Well... my hubby and I had to choose a realtor to help us find a house. We had a "bad" experience with a realtor before, so we decided to really look for the right one that fits our work style.. It may sound like "hiring" an employee, but I think it's worth it and. I thought it worth blogging too...
First, we read articles on the internet and formulate some questions to ask when we meet a potential realtor. Other than technical questions like how long have you been working, licensing, if you are part of a group,... we also ask about how are you going to find us house, how many showings, where do you find listings... and on.
As I was shopping for a mortgage, I ask referrals for realtors. By doing so, I have list of names to start with. I also ask referrals from friends.
Then I called them, make an appointment for an phone interview. During the phone interview, we could narrow down list of potential realtor that we want to interview personally. We also ask for references and interview them.
We narrowed down to 4 realtors and met them at Starbucks or their office. Still, we have lists of interview questions and we also tell them what is our work style... We then narrowed it down to two and this is one of the hardest part.
Knowing our buying habit, we tend to take time and really look at the features we want. I thought it won't much different with buying a house. One realtor tends to be lay back and may fit with our buying habit. The other is more the opposite. She's more structured and organized. We liked both but we can only choose one.
Hubby and I decided to vote. Since there are only two of us, we decided that if we came up with different names, we are going to discuss to make a decision that we both can agree. We found Kleenex and pen and we voted.
I felt so relieve to find out that we voted the same person. No discussion or debate needed. We chose Dave Ipsen.
We worked with him since August 2011 for about 8 months. He has lots of knowledge about the area we are interested in looking. He takes time to explain every questions we have. He's very responsive with e-mails. He has information in his hands. He's lay back, very flexible. We never felt pressured to make quick decisions. He always take as much time as we needed to see the houses. We knew we made the right choice.
We wrote down important criteria for choosing a house. We saw 5-6 houses almost every Saturday. Since the house orientation is one of the important part, we would bring a compass when we view houses. In addition to that, I learned about the city, neighborhood, the house structure and some details about how houses are built differently in CO compares to WI.
Even though it took about 2 months for us to decide a realtor, I think we indeed made a right choice.
Wouldn't you agree?
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