6 Surprising Ways To Grow Your Investing Business With A Real Estate Agent

When I talk to real estate investors about the deals they’re doing, I’m surprised how often they choose to skip working with a real estate agent in favor of doing the deal themselves. From a dollars-and-cents perspective, I can understand that they are counting the cost of doing the work themselves versus paying a fee to an agent. And, it’s an unfortunate reality in the real estate industry, that there are many agents who are not “investor-savvy” and operating with the investing mindset that these types of investors need.

However, I can also tell you, as someone who invested in his first door at the age of 18 and then became a real estate agent in the 1980s, there are a group of us investing-savvy agents who are simply NOT being utilized to the degree that we could be. What I mean is: Investing-savvy real estate agents have a wealth of strategies at their fingertips to help investors.

In this article, I’m going to share six ways that an investing-savvy agent can help you grow your real estate investing business – and I think these six ways may surprise some investors because they didn’t realize that they could get their agent to help them with these steps…

#1. Tap Into Their Network

Whether you need contractors, inspectors, painters, cleaning teams, or some other professional to help you in your investing business, sometimes it’s hard to find the right team who is reliable and cost effective. So skip the time-intensive work of sourcing these teams yourself: Ask your real estate agent for a referral. Agents know and work with many of these professionals so piggy-back off of the agent’s network to source affordable and trustworthy teams.

#2. Rapid-Fire Valuations For Making Accurate Offers

Investors (especially the newbies) struggle with knowing how much to offer when investing in a property. This is a service your agent can do for you by running “comps” (research to find a comparable price on similar properties that have sold nearby). This will help you to know whether your offer is attractive to the seller but also has some built-in profit potential for you. Work with your agent and build a good relationship with them and they can turn around some fast comps for you so you can do multiple deals!

#3. Advice For Higher-Profit Sales

If you do flips or you’re looking to sell a property you’ve held for a while, your agent can guide you on how to make the property more attractive to sellers. A quick walk through with your agent will reveal which small changes you can make to increase the likelihood of a fast, profitable sale. It could be something as simple as painting a wall or decluttering a room but an agent’s expert eye will pick out the factors that will put more money into your pocket sooner.

#4. “Outsource” The Sale

Most seasoned investors know that the best way to grow a business is to outsource some of the work… and yet, many investors remain the “bottleneck” as they complete the sale themselves. But let me give you another way to look at it: An agent can free you up from the negotiating and the paperwork so you can focus on doing more deals. Sure, investors may balk at the agent’s fee but consider this: All the time spent at this stage of the deal could be spent doing another deal because you’ve “outsourced” the paperwork and negotiation.

#5. Move Into Other Markets Seamlessly

There are so many exciting markets to invest in…in this country! However, many investors stick surprisingly close to home because they’re familiar and comfortable with the area. Some investors would consider expanding into other markets (especially if their market has become less favourable to investing) but they need to ramp up their expertise in the new markets. That’s where an agent comes in: As an expert in a market, they can be the investor’s “expert partner” in the new market, getting the investor up-to-speed on the best areas to invest.

#6. Marketplace Trends To Direct Your Business Growth

Perhaps the most under-utilized skill that an agent brings to investors is the ability to understand and predict marketplace trends. Agents have their ear to the ground and can spot trends months or even years before those same trends hit the headlines. Agents know when areas are declining or gentrifying, when they are becoming investor-friendly, when changes in the economy start influencing rental markets, and so on. Don’t just rely on the same information you got years ago when you started investing, ask your agent about what different parts of your market are doing – perhaps you’ll discover an area that you can invest in before anyone else does.

Get Your Agent On Your Team!

If you’re an investor who hasn’t been using an agent, or perhaps has just been using an agent to help you market and sell properties, it’s time to rethink how you use your agent. They have tools and strategies and knowledge that you can tap into and it’s just a matter of reframing how you think of their contribution to your team.

Start by sitting down with your agent(s) and telling them in greater detail about your investing business – what you do, how you do it, what your goals are, and how you want to grow your business. Then, solicit their advice on how the two of you can work together more effectively. Be open-minded about how you can work with the agent to grow your business.

And when you have one or more investing-savvy agents on your team, be prepared to do more deals than you realized you could do!

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