In today’s market, real estate professionals need to be just that — professional.
That means more than giving the tour, explaining the steps involved in buying and selling a home and giving clients a to-do list to meet deadlines.
Agents increasingly will be required to demonstrate their value by helping clients make sound decisions during what is often the biggest financial decision of their lives.
To do that, you need to know the property, the neighborhood and local market, backed by the most current and reliable real estate data. Brokers need to become market insiders. If you aren’t, clients will know.
Providing reliable data on your city, its neighborhoods and the property is crucial in building trust.
Establishing Trust with Data-Driven Insight
To do so, the broker needs access to comprehensive and reliable property data to paint a nuanced picture about the home and neighborhood and compare that to similar homes in other neighborhoods in the market.
Accurate property data can help an agent make the case for lowering the listing price to a seller with unrealistic expectations, so a home doesn’t languish on the market for weeks.
Data can help your buyer gain an edge when multiple competitors are bidding on the same home. Data can help the agent negotiate a fair price acceptable to both parties.
As a broker, you also want to give your client options. It is important to know a lot about the neighborhood, and also about other neighborhoods where homes are on the market.
Only when you understand citywide trends and the neighborhoods can you truly claim to be an expert on your market.
How do you gain an insider’s knowledge of a property and its market?
ATTOM has both granular real estate data on individual properties and the tools to put that information into context.
The company, for example, has an easy-to-use Neighborhood Navigator tool where you can research by zip codes key details about a neighborhood. You can find everything from the average commuting distance and crime rates to where the closest gym and pizza place is located.
The Neighborhood Navigator tool provides:
- Highly detailed boundaries at the macro, neighborhood, sub-neighborhood and residential subdivision level.
- Community demographics, socioeconomic data, points of interest and schools.
- The ability to generate PDF reports, interactive maps and thematic visualizations to display neighborhood trends and boundaries for potential clients.
- Easily searchable data on comparable homes within the same area, and access to the current sales trends.
As for property data, ATTOM has a national data warehouse with more than 155 million residential and commercial properties in 3,000 plus U.S. counties.
This information includes the square footage, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms; the estimated taxes; the property’s price compared to the listed value; and how much the property is mortgaged in relation to its estimated value.
You can also learn who owns the property and its precise geographic boundary lines, among other details.
The Changing Landscape of Real Estate Fees and Client Expectations
In spring 2024, the National Association of Realtors and several large U.S. brokerages agreed to settle the Sitzer-Burnett federal lawsuit brought on behalf of home sellers in Missouri. In settling, NAR agreed to conditions to encourage more direct negotiations among buyers and their agents over broker fees.
Post Sitzer-Burnett, both sellers and buyers will negotiate separate written service agreements with their agents in most MLS territories of the U.S. This should, over time, make the typical buyer and seller more aware of the fees, which have traditionally been an afterthought in sales.
That’s also likely to make consumers more demanding. If a buyer or seller’s agent isn’t providing value, the client will increasingly question what they’re paying for. Buyers and sellers have traditional and alternative ways to buy and sell homes. They have Google to search for basic facts about a property available online. To prove your value, a broker will need to do more.
Agents who fail to build trust with clients could be forced to leave the business. Certainly, at a minimum, the underperforming agent will lose business to highly rated agents as the reviews roll in on Yelp, Reddit and elsewhere.
The broker fee should be, and increasingly will be, a reflection of the agent’s experience and insider knowledge of the property and local market. An agent’s ability to find and use data to help their clients make sound decisions will be at the core of a successful career.
You can use transaction history and sales trends data from ATTOM to track changes in home sales, prices and other crucial details pertinent to transactions, and make yourself a true insider.
Written by: Jennifer Von Pohlmann