In many ways, real estate is just the name that we give to all the natural land we have transformed into civilization. That makes managing real estate one of the most important things that our society does to maintain itself. Maybe that is why people in the United States alone spend more than $202 billion every single year on real estate sales and brokerage services!

Of course, an industry that large will have a huge number of realtors to choose between. With the right questions to ask your realtor before you pick them, you will have a better chance of choosing the right realtor for your situation.

Read on to learn all about the most important questions to ask your realtor before you sign anything!

1. Ask Each Realtor About Their Experience

If you want to know what to ask a realtor, start by asking about their experience. The most obvious thing to find out is how long they've been a real estate agent.

However, some real estate agents start out doing real estate work only part-time. Later on, they transition to working as full-time real estate agents. If you ask them about their experience, they might add their part-time and full-time years together, inflating their years of experience.

If you ask how many years a realtor has been in the business, make sure to ask how many of those years, if any, were as a part-time agent.

If a significant number of those years were part-time, that can give you a better sense of how much experience this realtor really has. It may also help you decide if this realtor will tend to bend the truth or not.

Of course, total years of experience isn't the only thing to pay attention to. You also need to know how much work your candidate realtor has done in that time. If possible, also ask for numbers about how many properties they have managed in their career as an agent.

At the end of the day, more experience tends to be better. That does not mean that agents with less experience cannot do a great job. It does not even mean that some agents with less experience will do a better job than some agents with more experience.

But unless you have a good reason to think otherwise in a specific situation, it often makes sense to assume that an agent with more experience will be able to do better work for you.

The last thing to keep in mind is that not all experience is created equal. If somebody has a lot of experience selling homes in your part of town, that experience is probably worth more than the experience that another agent has selling properties in another part of town.

2. Ask Your Realtor About Their Volume of Work in Recent History

Total experience is very important. However, recent experience can also be very informative. If a real estate agent has had decades of experience selling huge numbers of homes, but they haven't been doing much work in the past few years, they might not be the best choice, despite their total experience.

Make sure to also ask about how many transactions a realtor has managed just in the past year or so.

3. Ask for Recommendations, References, and Reviews

You can probably find online ratings and reviews for your realtor. They can provide essential information that can help you assess if they have done good work in the past. That is probably the best indicator of whether or not they will do good work for you.

However, you should also ask your candidate realtor for references. If they can provide many glowing references, that is some indication that they may do great work for you as well.

4. Ask Your Realtor What Kind of Contract They Use

Some realtors use long-term contracts. Sellers want to get out of them at some point, only to discover that the contract says that they cannot.

One of the most important realtor questions to ask is if they provide a flexible contract. If you decide to change your realtor partway through the process you want a contract that allows you to do so. Make sure you ask your candidate realtor if they will provide that kind of contract.

5. Ask a Realtor How Long It Will Take Them to Sell a Home

Ask your realtor how long they think it will take them to sell your home. Also ask them how long it has taken them in the past to sell the homes they manage. Make sure to ask for specific numbers for that second question.

If you want to know how to find a realtor, you would want to know how carefully your candidate realtor tracks their rate of success.

6. Ask Your Realtor if They Have Photography Contacts

You are definitely going to want to use professional photos for selling your home. To help you know how to choose a realtor, ask each candidate realtor if they can provide professional photographer services.

If they say that they can do the photography themselves, that might not be a good sign. Unless they literally worked as a professional photographer before, you'll probably get better work out of a professional.

Understand the Most Important Questions to Ask Your Realtor

We hope learning about the questions to ask your realtor before hiring them has been helpful for you. Many people are unfamiliar with the real estate process. Unfortunately, if you pick the wrong realtor, it can be difficult to recover from that mistake.

That makes learning a little bit more about how to pick the right realtor an investment. To learn more about how to choose between your options for a realtor or to speak with real estate experts who might be able to help you, feel free to reach out and get in touch with us here at any time!