- Hey, it's Nolan Matthias from Mortgage360
and welcome back to part three of our series
for first time home buyers.
Part one, we talked about how to create a down payment,
how to gather a down payment, part two,
we talked about how to get pre-approved
and today we're talking about how to select a realtor,
which in my opinion is the most important piece
of buying a new home.
But before we get into it,
before we talk about why it's the most important piece
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Okay. So let's get into it.
Why is selecting a realtor the most important piece
of buying a home?
Well, selecting the right realtor
will prevent all the problems.
Not just the problems when you're buying,
not just the problems when you go to sell later on
and not just the problems that may occur
during the time that you own the home
but basically all the problems that can come up
that you don't actually have a frame of reference for.
A lot of times we call this, you know,
checking for our blind spots, you know,
what are our blind spots in the mortgage process?
So the real estate process.
Well a good realtor is gonna make sure
that the blind spots that you have
are pointed out to you so that you don't make a mistake.
Just like having a good mortgage broker
would do the same thing.
Now I'm gonna go out there and say it right now,
buying or selling a home for sale by owner
or with the help of one of these technology companies
that will help you do the process by yourself
is not the right way to go about buying or selling a home.
There is so much that you don't know as a consumer
about buying and selling that to do so is absolutely absurd.
I'll use myself as an example
because the week before I filmed this video, so last week,
I actually bought a property for myself
a condo that was an investment.
And I'd gone through the process
and tried to write up the contract myself
and do all the things by myself and while halfway through
I realized that even though I'm in the industry,
even though I've run a real estate company,
even though I'm pretty clear on what needs to be done
in a contract,
there were some things I didn't know
because in this case I was buying a judicial sale
and there was just things I didn't know.
In fact, the realtor that I was dealing with,
well, he knew how to find the answers really easily,
he didn't know the answers to all the questions either.
So it was one of those things where
if I didn't have a realtor in place,
if I didn't have somebody to help me through the process,
I could have made a really big mistake
and that's coming from somebody in the industry.
And we see it all the time.
We see people trying to sell their property,
thinking that they can go and sign up for one of these,
you know, we list site type scenarios
or we list type sites and they come out of it
and you know, they don't know what conditions to write,
they don't know what to do with the home inspection,
they don't know what to look for in a home inspection
or how to even find a good home inspector,
and they end up finding out years down the road
that, you know,
they bought a property on the backs onto a major roadway,
and that is a huge cost when it comes to resale
or they bought a property that had previously
had water damage or was previously a marijuana grow up,
and if they'd just had a good realtor
they would have avoided all of these issues.
But because they tried to do it themselves
and save a little bit of money
they ended up costing themselves tens
or hundreds of thousands down the road.
So a realtor isn't just somebody to negotiate for you,
it's somebody to keep you out of trouble.
And I can't emphasize enough.
So when you're going and looking at homes
it's good to make sure that you have a great realtor.
Okay.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go
through the three ways that I would choose a realtor.
And these are the only three ways
that I would choose a realtor if I was buying a home.
And I'm gonna start with the one
that I would do only if I absolutely had to,
and then I'm gonna work my way to what I think
is the absolute best way to select a realtor.
Okay. So let's start first with online reviews.
So this is a scenario where I'm moving to a new city
or I absolutely don't know anybody who knows a realtor
or a realtor myself.
And what I would do is I would go online
and I would search for things like best realtor Calgary,
best realtor Toronto, best realtor Vancouver.
And what that type of search in Google should do
is it should bring up review sites
whether that's Google's review site itself
or whether it's something like Yelp.
Actually, I find Yelp to be a really good tool
for finding great realtors or great businesses,
but the one thing you have to watch out for
is businesses that use basically fake reviews
in order to prop up their five-star ratings.
So what you wanna do is you wanna find this happy medium.
You, you don't wanna choose the realtor
or the mortgage broker or the business that has, you know,
three or four or five star reviews
and therefore has an overall five star rating,
and you don't wanna pick the one
that has 405 star reviews and, you know,
five really, really bad reviews.
