When To Fire Your Real Estate Broker

Does that mean she has lost interest? When do you know if you should hire another agent?
 

A: After three months without an offer, any good agent might suggest lowering the price point in order to sell. Whether or not you need to do this will depend on how fast your local market is moving.

Simply suggesting that your mother lower her price isn’t grounds to fire the agent. The real question is what else has she been doing to market the property? Has she held open houses for the public and for brokers? Has she advertised the home?

If the answer is that she hasn’t done anything for three months except ask your mother to lower the price, then a conversation is in order. Your mother should do her agent the courtesy of asking what plans she has for the marketing of the property and ask her to provide the sales data for homes similar to hers in the area over the past three months.

If the conversation doesn’t go well, the next thing to do is look at the listing agreement. When does the listing agreement terminate? What kind of notice does your mother have to give the agent if she decides to switch agents? If she signed a 90-day listing agreement, it should have expired by now and she would be free to interview other agents.

Any agent can go stale on a house. When that happens, it's usually because he or she thinks that the house is overpriced for its own physical condition or the changing local market conditions or another project is drawing the agent's interest. (It can also happen if something has changed in the agent's personal life making it hard for him or her to concentrate on work.)

If you decide to change agents, your mother should start the interviewing process from scratch. That means finding three agents, asking each of them to prepare a comparative marketing analysis (CMA), interviewing them about what they sell and what kinds of clients they have, and asking about the marketing plans they have for the property.

When all that's done, your mother should decide which agent is right for her. And don’t be surprised if she decides to lower her price and stay with her current agent.

NOTE: This column is distributed by Real Estate Matters Syndicate, PO Box 366, Glencoe, Illinois, 60022. This column may not be resold, reprinted, resyndicated or redistributed without written permission from the publisher.