Law student shares ingenious secrets she used to guarantee she found the best house, for the best price, with the absolute minimum hassle required.
When Christy Corder -- a first time home buyer just out of law school -- decided to buy a home, she wanted to get the best deal possible, but was too busy studying for the bar exam to do all the work herself. She didn't have the time to "shop around" with a dozen different Realtors - most of whom were incompetent anyway.
In a competitive market where there are practically more people with a real estate license than with a driver's license, Christy realized that agents will do anything to get a customer's business... ANYTHING! To capitalize on that fact, she developed a plan she could use on any real estate agent, in any market, and not only got them to bend over backwards for her, but she was assured that she would receive a nice chunk of that agent's check at closing if all of her requirements weren't met.
Some of the tactics Christy used are as follows:
Quickly separate the winners from the losers. Due to the fact that most agents couldn't negotiate their way out of a paper bag, Christy needed a way to quickly identify the best agents who could get her the best deal on her home from the rest of the crowd. That way, she didn't end up finding a home with an agent she might not want negotiating on her behalf.
Christy had a couple agents in mind, but rather than wasting time looking at a bunch of homes with each of them, she decided to construct an interview for each of those agents. After her interview, she would either identify an agent worth working with, or look around some more. Either way, she wasn't going to waste a minute of her time looking at homes with an incompetent agent.
Guarantee they are going to be the ones doing all of the work. In an earlier attempt to find a home, Christy found more homes she wanted to see on her own than the agent she was working with found. She didn't have the time to do all of her agent's work, and knew that her agent SHOULD be able to find everything she was finding. However, typical commission structures give no incentive (or disincentive) for agents to do that work.
Christy changed that by making her agent agree up front that she would be compensated fairly out of the agent's commission if she found the house herself. As a result, not only did her agent search the MLS several times a day, but he went above and beyond the call of duty to find other homes not in the MLS -- and he found them before 95% of other Realtors found them!
Keep them on their toes with a "cancel anytime clause". Any agent who wanted Christy to sign an agreement committing her to use them for the next 6 to 12 months just wasn't going to cut it since most agents sit back and relax as soon as they get a buyer to sign any such contract. Once Christy found that her agent "passed the test", she told him she would sign a 12 month contract, but reserved the right to cancel her contract with that agent at any time - for any reason. That way, if the agent got too busy for her, wasn't finding enough homes for her to look at, or turned out not to be as competent as he initially appeared to be, she could get rid of him.
Force them to stop selling homes as if they were used car salespeople. Nothing irritated Christy more than agents who kept pointing out the obvious with each home -- as if she were blind and didn't notice that the home had vaulted ceilings, or which bedroom was the master bedroom! Christy felt that an agent's job isn't to show off the painfully obvious positive features of every home they see -- but instead to watch out for her interests and find out everything WRONG with that home. She developed a condition which any real estate agent who wanted to work with her had to agree to -- up front. That condition essentially guaranteed her agent would never waste her time with "used car sales" tactics, and instead act as her advocate -- making sure she doesn't buy a home that she won't be 100 percent satisfied with after her purchase.
All of the agent's work will cost her nothing, and on top of that, if desired, she could make money from her agent. Considering she was just out of school, Christy didn't have much at all in savings, and she wanted all of that to go towards buying her house and furnishing it. The last condition Christy required of her agent was that she didn't pay him a dime out of her pocket. In fact, she devised a very interesting plan that leveraged her contacts with the community to make money with her agent instead of ever having to pay a dime in steep commissions if she wanted to work with that agent in the future.
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About the Author
Joel is the founder of Make-Them-Pay.com - a free website dedicated to empowering home buyers to get the most out of their home-buying experience.