Questions as an Agent You May Have Not Thought Of When Interviewing Real Estate Companys

After reading Lenn Harvey's post My Real Estate Company, How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count the Ways, which is about the questions you need to ask yourself when choosing the right real estate company for YOU as a new agent looking to start in the real estate business or an experienced one looking to find a brokerage model that best fits YOUR needs. 

By the way if you haven't read Lenn's post, please do first.  She has some great advice on how to choose the right office and she breaks down the different brokerage models out there.

So, why did I write this post?  When you're a newer agent you usually go for a brokerage that will give you a lot of support (ie: training and floor time and postitioning in the market), but it's hard to know what questions to ask when you're looking for the right brokerage to work with at the very beginning. 

After a few years those questions and details start to become apparent as you work your way through this real estate business and hopefully while you build your own.

So here a few more questions to think about when choosing a broker:

1) How many Active listings does this broker have at any given time?

• The reason to ask this is to find out the number of company signs out on the market, promoting not only that particular listing, but the company itself.  If your broker carries over 100 listings on average at one time and a good portion of them are standard company signs (ie: not ones with the listing agent contact number on them - and I would ask about this too) then there is a good chance that there will be a decent number of buyers who call into the office directly from that sign.

Which leads me to Question #2

2) How many main office calls (Floor Calls), calls that are fair game to the agent who answers the phone,  does the broker get daily, monthly, etc? 

• If you're a new agent this is one of the ways you will get some of your first real estate deals, so you want to be sure that the phone is ringing on a regular basis to increase your chances of getting a few buyer leads.  One's that you can build a long term relationship with (most won't be ready to buy until 6 months from the time they called).

3) How much floor time (time spent answering the main phone to potentially capture buyers looking for property) will your broker give you and what are the best times to be sitting answering phones? 

• A large franchise company may be established in the community and have many listings to make the front office phone ring more often (depending on their advertising strategy), but there are more agents that you work with in an office like this, which means that floor time is divided among all the agents.  So if there are say 40 agents, you may get floor time 3 or 4 times a month. 

• A smaller boutique office or smaller franchise company may not have as many listings, but maybe you work with only 2 other agents and you can be on floor more often increasing your chances.

4) How is the brokerage company set up? Are you competing with your broker or does he just manage the business?

5) What about the buyer or seller leads that come in from the internet?  What is the broker's policy on passing out these leads?

• Some brokerages are designed so that the successful broker is the "rain maker", his advertising, years of experience, etc. bring in a large number of buyer and seller leads per year and he gives all (if he just manages) or some of those leads to his agents to work on.  Some agents are buyer's agents so even though they can bring in their own clients or listings, the broker gives them all of his buyer leads and only deals with listing property.  So it's important to ask all of these questions.

6) How many buyer (or seller) leads can you expect to receive from your broker on a yearly basis?

So there you have it. A few more questions to add to the list when looking for the Broker that's RIGHT FOR YOU :)

Copyright 2008 Jessica Bigger, All rights reserved.