best available real estate agents for you to interview, we conduct a study to determine the best fit for your situation.  We collect all of the real estate market stats in your area to find real estate agents that recently sold a house in your area.  Our approach to finding agents for buyers is almost identical to our search for seller’s agents.  The only difference is that we focus on the client’s desired target area where they want to live but the rest of the criteria is the same.

We narrow the list down based on several key factors.

Agents that Sell Houses

We don’t care if an agent has more signs planted in your neighborhood or if they can stuff more mailboxes with newsletters, recipe cards or flyers.  We are only interested in their ability to sell a home.  So, when we start looking for agents, we only focus on agents that sold houses.  If an agent hasn’t sold a house in the target area, they are immediately discarded from the list.

Agents That Sell In Your Neighborhood

We focus our study on a 5-mile radius area around your house.  By focusing in on such a small territory, we can find agents that know about your neighborhood or area and know how to market a listing in that area.  Big cities such as Dallas have several pocket communities in the city that attract specific types of buyers and offer specific amenities.  Realtors that specialize in these pocket territories know that area’s buyer demographics and know how to market to them to attract them to your property.  Also agents that service a particular neighborhood can better price your home to sell than an agent that doesn’t know the area.  A city’s real estate market is comprised of smaller sub-markets.  Each sub-market behaves differently.  Housing prices in some markets go up while other areas experiencing falling home prices.  You need an agent that knows which market your house is competing in.

Six Month Time Span

Can an agent sell in today’s market?  Today the real estate market in your area may be a buyer’s market, but last year might have been a seller’s market.  Who cares if an agent could sell in last year’s market, it’s today’s market that counts.  Each market requires a different strategy to succeed so you’d better find an agent that knows today’s market tactics.  By narrowing our collected data to only the past six months of sales, we can clearly see which agents perform in today’s market.

Similar Sized Houses

Larger houses attract a different kind of buyer than smaller houses do.  Smaller houses usually involve first-time homebuyers with special incentive programs that help a first-time homebuyer finance their first home purchase.  Larger houses have certain amenities that buyers demand that smaller houses do not.  You need an agent that knows how to sell your sized home and how to make it appeal to the type of buyer that would want it.  When we perform an agent search we reduce the list to only show agents that have sold/bought houses similar in size to your house.  This is usually, but not always around 500-700 sq ft of your house’s total square footage as listed in the tax appraisal.  For example, if the size of your house is 1000 sq ft, we will search for all agents that sold houses in the last 6 months that were approximately 500 to 1500 sq ft.

Unique Exceptions or Additions

Not every sale is applicable and some situations are unique.  If you have a townhouse, you want an agent that sells townhouses instead of single-family houses.  You don’t want an agent that specializes in foreclosures if your house isn’t involved in a foreclosure situation.  If your house is subject to a short sale then you will want a real estate agent that can negotiate a short sale with the bank to help you avoid a foreclosure.  Fixer-upper investor properties also require unique talents to attract investors.  If you have a unique situation that requires a special talent we will tailor our search to include your particular needs.

The Final List

After we narrow down the list based on the above criteria, we are left with a focused list of agents that have demonstrated by their track record that they can sell your house.  If your area has a low amount of sales, we may have to adjust the home size and timeframe factors discussed earlier to collect more data.  The list of remaining agents after all of the above criteria are applied is the list we use to find three agents for you to interview.  We contact agents from this list and have them sign a referral agreement that explains our program and how you benefit from the cash back at closing program.

From this final list, we sort the agents into three groups:

Agents That Sold Multiple Houses:  Agents that have sold more than one house in this list are contacted first.  Even though we may not know these agents, we think their record demonstrates that they are capable of selling a house in your area.

Agents That We Have a History With:  Agents from this list that AgentHarvest has worked with before will also be contacted.  Good agents are hard to find and if we see an agent that sold a house in your area that we have favorably worked with before, we want you to meet them.

Other Agents:  If we haven’t found three agents from the other two groups we will contact the rest of the agents on the final list.  If we are unable to find three agents after notifying all of these agents, we will stop at this point and only give you the agents we have contracted with so far.

The Best Agent –vs- the Best Agent for You

When we find the best available agents to buy or sell your house are we saying that they are the best overall agent in your neighborhood?  No.  To find the best or top performing agent in your area, we would need to collect data for a year or longer, and take all house sales into consideration.  That would reveal the top producing agents in your area, but it would not take into consideration recent activity or houses similar in size to yours.  The purpose of AgentHarvest is to find the best available agent for you.  We believe that recent sales activity of houses sold similar in size to yours are the two most important criteria for finding capable agents.  We feel that this approach is the best way to find your top three agents to interview.

Thank You

Bill Petrey
AgentHarvest

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