North Shore Real Estate Agent Recommendation (Evanston, Mundelein: short sales, foreclosures, houses)

[Mrygal]

Hey there,
My husband and I are moving from the DC area to the North Shore area for work at the end of the summer. We're hoping you guys could give us some recs for real estate agents. Personality and experience are huge for us and would like someone who's energetic and amiable and well-versed in the homes selling up to 900K. --we're trying to avoid the slimy or snooty salesman type of personalities. We need someone energetic because we'd like to look at a lot of homes over a small period of time (eg, one or two days). Thanks in advance!

[Aeronautica35]

Lots of good realtors but a good way to find ones with the Price range is to lookup up Top Sellers in the Lake County Area as they usually focus on the Higher end homes.

Here is a listing that may interest you: It is Mundelein and is a newly rennovated house on a private lake. Just came on the market today!

579 BANBURY Road MUNDELEIN, IL 60060

[Mrygal]

Thanks Aeronautica. Didn't even think about looking up realtors that way!

[cohdane]

One tool in the screening process if you're looking for a buyers agent: Get the list of homes they've acted as a buyers' agent on in the last year. See if a high percentage of them "coincidentally" were listings within their own brokerage.

This tells me they're biased towards their own in-house incentives instead of towards the buyer's needs.

Also, you could see what the sale prices are on those properties they have helped buyers purchase and use Google to find the last listing price before sale to see how good they are in the negotiation stage. (See that little blue word "cached" on the results page? The further back you go in the results, the more likely it is that one of those cached links will show you the last list price.) Redfin.com also shows last list price on some of the more recently sold properties. The bigger the gap between last list price and ultimate sales price, the more likely it is they'll be a good negotiator for you when the time comes.

Top sellers don't help you in this situation. You want a top negotiator who's only interested in what your dream house is.

[chet everett]

Where to begin. Mundelien is not North Shore, agents active / succesful there are unlikely to be much help in the $900K range, very different market segment.

The top sellers in Lake Co will, by definition, miss the very desirable Cook Co suburbs of the North Shore. Further the top agents in terms of either volume or sales amount will be extremely unlikely to have been particularly active in the price range the OP is asking about -- lately VOLUME has been concentrated in the much lower price ranges. The traditional winners in the North Shore "dollar amount" sales will land just a handful of VERY high dollar sales. Selling literally one or two homes to make the $10M club is not uncommon. The success of working with an accomplished LISTING agent when you need a BUYER'S agent is also highly questionable.

I think most of cohdane's are helpful for finding a good buyer's agent, though I belive simply asking them about their relative ease /comfort of working outside of their own brokerage ought to be fine-- wouldn't rule out an otherwise very responsive buyer's agent who has helped a lot of buyers find a lot of homes from their own brokerage as sometimes the cards do work out for "in-house" listings, but really no buyer's agent can afford to turn their back on anything if they want to make money. And even the 'laziest" high volume listing agent will generally still be a good source of a comprehensive 'stack' of all the listing in the price range you ask them for, regardless of value. Unfortunately that high volume lister probably has less than no incentive to point out which is actuallly the best value among those listings.

I would caution too that the stats or even trying to manually dig back in time to find big spread from ask to sell might not be all that helpful -- the climate has forced lots of buyers to really rethink asking prices and this is not necessarily a reflection of any negoition talent.

It would be far more useful for the prospective client to ask me, as a potential buyers agent, to explain "how they will help to make sure the best price is obtained". The answer you want to here is simple: deep knowledge of recently sold comparable properties. This means knowing the specific conditions and circumstances of sales going back for quite some time. If the agent you go with IS NOT FAMILIAR with the very real effect that various school attendance boundaries, quieter streets vs busier streets, divorces, short sales and foreclosures VS non-distressed sales all have, along with demand from tear down builders (or homes unsuitable for tear down) they CANNOT help very much in determining whether a home is listed at price that is realistic and any illusion that they can magically negiotiate will soon be wiped away...

The best way to get a good deal on a house is NOT generally to look for a grossly over priced home and they try to hammer it down the range you can afford (and that is probably should have been in) but instead to find the home that is realistically priced and a seller that understands the best why to quickly get the price they want. A hard working buyer's agent can help you find thess houses and save a lot of wasted energy.

[Rlest8]

If you are interested in buying on the NS from Evanston through Lake Bluff please feel free to private message me.

[Mrygal]

Thanks all. Especially cohdane and chet everett, great input. There are so many real estate agents in the north shore area, I don't know where to begin. I was hoping there might be a few buyers (with the same requirements as mine) on this forum who had used agents in the north shore and could recommend them.

[middle-aged mom]

Originally Posted by chet everett

It would be far more useful for the prospective client to ask me, as a potential buyers agent, to explain "how they will help to make sure the best price is obtained". The answer you want to here is simple: deep knowledge of recently sold comparable properties. This means knowing the specific conditions and circumstances of sales going back for quite some time. If the agent you go with IS NOT FAMILIAR with the very real effect that various school attendance boundaries, quieter streets vs busier streets, divorces, short sales and foreclosures VS non-distressed sales all have, along with demand from tear down builders (or homes unsuitable for tear down) they CANNOT help very much in determining whether a home is listed at price that is realistic and any illusion that they can magically negiotiate will soon be wiped away...

Good stuff, Chet. Intimate and very local knowlege is best. Knowing why a property sold for $X, when it did, is critical. This information cannot be gleaned from the MLS or any website. It's all about doing your homeowrk and connections.

Not all agents are good with inbound relocation people. They don't know how or are uncomfortable probing about what makes you tick and then matchmaking with the current inventory and then the best values.
Many agents operate in wide geographical areas and do not have the pulse of every local market, or the neighborhoods within.

The Northshore also means different things to different people.
Knowing why a prospective buyer has fixated on the northshore versus a plethora of other communities is critical.

Making relevent a buyer's agent's negotiating batting average does not hold water without knowing the local market. That an agent closes, on average, say within 1% of the asking price is irrelevent information unless you know how the asking price stacked up against the facts of very recent closed comps and how badly the buyer wanted the house. One also does not know beans about the seller's assist with closing costs or the increasingly testy home inspection issues, which do not reflect in any data base.

Many, many agents claim to be number one. Believe them all. The best buyers agents make their clients number one.

( No horse in this race. I do not work the shore.)

[Anthera]

Feel free to pm me for agent recommendations. I am not an agent. but have used several over the years.

I think its a good idea to narrow down the area. I don't think a Lake Forest agent will be able to give you the inside track about Winnetka, and vice versa.

[chet everett]

Probably true that the inventory is different enough in Lake Forest that an agent in Winnetka might not be the best bet.

Even if you do not have kids / kids are many years from high school it is fairly common to focus on high school attendance area as a criteria for limiting the town(s) you are going to focus on -- New Trier covers several, but many other high schools make it pretty easy to narrow in on one or two, and real estate agents rather frequently do specialize in one area or another as the families wit kids very often do need / want to stay in district...