When Christy Corder, a first-time homebuyer fresh out of law school, decided to buy a home, she wanted to get the best deal possible, but she was too busy studying for the bar exam to do all the work herself. . She didn’t have time to “shop around” a dozen different real estate agents, most of whom were incompetent anyway.

In a competitive market where there are virtually more people with real estate licenses than with driver’s licenses, Christy realized that agents would do anything to get a client’s business… ANYTHING! To capitalize on that fact, she developed a plan that she could use with any real estate agent, in any market, and not only got them to go above and beyond for her, but also ensured that she would receive a good chunk of that agent’s check. . at closing if all of your requirements have not been met.

Some of the tactics Christy used are as follows:

Quickly separate the winners from the losers.

Due to the fact that most agents couldn’t negotiate her way out of a paper bag, Christy needed a way to quickly identify the best agents who could get her the best deal on her home from the rest of the crowd. That way, she didn’t end up finding a house with an agent, she may not want to negotiate on her behalf.

Christy had a couple of agents in mind, but instead of wasting time looking at a bunch of houses with each of them, she decided to build an interview for each of those agents. After her interview, she would either identify an agent worth working with or do some more research. Either way, she wasn’t going to waste a minute of her time looking for houses with an incompetent agent.

It guarantees that they will be the ones to do all the work.

In a previous attempt to find a house, Christy found more houses she wanted to look at on her own than the agent she was working with found. She didn’t have time to do all her agent’s work and she knew that her agent SHOULD be able to find everything she was finding. However, typical commission structures provide no incentives (or disincentives) for agents to do that work.

Christy changed that by having her agent agree upfront that she would be fairly compensated from the agent’s commission if she found the house herself. As a result, her agent not only searched the MLS multiple times a day, but went above and beyond to find other homes that weren’t on the MLS, and found them before 95% of the others! real estate agents will find them!

Keep them on their toes with a “cancel anytime clause.”

Any agent who wanted Christy to sign an agreement committing to use them for the next 6-12 months just wasn’t going to cut it, as most agents sit back and relax as soon as they get a buyer to sign said contract. Once Christy discovered that his agent “passed the test,” he told her that he would sign a 12-month contract, but he reserved the right to cancel his contract with that agent at any time, for any reason. That way, if the agent was too busy for her, he wasn’t finding enough houses for her to look at, or it turned out that she wasn’t as competent as she initially seemed, she could ditch him.

Force them to stop selling houses as used because sellers.

Nothing irritated Christy more than officers who kept pointing out the obvious at every house: like she was blind and didn’t realize the house had vaulted ceilings, or which bedroom was the master bedroom! Christy felt that an agent’s job is not to show the painfully obvious positive features of every house you see, but to look out for your interests and uncover everything WRONG with that house. She developed a condition that any real estate agent who wanted to work with her had to agree to: upfront. That condition essentially guaranteed that your agent would never waste your time with “used car sales” tactics and would instead act as your advocate, making sure you don’t buy a home you won’t be 100 percent satisfied with after your purchase. .

All the work of the agent will not cost you anything and also, if you wish, you could earn money with your agent.

Considering that she was just out of school, Christy didn’t have a lot of savings and she wanted all of it to be used to buy her house and furnish it. The last condition that Christy demanded of her agent was that she not pay him a penny out of her pocket. In fact, she came up with a very interesting plan that took advantage of her connections with her community to make money with her agent instead of having to pay a penny in high commissions if she wanted to work with that agent in the future.