The perfect real estate agent.

In recent years, much has been said about the “massification of real estate agents” at a global level, the result of effective expansion strategies on the part of the main international real estate mediation brands. The real estate industry moves large sums of money, which makes it attractive for anyone looking for a job. The business model of Real Estate agents often advocates hiring several agents, in order to achieve greater market presence through numbers. Sometimes, regardless of the experience or positive qualities of the real estate agent candidate, he enters the company without experience or technical knowledge, which leads to some constraints in the relationship with clients. This led to a discredit on the part of the search for the real estate agent. With an enormous diversity of information about the market and its business cycle publicly available, the Real Estate Agent has a redoubled duty to value his role as a professional.

Firstly, it is necessary to analyze the duties of a Real Estate Agent towards its clients. Here I analyze ethical and technical aspects, not legal or associative ones.

Following the definition of “Kaplan Real Estate Education”, which in general presents what in my opinion are the main characteristics of a Real Estate Agent, sub-dividing their duties towards the Buyer and towards the Seller.

Agents working with seller customers must:

Understand the seller's needs and motivations.

Demonstrate market knowledge, real estate marketing techniques and high negotiation skills.

Have an in-depth notion of property values in your area of activity in order to be able to analyze and suggest current sales values.

List properties on relevant and effective listing services.

Make excellent presentations of the properties for future dissemination in various media.

Strategically organize visits, preparing the property properly, so that it looks perfect when visits are made.

Agents working with buyer clients must:

Attract, qualify and understand the needs of potential buyers.

Find real estate options in the market that meet the needs of your customers, carrying out the most effective prospecting actions.

Plan and schedule visits to the options presented after having full knowledge of the characteristics of the property to be visited.

Show the properties in a professional manner, highlighting the positive points and required characteristics, and ethically warning about any negative points of the property and other information that you may have obtained from other real estate professionals (home inspectors, appraisers, trainers and other real estate agents) .

Demonstrate negotiating skills and try to get the buyer and seller to come to an agreement.

At the closing of the deal, the Real Estate Agent normally accompanies the parties at all stages of the negotiation and purchase and sale process, up to the public deed.

Taking these premises into account, the perfect Real Estate Agent must have extensive market knowledge, obtained through some experience in the sector and professional training for each of the above mentioned characteristics.

But the real estate market is atypical in almost every way. On the part of the consumer (sellers and buyers), when asked about the main characteristics of a Real Estate Agent, in a recent survey I prepared on the LinkedIn platform, 47% of respondents worldwide responded “Charisma and social skills”, 28% “ Years in the Market” (experience), 22% “Innovative and focused on new technologies” (an Agent of the Future) and only 3% answered “Academic Qualification”.

In a study carried out by Redfin, and in order of importance, there are the following characteristics that the market is looking for in a Real Estate Agent:

Honesty and Integrity

Technical knowledge

Attention to detail

Ease of communication

Negotiation skills

Dedication and determination

Be a “Team player”

Empathy and compassion (in the sense of defending your client's interests first)

Experience

Agility in achieving goals

Three different visions, three different results, albeit with some similarities. Reaffirming that the real estate industry is atypical, and consumer needs are virtually unlimited, it becomes impossible to describe what a perfect real estate agent is, as each one has its characteristics, more or less evident, which may or may not be crucial to achieving customers' objectives.

This theme is crucial nowadays, as brands by themselves lose weight in relation to the customer retention capacity of the best agents. There is also a global tendency to give more focus or power to the agent, because at the end of the day, he is the one who represents the brand in the day-to-day real estate mediation.

The global trend on real estate agents was overshadowed by the provision of low quality services, the massification of agents, the growth of technological platforms that solve part of the market's needs without resorting to agents. Over the years I've met super agents in most parts of the world, and for these there must be a way to differentiate them, to elevate excellent professionals to the level they deserve.

A platform that was born with this philosophy is being developed. Establish the first major directory of real estate agents worldwide, which obtains all these and other characteristics of each profile, where the market will only have to insert what its needs in terms of real estate and through data registered in Blockchain and Machine Learning, can obtain the profile of the most qualified agents for that type of specific needs.

This platform could change the paradigm of the Real Estate Agent being unnecessary, and even the form of demand and supply of real estate. The market starts to search for the perfect agent to find solutions for its needs, whether in the sale, purchase or lease of real estate.

With this analysis, I argue that there are no perfect Real Estate Agents, but there are real estate agents who are better able to achieve the objectives of a certain customer profile. Is this a more effective format when talking about real estate transactions?