Two Steps to Choosing the Absolute Best Real Estate Agent

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Let’s say you want to buy or sell a home and you want advise, a local expert to help you sell for the highest price or buy a home in the right area at the right time. How do you pick a Realtor? Hopefully you’re looking at experience (years licensed and sales completed) as well as client satisfaction (reviews and recommendations). These are the two necessary steps to picking the absolute best real estate agent. You’ll need both to find the best available real estate agent. One or the other is not enough! You could find an agent with hundreds of great reviews only to find out they don’t represent actual sales or clients. Or you could find someone with many licensed years and sales, but they actually haven’t made their clients happy along the way. So you need to verify both, and it’s easy.

There are independent places you can go to verify both real estate agent experience and client satisfaction!

1. Verify a Real Estate Agent’s Reviews

Three Best Rated is a company and a process. They pick the best three rated real estate agents in an area using a 50 point inspection process to determine which three make the list. If the real estate agent you’re considering makes this tiny list (for example 3 agents are picked out of Portland areas 11,000 agents!) then you know you’ve got a good one.

Five Star Professional is another independent company that verifies customer satisfaction for real estate agents. In order to determine which Realtors are highly regarded, they randomly call and survey recent home buyers and sellers across the country every year. Then the top ranked agents are offered the award. For example in Portland 4% of agents will receive the 2022 Five Star Professional award. Only 72 real estate agents in Portland (out of 11,000) has received the Five Star Professional award ten years in a row!

The Best Reviewed Real Estate Agent in Portland

Okay, so if you read the above section you’ll see that a Three Best Rated winner in Portland combined with a ten year Five Star Professional winner in Portland has to be at the very top of any customer satisfaction list. Stephen FitzMaurice, Principal Broker in Oregon, Managing Broker in Washington, has managed both. Ten year winner of the Five Star Professional award, multi-year winner of Three Best Rated. He’d love to talk with you today. Give his team a call or chat with our bot on this site. You’ll be surprised how quickly he calls you back.

2. Verify a Real Estate Agents Experience (Years Licensed + Sales Record)

Determine years licensedOregon and Washington allow you to lookup a real estate agent’s license. This will tell you two very important things, how long they have been licensed, and if they have any customer complaints sticking to their record. Personally, I think it is essential to spend the 60 seconds to look up an agent’s license before signing a contract with them.

Verify sales record – it’s hard to find a real estate agent that would admit to not being experienced in an area. Thankfully, there are a few ways to verify a real estate agent’s sales record. Realtor.com makes it easy with their Realtor Finder page. Simply type in the name of the Realtor you want to check up on and it will show their sales record. Want more information? You can find a map of the real estate agent’s sales (though it only goes back one year) if you look up the agent on Zillow’s Agent Finder.

We’d love to talk with you.

Stephen FitzMaurice has been selling real estate since 2003 and his small team has completed over 2,000 sales in Oregon and SW Washington. Not only are they one of the most successful real estate teams in the country, but they are one of the highest rated in customer satisfaction – and that is what really matters. Please give us a call today or chat with our bot on this site. We’d love to start up a conversation.

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What My Clients Are Saying

You're looking to buy a house and reading reviews because this is a major decision. We entered the market to purchase a home very inexperienced and skeptical. We now own a house thanks to Stephen and his network. Stephen will be our first choice whenever we decide to buy or sell a property in the future.

George