How to find active agents in a given area?

Question

Hi All,

General question for a specific situation.

What is the best way (ways)  to determine what are the most active listing agents in a given area?  (I have done the obvious, drive around and write down names of existing listings.)

I do not have MLS access but would like to determine who the most successful agents are in a particular area.

Specifically, I am closing on a property in the "Wrigley" area of Long Beach, CA. It is an old property, very small duplex. We are considering a couple options, do we want to remodel the duplex as is.  Convert to a single family (most properties in the area are single family), finally do we want to add 500-900 sqft.

We have done our own cost/value analysis, for various scenarios, now I'd like to get a good agents opinion.  Also, since this is our first property in this area, we will likely want to list it with an agent.

So I'd like to find the big hitters in the area.

Michael Quarles · Answer

Realtor.com

Preston Guyton · Answer

I really think Google is a good place to start. Many of the most successful Realtors I know are everywhere online trying to create and find new leads. Take a look at their website, and see what kind of advertising they are doing. Think of it like this. What would be your first step if you were searching for a home in an area you are not from. 90% start searching online.

Vincent Martinez · Answer

You can just go on Trulia, type in the city you want, then click on "find an agent". It will list the agents in order of the number of listings they have in that city.

Rusty Eddy · Answer

Hi Matt,
That is a really good idea asking title, escrow and mortgage agencies.  I had not thought of that but is pretty obvious in hind sight!!

Matt Eilers · Answer

If you cannot access the MLS and Realtor.com does not seem to be too helpful, I would go to the following places and ask them who they work with a lot and would recommend.
1) Title Company
*while they could not give you exact numbers, they should have a good idea of who does a LOT of business with them 
2) Bank or Mortgage Company
*same reasoning, the mortgage officer should be able to tell you which realtor brings in a lot of clients to try to get a loan.

Hopefully, between these two places, you may start to here a realtor or two who name keeps popping up.

Good Luck!

Rusty Eddy · Answer

Thanks Hazel that is a helpful set of metrics to go by, the closing rate being probably more important than total sales.

It looks like this info will have to come from the MLS, I can't find any obvious sources that will provide this info in a manner that will be easy enough to analyze.

Thanks for the feedback, good article on the irvinehousing.com blog as well.

Hazel L · Answer

It depends what you're looking for in a listing agent--highest sales rates (% closed) or the largest number of sales (volume). I take a more quantifiable approach when looking for listing agents, and have a realtor friend look up records for me on the MLS.

If you're looking for an agent with a high volume of sales, you can have a realtor friend look up a list of closed sales in the past 6 months or year in a certain neighborhood/city. You can copy paste the table into excel or access and sort by agent ID and see who has the most listings.

If you'd like to find agents with a high percentage of sold listings (this is going to be a little harder to do), you can sort the list by expired listings. Look up the agent history for the agent ID numbers that only had 0-1 expired listings. When viewing their sales history for the past 6 months to a year, divide expired listings by total listings to determine percentage of sold listings. Compare percentages among agents find out who has to highest percentage of sold listings, and thus the higher chance of getting your property sold.

Here's a link to an example of sorting with this method in my city for your reference:

http://www.irvinehousingblog.com/blog/comments/irvine-realtor-ratings-7-8-2007/

Hope that helps, best of luck to you with finding those agents!

Rusty Eddy · Answer

Unfortunately I did not find realtor.com to helpful.  I did a search on Long Beach and got 97 pages of Realtors from spanning all the way down to Dana Point.  I then tried putting 'Wrigley' in the keyword and got one.

I was hoping there was a way to get a count of properties sold in an area by a particular Realtor.

I did end up hooking up with somebody that seems really sharp, by doing the obvious: calling signs in the area :)

Praveen Kumar · Answer

Firstly find the best company in the area. Good real estate companies generally recruit qualified agents. Then within the company find the top performing agent for the past 3 years in the area where you wish to purchase the property.

Praveen Kumar