What you're looking for is that happy medium of volume
where lots of people seem happy
and then you wanna go through
and if they do have negative reviews,
you wanna look at the negative reviews and say,
okay, what happened here?
What was the reason why these people didn't seem
to like this particular realtor?
And what you'll do over time
as you read more and more of these reviews
and you look at different real estate agents
and different mortgage brokers and so on and so forth,
is you'll find that you'll start to get a comfort level
with certain individuals.
And once you get that comfort level
with them via their online reviews
then what you can do is you can go and reach out
to that realtor and say,
"hey, I found your reviews online,
I'm new to town,
I just wanna have an interview,
maybe sit down for a coffee and see if we get along
and see if you'd be the right fit
for helping me find a home."
Now, you may wanna do this with three or four realtors,
and basically find the one that you feel
is the most trustworthy.
Not the one who has the best sales pitch
but the one who you think is going to do the best job
for you and is going to help you
and keep your best interests at heart.
Now, the second way that I would go
and try to find a realtor,
if I didn't have one already
is I would go to my mortgage broker.
Because here's the thing like as a mortgage broker,
I have a pretty good understanding
of the realtors in Calgary, in our market,
and who the good ones are, who the bad ones are,
and who are the ones who will genuinely care
about you the most on
and let's call a spade a spade here.
The thing that we're looking for in a realtor
is not the slickest, not the best marketer,
we're looking for the realtor
who's going to care about you the most.
Put your needs before their own
and make sure that you're taken care of.
And if you can't find it online
and you can't find it through the next way
that I'm going to tell you to find a realtor,
then the mortgage broker that you're dealing with
probably has a pretty good sense
of how to figure out who the best fit would be for you.
So that'd be my second way of choosing a realtor.
Now, the first,
and this is the one that I most highly recommend
and notice this isn't the one
that is ask your mortgage broker
because I'm a mortgage broker.
No, no.
This is the one that I think is the better way
to choose your realtor.
And that is by asking people that you know,
who own a home.
Because if you know people who own a home,
then you know people who have used a realtor.
And the people that you know are most often the people
who are most like you,
and if they've had a great experience with a realtor
there's a good chance that you're also going to have
a great experience with that same realtor.
Now, what I wouldn't do is I wouldn't do this.
I wouldn't do the old go on Facebook and say,
"hey, anybody know a realtor?"
Because what's gonna end up happening
is you're going to get an onslaught of recommendations
from people who call themselves your friends online
but who you probably don't know that well.
And in my experience, you know,
you put up a post like that,
you'll get 25 30 different posts recommending
different people,
and it just turns into an absolute shitshow
where you've got all these recommendations
and you don't know how to filter out who's who.
So you really wanna go to those people
that you know and that you know well
and ask them what their experience was like
and who they think you should use as your real estate agent.
And then feel free to go
and interview that real estate agent, get a feel for them.
See what they're like,
maybe go and see a couple of houses with them
and genuinely start to get a feel for who they are
and what they represent.
And when you think about a real estate agent
their job is to represent you.
So when you're looking at that real estate agent
and trying to decide who you're going to choose
think about that,
would they represent you the way
that you want to be represented?
Now, if there's one thing that I strongly recommend
that you don't do,
it is don't go and buy a house from a realtor
who's the listing realtor of the house you are buying.
Your realtor is there to represent you
and if they've got a listing
and they're trying to sell a house for somebody
they've got an obligation to that person
in order to make sure they do the best job
to sell that property
which makes you not their client, but their customer.
And if you're their customer
their job is to get as much money out of you as possible.
So you always wanna make sure
that you have different representation
than the person selling the house.
Because again that realtor is representing you
and you wanna make sure
that they're doing what's in your best interest
not necessarily what's in the seller's best interest.
So if you found this information useful,
please do me that favor
hit that subscribe button, hit that notification bell,
and please hit that like button for the YouTube algorithm
so more people like you can see this video.
In our next video,
we're gonna talk
about finding a home and writing an offer.
So once you've selected your realtor
the steps you should take in order to find that dream home
and then actually writing a contract
and we'll go through a contract in detail
so you can see exactly what you're looking at.
We'll see you on that next video,
cheers.