Short advice from real estate agent Steve D Valentine on practical house-shopping etiquette and collaboration: buyers should communicate with their agent, visit open houses (while informing the host they have an agent), bring properties they like to the agent’s attention so searches can be narrowed, and work as a team to find homes within constraints (e.g., 3 bed/2 bath under $400,000).
Chapters
I think whenever you're looking at homes, I think you have that initial conversation with your agent and the agent should arm them with the correct credentials, maybe business cards, those types of things. Like, hey, I'm going to send you a list of homes and inevitably you're going to be driving around these neighborhoods. You're going to see an open house. You're going to want to pop into it. Well, go ahead and pop into it and take a look at it. Let the person that's there know that you're working with an agent. Same thing with the for sale by owner. It's okay, right? I'm going to represent you. This is what we talked about and this is what we do. We work together as a team to find the best house for you. And guess what? I'm not always going to find find everything. It's a needle and a haystack when you're saying, I want a three bedroom, two bath for under $400,000. Well, here's 3200 of them. So it's not always as easy as what everybody thinks it is. So it's best that we're both on the lookout. And the more houses that you bring to me, you're like, I really like this one. Then I'm going to know, okay, these houses really fit. And we can start narrowing down the searches and the location because a lot of times you can go look at an open house and go, I don't like this area. I don't want to go that far west or that far east. And we start to narrow it down based on your time.
