Chapter Five:
How and Who to Hire “In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” – Warren Buffett Let’s start the examination of the shortcuts most likely to mess with selecting an agent by looking at Availability and Representativeness – by far the biggest factors in how people choose a Realtor. As I’ve mentioned, according to multiple sources (from the NAR to Zillow) 70 percent of consumers will hire the very first agent they talk to. This means they don’t have a system to interview multiple agents and then compare answers to see who is the most likely to produce the desired outcome. On the surface, this is crazy if not out-and-out scary. Your home is the single most expensive thing you’ll ever buy or sell. It’s a complex transaction, with a multitude of moving parts. It’s something consumers take on only a few times in their lives. The time between transactions is usually long enough that the conditions in which they’re acting are likely to be radically different. It’s not the type of transaction that can be returned or exchanged. There’s no practical recourse for either party once the sale is complete.
