3 Objections to Hiring a Buyer or Tenant Agent

You have some questions about why you should hire a real estate agent to find you a property to lease or buy. Let’s talk about that. Here are the top 3 most common objections to hiring a real estate agent:

“I won’t see the whole market”

You may say, “If I hire an agent, I won’t see the whole market.” The thought goes, “If I hire an agent to represent me in the property search, my options will be limited to only those seen by the agent I hire rather than be exposed to the whole marketplace, and other agents won’t bring me good deals if they come up because I’m already represented and they won’t want to split the commission.” This reasoning brings up a question, is your business the type of business that would most ideally benefit from an agent?

The types of businesses that most clearly benefit from hiring someone would be any of the following:

1) You have a lease expiring or a particular deadline and you need to ensure that you have someone working overtime on your behalf to get it done.

2) Another situation where you benefit from representation is if your company has more than one requirement to manage and needs an agent who can keep all the information organized and prioritized.

3) Or, perhaps, your business is based in a different market and it is difficult to stay apprised of all the opportunities. In these cases, it makes sense to hire an agent to manage your requirements.

“I’ll work with all the agents”

‍You may say, “I don’t need to hire an agent because I can call all the agents and let them know about my requirement and then let them bring me options.” This might work for a week or 2, but you will notice a couple things: first that all the agents you talk to will send you the same properties and if none of them work for you, you never hear from them again. Or, the agent will push all their own listings and if none of them work, they disappear. Especially if your requirement is a smaller transaction size, most of the experienced agents you would want representing you are not going to risk spending their time working on the project in the event you could find something else and cut them out of the deal.

“I’ll use the internet”

You can always surf around the web looking for properties on all the public listing services, but the free information on these sites is almost always incomplete or outdated and the sites force you to call or email the listing broker, who is, in fact, working against your interests. In commercial real estate, there aren’t centralized databases of curated information like the MLS is for residential. Each agent has their own database and any good agent pays for access to more active 

There are legitimate reasons why hiring an agent doesn’t help you: here are a few. You shouldn’t hire an agent if you run a development company and need to maintain good relationships with all the different agents. You don’t want to be known as the developer who only works with one agent, because then you won’t see all the deals. Don’t hire an agent if you believe they are not qualified or are going to just tell you whatever you want to hear to get you to sign a representation agreement. Don’t hire an agent if they’re not reliable, in any way, if they say they are going to get you something by a certain time and they don’t it means they either 1) tell you what you want to hear in the moment, or 2) are not organized, neither traits will help you in the long run.

There are real reasons why you should hire an agent and real reasons why you shouldn’t, just remember that a good real estate agent is a trained professional who knows how to make your life easier and ultimately make you more effective at running your business while getting the best deal for your real estate.

I’m David Skinner, and this is the CRE Coach, where together you and I are lifting the hood on Commercial Real Estate.