How to Find the Right Realtor

   THE REAL ESTATE CFO  

Featured Article  ·  Month 1

Featured Article — Month 1

How to Find the Right Realtor

What to look for, what to ask, and what to walk away from

Before credentials, before local knowledge, before anything else on this list, ask yourself a single question: do I trust this person?

This is not a trivial transaction. The median home price in Santa Clara County is $2,000,000. For most people, a home purchase is the single largest financial decision of their life — one that will affect their balance sheet, their monthly cash flow, and their family’s circumstances for decades. At that scale, the stakes of choosing the wrong advisor are not abstract. They are measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars, in missed opportunities, and in decisions made without the information needed to make them well. Trust is not a soft consideration. It is the most important one.

Trust in a realtor means believing — based on your conversations, their track record, and your instincts — that they will put your interests above their own, even when doing so costs them something. That includes advising you not to make an offer on a home that does not serve you, telling you the truth about what your home is worth even when the number is lower than you hoped, and walking away from a commission rather than steering you toward the wrong decision.

This matters more than people realize because real estate is a commission-driven business. The incentive structure rewards closing, not waiting. A realtor who tells you to keep looking when you are ready to buy, or who recommends accepting a lower offer because it is more likely to close, is demonstrating the kind of integrity that is hard to find and enormously valuable when you find it.

How do you assess trust before a transaction begins? Ask for references — specifically from clients whose circumstances resembled yours. Ask those references directly: was there ever a moment where your realtor put your interests ahead of their own? The answers will tell you more than any credential.

Real estate transactions are genuinely complex. Every deal is different — different property types, different financing structures, different seller motivations, different inspection findings, different title issues. There is no template that applies uniformly, and the number of moving parts — timelines, contingencies, disclosures, appraisals, loan approvals, escrow instructions — can be overwhelming even for experienced buyers and sellers.

A great realtor simplifies without oversimplifying. They can walk you through the process in plain language, explain what is happening at each stage and why, and prepare you for what is coming next before it arrives. They do not let you be surprised.

Critically, they are also your guide through the documents. A real estate transaction generates a significant volume of paperwork — purchase agreements, counter-offers, disclosure packages, inspection reports, preliminary title reports, HOA documents, escrow instructions, and more. Most of these documents contain language that is unfamiliar to anyone who is not a real estate professional, and many of them contain information that is material to your decision. A good realtor does not simply hand you a stack of paper and tell you to sign. They sit with you, walk through each document, highlight the elements that matter, explain what each one means for your decision, and answer your questions honestly.

When interviewing a realtor, ask them to walk you through the key documents in a typical transaction and explain what you should be looking for in each one. Their ability to do this clearly and confidently is one of the clearest indicators of genuine expertise.

A real estate transaction involves far more people than most buyers and sellers expect. At various stages, you will be interacting with or depending on: your realtor, the listing agent or buyer’s agent on the other side, a transaction coordinator, a lender, a loan processor, a title officer, an escrow officer, a home inspector, potentially a specialist inspector (structural engineer, roof inspector, pest inspector), an appraiser, and in some cases an attorney. Each of these professionals has their own timeline, their own requirements, and their own way of communicating.

The realtor’s job is to be the traffic cop in the middle of all of this — to know who needs what and when, to make sure nothing falls through the cracks, to translate between professionals who speak different languages, and to protect you from being overwhelmed by competing requests and deadlines.

In practice, this means your realtor should be the one receiving and organizing the volume of requests, not passing each one directly to you in real time. When the lender needs updated bank statements, when the escrow officer needs a signature, when the inspector needs access scheduled — a good realtor is coordinating these things on your behalf and presenting you with what you need to do, in the right sequence, without unnecessary noise.

They also play interference when necessary. If the other side is being unreasonable, if a deadline is at risk, if an inspector’s finding is creating panic where calm is warranted — your realtor absorbs that and manages it. That buffer is one of the most underappreciated parts of good representation, and it only exists when your realtor is experienced enough and present enough to provide it.

Ask any prospective realtor how they manage the process between offer acceptance and close of escrow. If their answer does not include a clear description of how they handle the coordination of all parties and protect you from being overwhelmed, that is something to probe further.

This is one of the most overlooked factors in choosing a realtor, and in a competitive market like the Bay Area, it can directly affect your outcome.

Real estate is a relationship business, and the realtors on both sides of a transaction have worked with each other before — or know people who have. A realtor’s reputation within the professional community matters in ways that are invisible to their clients but tangible in results.

Consider a situation that is more common than most buyers realize: a seller has received multiple offers, and the highest offer and a slightly lower offer are both on the table. The listing agent knows the realtor behind the lower offer. They know that this person communicates clearly, manages their clients’ expectations honestly, does not manufacture drama over inspection findings, and can be counted on to close a clean transaction. They do not know the realtor behind the higher offer. In that situation, a listing agent may genuinely recommend that their seller take the lower, more reliable offer — because a failed transaction is worse for everyone than a modestly lower price.

Your realtor’s reputation is part of your offer. A realtor who is known for integrity, professionalism, and follow-through is an asset in every negotiation, even when that asset is invisible in the numbers.

