Let the Real Estate Buyer Prepare: Internet Tools to Assist in Your Search for a Real Estate Agent

Let the Real Estate Buyer Prepare:
Internet Tools to Assist in Your Search for a Real Estate Agent

Let the Real Estate Buyer Prepare:
Internet Tools to Assist in Your Search for a Real Estate Agent

Real Estate transactions evoke the most sense of trepidation amongst consumers. After all, these are the transactions where the largest amounts of money exchange hands. Who is there to guide you through the process? Most of us turn to a seasoned real estate agent to help.

With an average commission of 5% coupled with the fact that you are often ‘married’ to an agent for some period, it’s essential to check their reputation before sign the nuptials. Word of mouth recommendations are one way to put your mind to ease, but failing that, the Internet, until recently, didn’t have much to offer.

The Internet featured hundreds of referral sites yet all of them lack prominent ratings provided by the actual consumers that have interacted with them. Many referral sites feature pages of sponsored ads which cloud any useful data. Others offer extensive information about a given agent, such as, the agent’s pets and number of children the agent has. While that’s nice to know, it’s useless in answering four important questions about your perspective agent:

1) Integrity: Was the agent honest and loyal to past customers’ interests?
2) Quality of the Deal: Did the agent strike a good deal for his/her past customers?
3) Recommendation: Would past customers recommend this agent to their friends?
4) Availability: Did the agent expeditiously respond to past customers’ requests?

RankYourAgent.com seeks to level the field in real estate by providing answers to these crucial questions about perspective agents. RankYourAgent.com (http://www.rankyouragent.com) collects the answers to these questions provided by web users. These statistics are made available free of charge to anyone who’d like to view a real estate agents ranking.

RankYourAgent.com derives its income from unobtrusive Google(tm) Adsense(tm) ads. A quick visit to RankYourAgent.com will allow the user to rank an agent that isn’t already ranked, or view agents by name or region.

Visit http://www.rankyouragent.com today and see if your agent is listed. At the end of your real estate transaction, don’t forget to come back and provide rankings so that others can benefit from your experiences.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Investors file claim against Ritchie

Investors file claim against Ritchie
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KUTV - SALT LAKE CITY - The Utah Department of Commerce announced this week that the Division of Securities has released a top ten list of investment scams for 2007. The list details fraudulent activity tracked by the Division of Securities over the past

How to determine the best real estate markets to invest in?

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Now, let’s suppose you are planning to invest in real estate … you might want to ask yourself two questions -

Where will you invest? And

What sort of property will you buy?

Why ask questions like these? Well, like some wise person said, money is made when buying. It’s very important that the buying decision is a very good one … that decision alone might greatly increase the possibility and amount of profits made.

Also, buying real estate properties at relatively low prices in areas that have very good fundamentals and future prospects is one way to almost guarantee profits.

One way to answer the first question might be to see which are the fastest growing communities … and then determine why they are the fastest growing communities.

For instance, according to a recent article on netscape.com, Greeley, Colo. is one of the fastest growing communities … and the possible reason stated for it being one of the fastest? Its relatively inexpensive homes and its proximity to a major metropolitan center.

If Greeley remains at the head of the list of fastest growing communities for another year or two, its “relatively inexpensive homes” might become fairly expensive … and by that time the people who saw this trend first and bought homes there would have made many a pretty penny

Communities with the fastest rate of population growth can also see very high real estate value appreciations.

And coming to our second question, what sort of property will you buy?

Well, the answer to the first question might determine the possible choices for this … for the type of property to buy might well depend on where you buy property …

Location might determine the best type of property to buy …

For instance, luxury property has a been one of the best performing segments of real estate, but you may not want to buy luxury property as an investment option just about anywhere - maybe if you chose to buy property in Beverly Hills, then luxury real estate would be a great option.

And what if you are buying property in a fast growing community where a large percentage of the new population is single families? Then maybe buying single-family homes would be a good option…

And if a large percentage of the population is retirees, then you might want to determine what types of property people in their golden years prefer.

About the Author

Gurubhakt is a writer and web content developer who has written content for several niche sites, and one of the latest is http://www.abeachfronthouse.com that discusses a wide variety of real estate like golfcourse condos, Baja real estate, cottage in PEI, Canada and more.