It’s an exciting time in your life. You’re about to embark on the journey of buying or selling a home, or maybe even both. You take to the internet to search for the perfect realtor. Or perhaps you have one already in mind: a friend of a friend, or a family member. In any case, you contact them, inform them of your intentions, and ask for their help in achieving your goal. But shortly into your journey, you realize your realtor isn’t doing their job to your standards. They’re not around much. They don’t guide you on how to stage your house. They misinform you of what kind of offer to put down on your dream home to assure you’re picked for the sale. How do you cope when your realtor is a nightmare?
Identifying a nightmare realtor
When my husband and I were selling our home and looking for a new one, we had a pretty awful experience. We contacted the realtor who had helped us buy our home 15 years before. That was a mistake. This realtor was maybe off his game, or perhaps because he wasn’t going to be making much money off of us, he didn’t deem us worthy of his time and efforts.
When it came time for negotiations after we had a contract on our house, at every turn, he played advocate for the buyers. He led us to believe the sale would fall through if we didn’t give in to their outlandish demands. He didn’t advocate for us, or our needs at all. This was also true when searching for a home. We had found a home that we loved, and we put an offer in. But we weren’t given any advice on what a competitive offer would be, and essentially lost the potential to own it. Most of the other homes he showed us didn’t fit our needs.
Reaching out
We wondered if there was anything we could do about some of the more gray issues with the realtor, so we reached out to another realtor to ask for advice. She helped us, and encouraged us, but there wasn’t much we really felt we could do. I had just had a baby, we didn’t have a place to live, and the time was very stressful. It wasn’t worth the effort to seek any retribution. We wished we would’ve reached out to other realtors sooner, if nothing else for advise on finding the best one for us.
Finding the right realtor
If you are in the midst of trying to find a realtor for your buying or selling needs, I encourage you to research, research, research! The realtor we contacted for advice gave us a pretty solid piece of it: If you want to know how good a realtor is, ask the people they work with. In other words, don’t go off the reviews online. They can be outdated, or screened, or even edited.
Reach out to several realtors. Get to know them a little bit. Find out what their work ethic is. Find out if they will jive with your family dynamic, and the needs you have. Don’t just pick a realtor because someone recommended them, or even if you have used them before, unless it was recently and they were excellent. Basically, do your homework! This is an important time, a big decision, and the natural stress that comes with it is enough. You don’t want a nightmare realtor ruining the process.
