"What’s Most Important in a Real Estate Agent?"

What would you guess is the most important skill or quality when it comes to choosing your Apollo Beach real estate agent? Since that real estate agent is someone who will play a key role in the financial event most families consider the most important they ever face, it’s well worth investigating. When you buy or sell a home, it almost always turns out to be an indelible milestone in the family’s history. So what quality is most important in making the choice of who you want to play that key role?

March 2012 the National Association of Realtors announced the results of a survey that addresses the question in a serious way. As published in their Economists’ Outlook, the answer is both surprising and – when you think about it – not so surprising at all.

Communication and negotiating skills both come up as key factors that buyers consider important. Both qualities are considered necessary to instilling confidence among the parties to any home sale. Nobody wants any surprises during the process; everyone wants to know what’s going on at all times.

Knowledge of the real estate market, which is key in establishing and relating the real values in a home sale, is valued even higher. Knowledge of the purchase process -- the ins and outs of the technical details of what is often a complex series of requirements -- is thought to be even more important for a real estate agent.

But those are not the most valued quality according to the NAR survey, which was national in scope. It queried a national sample of actual recent buyers of new and previously owned homes, so the answers they report are based on real experience with real estate agents by real home buyers.

Slightly more important was ‘responsiveness’ -- which I personally think of as the service side of communication. It means that the national sample of home buyers think a good agent not only knows the right answer to the many questions that come up, but also knows how to answer the phone!

So that leaves the last and greatest quality that real buyers value: and it’s the hands-down winner with an overpowering 98% of all buyers in agreement. The quality is honesty and integrity. More important than knowing the market? Than people skills? More important than keeping in touch? More important than mastery of the legal and technical issues?

You bet!