David Bach Day at Free Money Finance, 3 Basic Rules for Hiring a Great Real Estate Agent

In The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner, David Bach offers his thoughts on the three basic rules for hiring a great real estate agent and I wanted to share those with you. David's rules:

1. Get a recommendation.

2. If you can't get a referral to an agent you like, don't give up (there are other ways to find good agents).

3. Interview, interview, interview.

I've bought and sold four houses in my life (plus one that was my wife's house when we got married), so I've been through the buying and selling process a few times, and I can't agree more with this advice.

The first place I bought (a condo in Pittsburgh), I had NO CLUE. In fact, I can't even remember how I ended up with the agent I used. I didn't cold call him, but I'm sure it wasn't much better than that. He wasn't a disaster, but wasn't a shining star either. Good thing I only used him to buy a place (basically to show me around). I don't think he would have been aggressive enough for my liking.

All the other agents, we found from friends/people at work who had either bought or sold a house with an agent and liked the agent a lot.  All of these were much better experiences for us and all were successful. Our best experience was in Nashville where the agent helped us find a house in a month and four years later sold it for us in a week when we moved!

How about you? Any other tips out there on what to do (and what not to do) when hiring a real estate agent?

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