Should You Hire a Friend or Relative as Your Real Estate Agent?

Grand Rapids Real Estate Video Blog with Kevin Yoder

When it comes to hiring a real estate agent, whether they’re a friend or relative shouldn’t be a part of your search criteria.

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I recently read an article by Dave Ramsey titled “Real Estate and Relatives Don’t Mix,” and it talked about whether you should hire a friend or family member to help you with real estate.

I thought this article was interesting because it was written from the perspective of a well-known financial guru. Dave has hundreds of thousands of followers and has been on the radio for over two decades. He’s a person to listen to when it comes to both finance and real estate, and there were a few takeaway from this article I want to share with you.

First, hiring an agent is not a matter of right or wrong—it’s a matter of due diligence. For the folks that used a relative to represent them, that wasn’t their only method of choosing an agent. They actually did their homework and checked to see if that relative also had credentials

Dave also mentioned in the article that when you’re thinking about listing a home, there are a list of things you should look for in a real estate professional if you want them to represent you:

• Do they have a track record of success? This is made evident by the number of homes they sell annually, the number of reviews they have on real estate review sites, how many third-party referrals they have, what their list-to-sale price ratio is, and what their average days on market is compared to the board average.
• How long have they been selling real estate? By and large, more experienced agents get sellers more money.
• What is their marketing strategy? In other words, what are they doing to sell homes? What are the tools, methods, strategies, and systems they have in place to get the home the most exposure? Every agent has a different version of this process. Some do a lot, and some do very little aside from posting the home online, and it’s important to find out if your agent is the former or the latter.

Nowhere on the list was “Are they a friend or family member?”

So, what’s the takeaway here? When you’re looking to hire an agent, talk to a couple of them and compare their results and marketing strategies side by side so you can make a decision based on sound information. Past history is an indicator of future results, so what an agent is doing or has done should give you a pretty good idea of what you’ll experience as far as listing with an inexperienced agent versus listing with an experienced agent.

If you have any questions or would like to know more about getting the most money out of your home sale, don’t hesitate to give us a call or send us an email. We’d be happy to help you.