BiggerPockets

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.

Realtor.com

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!

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!

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.