Finding the best real estate agent – Part V

Finding the best real estate agent when buying an Investment home. Identifying and Finding the best real estate agent when working with investment or foreclosure homes is different than any other type of real estate. Where in other types of real estate can benefit from the energy and focus brought by novice real estate professionals there is no room for the blind leading the blind when it comes to investment real estate.

Knowing the costs of closing and carrying a piece of property does not leave a great deal of room for error. This is where the real estate professional is required to know the ins and outs of investment real estate. The best real estate agent for working in investment real estate is someone that has done it before, someone you trust and someone that is really good at math and not concerned with the things that don’t matter.

There are not enough books, websites or blogs to keep a real estate agent current or can replace the experience of having done it before. There was a real estate agent in the way way back past that decided to work with Foreclosures. The only problem was that he had as much experience in Foreclosures as he had in trapping tigers…which was ZERO. Zero isn’t bad when the subject is calories in a soda, but when the subject is hundreds of thousands of dollars at risk…experience is a very good thing but zero experience is very very bad.

Funny story:

An agent decided that a home was a good deal because it was well below the average price of homes in the area. The problem was that the home sat on a lot that was scheduled to have a freeway run through it within a year. This would have been known had the real estate agent been up on the business of investments, part of which is determined by what is happening in the local market…things like a four lane freeway! So the agent got paid, the investor got slayed and they never worked together again. The only difference was that the agent continued in real estate while the investor went back to working at the local mall.