Back in the day, Realtors® were the holders of the real estate gold. That is, the data about houses that were listed for sale: price, number of bedrooms, etc., If you wanted to get the dish on that house you just drove past on your way to work you needed to call the listing company or another Realtor® and ask.

That agent would look into the magical database, otherwise known as the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) where would be found in a glance the listing price, tax value, dimensions of the kitchen, which elementary school district the property is in and on and on.

Ah, those were the days.

These days, if a property catches your eye or if you want to find out what houses meet your criteria, the public has access to much of the same data as agents. There’s the grandmother of all real estate search sites, Realtor.com, as well as FrontDoor.com, listingbook.com, Zillow, not to mention the innumerable individual agent and company websites that have “search for listings” links in them (including this one).

In a future post I’ll examine the differing search results for these sites. They are most definitely not all on the same page. No pun intended.

So, who needs an agent? All they are good for is data and anyone can get that now. Right?

Honestly, that is all some agents are good for. Let’s face it, some real estate agents have not needed to be anything more than present over the past 5 years or so to make a living selling real estate.

But real estate doesn’t have the market cornered on members who don’t bring much to the table. There are doctors who can’t seem to relate to sick people (an odd career choice on their part), lawyers who offer no advise but merely carry out your suggestions and politicians who… Well, let’s not go there.

Getting past the ‘place holder’ agents who will undoubtedly need to find another line of work as the real estate market continues its interesting adjustments, there are good agent who offer qualities which have nothing to do with providing info on when a house was built, how many square feet there are and whether there’s gas heat or not.

They bring perspective, guidance, suggestions. They point out when your money will buy more house in the next neighborhood or when you’re about to get ripped off by your lender or whether the attorney your cousin suggested may be great for getting you out of a speeding ticket but may not be a good choice to handle a title search and decipher instructions from the mortgage lenders package.

Frankly, finding a house is not a great challenge. Particularly not these days. They’re’ EVERYWHERE!

But there is angst and fear associated with buying a house. There should be. It’s a big deal. A very big deal.

You don’t want to be in it alone.

Let’s say you find a house that interests you via one of the aforementioned resources. For the most part, if the property shows up on the online site, it has gotten there through a feed from a Multiple Listing Service.

That means, a real estate agent has listed it.

That means the seller has an real estate agent representing them.

Shouldn’t you?

So, bypassing an agent in searching for a house (BTW, working with a buyer’s agent doesn’t cost anything*) will not mean you bypass all agents. You just end up talking to someone who represents a seller.

Are Realtors® obsolete? Some are. Some started out that way.

But there are many, many honest, dedicated and enthusiastic agents who will help you through the process. And in buying a house, it’s the process that’s important.

* This holds true for most standards of practice. There may be some markets where buyers agents attempt to charge fees. That has not been the practice in the Greensboro area.