Ask your prospective realtor directly: how would other agents in this market describe working with you? It is an uncomfortable question that reveals a great deal in the answer.

A good realtor does not need to have completed more transactions than anyone else in the county. What they do need is genuine, current, detailed knowledge of the specific markets where you are buying or selling.

This means understanding not just the headline price trends, but the texture of individual neighborhoods — how long homes are sitting, what kinds of offers are winning, where inventory is tightening or loosening, which school districts are driving demand, and what the seasonal patterns look like in a given area. It means knowing the difference between what is happening in Sunnyvale versus Los Altos Hills, or between single-family homes and condominiums in the same city — because those markets do not always move together.

A realtor who knows their market can tell you, without hesitation, what a fair price looks like for a given property, what offer terms are likely to be competitive, and where there may be room to negotiate. One who does not will rely on automated estimates and generalities.

Test this in the interview. Ask them about current conditions in the specific area you are focused on. Ask what the typical sale-to-list ratio is, how quickly homes are selling, and what they see as the most important trends to understand right now. The depth and specificity of their answer is the clearest measure of how well they know what they need to know.

A real estate transaction is, at its core, a project — one with a fixed deadline, multiple interdependent workstreams, and a cast of professionals who each have their own priorities, timelines, and communication styles. The realtor’s job is to manage that project from start to finish: to know what needs to happen, in what sequence, by whom, and by when, and to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks while the client is kept informed without being overwhelmed.

This requires more than being responsive. It requires treating the transaction as a managed process — maintaining a clear picture of where every workstream stands at any given moment, anticipating what is coming next, identifying risks before they become problems, and coordinating the activities of the lender, escrow officer, title company, inspectors, and the other side’s agent so that all of them are working from the same understanding of status and timeline. When the lender needs something from escrow, when the inspector’s timeline affects the contingency deadline, when the appraisal comes in and triggers a downstream conversation — the realtor is the one holding all of those threads and making sure they connect.

The quality of the professionals in that network matters enormously. A trusted lender who can call the listing agent directly to confirm the strength of your financing carries more weight in a competitive offer than a pre-approval letter from an unknown institution. An inspector who communicates findings clearly and proportionately — distinguishing what is material from what is cosmetic — prevents unnecessary panic and keeps negotiations grounded in facts. A title officer who surfaces issues early prevents deals from unraveling at the last moment. These are not interchangeable professionals, and a realtor who has worked with the same trusted network over many transactions has built relationships that translate directly into smoother, faster, more reliable outcomes for their clients.

Equally important is how the realtor communicates with you throughout this process. A well-run transaction includes structured, regular updates — not just responses to your questions, but proactive communication that keeps you informed of where things stand before you need to ask. You should know at every stage what has been completed, what is in progress, what is coming next, and whether anything requires your attention or decision. That rhythm of communication is what allows you to stay informed without being in the weeds, and it is one of the clearest signs of a realtor who runs their practice as a professional operation rather than a series of ad hoc events.

Ask your prospective realtor how they manage communication with their clients during a transaction. Ask how often you will hear from them, what format those updates take, and how they ensure that nothing requiring your attention gets lost. Ask who they work with — lenders, inspectors, title officers — and why they chose those specific people. The confidence and specificity of those answers tells you whether their network and their process are genuinely built, or simply assembled on the fly.

Before committing to a realtor, sit down with at least two or three candidates. The following questions are worth asking:

→  How often will you proactively update me during the transaction, and in what format? What does a typical status update look like?

→  Do you have references I can speak with — specifically from clients whose situation was similar to mine?

→  Can you walk me through the key documents in a typical transaction and tell me what I should be looking for in each one?

→  How do you manage all the parties involved between offer acceptance and close? What does that coordination look like in practice?

→  What do you know about this specific market right now — prices, inventory, velocity, what is winning?

→  Have you ever advised a client not to proceed with a transaction? What were the circumstances?

→  How would other agents in this market describe working with you?

→  Who handles your clients when you are unavailable, and how do you ensure continuity?

→  Pressure to move before you are ready. A realtor who rushes you past due diligence — disclosures, inspections, documents you do not fully understand — is prioritizing the commission over your interests.

→  Telling you what you want to hear. A listing agent who inflates your home’s value to win the listing, or a buyer’s agent who validates every property you express interest in, is not being honest with you. You need someone who will give you their genuine assessment, even when it is not the answer you were hoping for.

→  Poor communication habits. How a realtor communicates in the interview is a preview of how they will communicate when a deadline is approaching and multiple things are happening at once. If they are slow to respond, unclear in their answers, or vague about how they handle the process, that pattern will not improve under pressure.

→  Inability to explain the documents. If a realtor cannot walk you through the key documents in a transaction and explain what matters and why, they either have not done enough deals to have internalized it, or they have been going through the motions without truly advising their clients.

→  A reputation that precedes them — for the wrong reasons. Ask around. Talk to people who have bought or sold in the area recently. Reputations in a local real estate community are generally well known.

Shabber Jaffer is a REALTOR® with Compass and a former Silicon Valley tech CFO. He brings financial rigor and hands-on transaction experience to buyers and sellers across Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties. DRE #02128859  ·  (408) 896-2014  ·  [email protected]