First Time Home Buyers in South Lake Tahoe: Part Three

November 17th, 2009 categories: Lake Tahoe Real Estate

SoundbiteblogYou’ve Got to Find a Great Real Estate Agent (Continued)!

This is inspired by a colleague and friend of ours, Rich Jacobson , who owns the Kitsap County Real Estate Blog in Washington state. His work for the source of this series is superb, and with his graces we are retooling it for first time home buyers in our South Lake Tahoe real estate market.

This then is the third in a series of articles focused on helping 1st Time Home Buyers successfully buy a house in South Lake Tahoe. Each time, we’ll focus on key events, or steps if you will, in the South Lake Tahoe home buying process.

In the first of these, we talked about Mortgage Lenders and Loan Pre-Approval.
In the second article we talked about the first five of the top ten traits to look for in finding A Great Real Estate Agent ( Pt 1).

Step Three: Find a Top Notch Real Estate Agent (here’s 10 traits to look for)

Top Ten Graphic

One of the things we like best about practicing real estate is we often get to provide meaningful help to people. I can’t think of anything more true than the joy we’ve had helping first time home buyers.

First allow us to emphasize just how important it is to have a professional real estate agent to represent you. This is of particular importance, and even more so for a first time home buyer. You owe it to yourself to have a dedicated advocate to represent your best interests exclusively. Here’s a list of things to look for in finding that professional:

Top Ten Traits of a Good Real Estate Agent: (Pt 2, the second  five!)

Highly Recommended: The agent you’re looking for you will have testimonials from past clients… if you ask. Get some of their past client’s contact phone numbers or e-mail addresses, and contact them. Great agents will always have lots of great clients who say great things about them!

Empathetic: Empathy is one of those character traits that you’ll want to observe in the agent that’s right for you. A great agent is sensitive to your needs. Does the agent listen? Does the agent ask this simple question, "what is important to you?" A good sign that shows a lack of empathy is the agent who constantly blathers on and on about how great he or she  is? The key to empathy is caring, and that comes through the use of ones ears, and as we all know, those don’t work when mouth is in full motion.

The empathetic agent is patient and understanding. As if by nature, the agent that’s right for you recognizes your emotions, fears, and anxieties, and this is particularly important with the first-time home buyer. The empathetic agent provides constant and confident assurances throughout the entire transaction.

Willing to Educate: There is never too much information. This is especially true with 1st Time Home Buyers. Ask your agent to lead you through the transaction process step by step. This will rule out surprises along the way, which will also allow you to anticipate the various events as they occur.

Tech Savvy: The Great agent is tech savvy. There is no way of getting around that in today’s professional real estate practice. Ours is an extremely tech dependent industry. Does your prospective agent have a dedicated website? A real estate blog? Is the online information the agent provides up-to-date and relevant to your process? Does it have tools to easily search for area listings? Do they provide online statistics and market reports that help you?

Continuing Education:  The professional real estate practice is forever changing and evolving. The role of the great real estate agent is one of constant adaptation and reeducation. In fact a real estate agent has to document their reeducation process every two years in Nevada, and every four years in California to maintain their license.

In addition to required continuing education courses, some agents choose to do much more than that. These are the agents to look for, and they have reached the pinnacle of real estate agent certification and qualification. The two top professional designations a real estate agent can achieves are the Accredited Buyers Representative (ABR) and the Certified Residential Specialist (CRS). These designations are synonymous with more study, more experience, and greater degrees of knowledge. The agent you are looking for has both of these (Yep, we have them too).

This completes the Top Ten Traits of a Great Real Estate Agent. Again we can not over emphasize the importance of a great agent for all home buyers, and the first time home buyer in particular.

Next, we will focus on the first meeting with your agent in greater detail, and what you need to accomplish prior to actually looking for your 1st home. The more you prepare ahead of time, the greater your chances of successfully achieving your 1st Time Home Buying Adventure!

The first post in this series, Mortgage Lenders and Loan Pre-Approval  here.
The second in this series, Get a Great Agent (pt 1)  here.
The next article in this series, Exchanging Vows: The Buyer Agency Agreement here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 9:17 am and is filed under Lake Tahoe Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Real Esate Tomato Chiclet