One of the key indicators of whether an agency will be able to get you the highest possible price for your property is whether they offer a team approach to selling your home.
When a sales team is engaged to sell your property, as opposed to one salesperson within an agency, the home seller is given a significant advantage over other more common sales systems. The entire sales team has an incentive to sell your property not just one person within the team.
While this may seem like a logical way to sell real estate, it will surprise many people to learn when they list with a ‘large brand’ franchise group, only one salesperson and maybe their assistant receive any benefit or incentive to sell the property.
Under this structure there is no motivation for a team of people to assist you in achieving the right price. This is why many salespeople ask the property owner to spend big on advertising — they’re compensating for a lack of salespeople working on the sale even though there may be 10 of them at the agency.
Most people have no idea how inefficient an individual agent is when they belong to an agency where protecting your turf is essential. When you see sales agents splashing their mobile number on all marketing material, including ‘For Sale’ signs, this is evidence they are trying to entice buyers away from other agents, some of whom may even be in the same agency.
This tactic also allows a sales agent to protect or lose buyer leads that come in through their personal phone rather than their agency’s general phone number. Quite often this system causes the right buyer for a listing held by one salesperson in the agency to miss out on the home they want.
The agent they have signed on with simply does not show them the home despite knowing their buying criteria.
So why doesn’t that agent show them their potential dream home?
Because they will lose ‘their’ buyer to a work colleague, not receive a full commission on the sale and have to search for a new buyer to purchase one of their own listings. In an agency where sales agents compete with one another to sell your home, you’re much more likely to receive the highest market price on the back of this internal agent competition. Internal competition between sales agents also ensures that each prospective buyer will receive personal service along with excellent follow-up and communication.
While all salespeople compete to sell your home, the person who negotiates the highest price for your property is financially rewarded with the sale.