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Not the Area Specialist What About the Glossy Home Profile Book and the Area Specialist Title?
The Home Profile Book
There's quite a few so called "national real estate trainers" who hold seminars all over the country teaching real estate agents how to prepare presentation books or Home Profile Books to impress home owners as a means to obtain new listing from homeowner's. These too have nothing to do with the sale of your home.
Unless your home is properly priced and the condition is properly "staged," the Home Profile Book will not sell your home for you. It's a listing getter as we call it in the business. And, unless your agent gives away these expensive and handsome looking profile books to every potential buyer who comes through your property, it does not do anything other than impress you. An average buyer is shown anywhere from 10 to 30 homes on a weekend. How much time do you think they spend reading the Home Profile Book?
Sure it shows the pictures of near-by schools, your backyard, commute times and emergency phone numbers but this does not sell your home. Your home sells itself when everything's done correctly by a real estate professional. What if your agent could save you the money and time it takes in producing these books and use it for something better like selling your home and saving you commission?
The Area Specialist
What's an Area Specialist? Many times I put a rider on my signs that say this because I specialize in any area that I list and sell in! There's no such official designation by The Department of Real Estate or by any formal real estate association or board. There's no specific training or accredited courses for such a title. Essentially, anyone can claim to be an Area Specialist. Now that's the intrinsic worth of being or becoming an Area Specialist. Even brand new agents who still have no idea of what they're doing in this business were taught to give themselves the title "Area Specialist."
True, there are a few agents who have actually established themselves in certain geographical areas and loosely speaking, they may be called Area Specialists. However, the truth of the matter is that it doesn't matter whether your listing agent is the "Area Specialist" because they don't usually find the buyers themselves. Buyers are brought to your home by the buyer's agent who may be located anywhere. I've had listings in Vancouver that were sold to buyers represented by agents from Seattle to Portland!
If your expectation of an Area Specialist is that he or she would find the buyer for your home because everybody thinking about buying homes in your neighborhood knows him or her is just not the case. Most home buyers DO NOT come from your neighborhood, they're from all over the country or even the world and most of them are already working with their own real estate agent (the buyer's agent).
It's easy to find out how many homes your Area Specialist has actually listed and sold all by himself. All you have to do is ask the Area Specialist to provide you with a MLS print-out of his or her past 12 months of transactions. The listing and selling agents' names are clearly shown on MLS statistics. You will find that in most cases the answer is none!
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