I first was licensed by the Georgia Real Estate Commission to be a real estate salesperson in 1979. After interviewing with a number of brokers, I decided to place my license with Barton & Ludwig Realtors, a fast-growing independent company with extremely ugly colors (blue and painfully bright orange).
It was an awful time to be entering the real estate business, but I didn’t know any better, so I did everything they told me to do, and before long, I was listing and selling houses.
We didn’t have cellphones, fax machines, computers, or even pagers yet. The so-called “multiple listing services” were secretive lists of “for sale” homes. The word “CONFIDENTIAL” was printed on the cover of each listing book, even though the information was often obsolete by the time it was printed in book form.
Todays’ buyer has the Internet, and that changes everything. Today, fully 88 percent of buyers begin their search online, taking virtual tours, gathering financial and neighborhood information, and generally learning all the facts we so carefully guarded in 1979.
A quick visit to REALTOR.com reveals homes, both “for sale” and “recently sold” in a dizzying array of customizable sortings, and enough data is easily available to perform a reasonably accurate estimation of value, even before the buyer leaves his sofa.
This begs the question: If the agent is no longer a gatekeeper of information, what value does he bring to the table? Here we come to my opinion:
• Experience: The homebuying process is often a long and winding road, with many a twist and turn. And because the average buyer or seller moves only once every seven years, prior involvement is not the same as current experience. Having an experienced agent at your side is akin to a wagonmaster guiding settlers over the Rockies to the unexplored West. It is almost indispensable.
• Expertise: With luck, your agent will have developed specific transaction skills that can overcome the inevitable challenges that threaten to doom the transaction. Not a lawyer, not a loan officer, not a builder, yet with substantial knowledge in all these areas, a good agent filters all information from source to client, buffering or strengthening as needed for a smooth closing.
• Confidence: A by-product of experience and expertise that's vital in its own right. Buyers and sellers typically lack the confidence necessary to see the sale through to the conclusion. I'm sure there was once a perfectly smooth purchase and sale, but I've never seen one in thirty years of practice. And sometimes, the only thing keeping the buyer and seller on track is the agent's determination that the sale can and will happen. And finally,
• Passion: Most successful agents get a real sense of satisfaction from seeing a family find the right house and make it their own. Buying a house is not like buying a pair of shoes. It's a very emotional process, and is likely one of the largest financial transactions a buyer or seller will ever undertake. For that reason, the agent's enthusiasm and zeal for the ideal of home ownership is key to their own ability to serve the public.
Yes, the Internet has forever changed the way we approach buying and selling a home. But even as technology advances, regulation and consumerism at all levels have caused the process to become even more complex. Thus, the need for the qualified real estate professional is as pronounced as it has ever been.
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