[skt5]

I know this is slightly off-topic but I figure I'd share an approach to picking a solid buyer's or seller's agent that someone told me about that might interest folks reading this thread.

Define a geographical bounding box for the area of the home you wish to buy or the area of the home you are selling that your potential buyer's might be looking in. This could be a circle with a 0.5 mi radius in very dense cities or several miles for not-as-dense locations.

Then, search on Redfin or Zillow for all closed sales in the last N months for properties in your bounding box that meet your general criteria. Note you may have to adjust the value of N, what "general criteria" means, and your bounding box definition to get a good number of closed sales.

Finally, go through each closed sale and tally the number of sales & purchases each agent has. Anecdotally in dense areas, you should see the same few agents buying and selling homes. Interview the top X and pick an agent.

If your agent is going to get paid a lot - at least make sure they have a ton of local knowledge.

[rootsudo]

This is great advice actually - makes sense. I do something similar for comps, trends and such but to find which one is the most popular "Seller/broker" is great.

Especially because you aren't going to be buying the house yourself and using the listing agent is a risky idea as well.