Update: I met with 3 brokers thus far and it's been... enlightening. I honestly didnt' expect this level of variance in preparation, estimates and advice.
Starting with things I was less happy about: One broker gave a suggested listing price I felt was almost comically undervalued. I'll admit I had an emotional response to that, something I wasn't expecting, and I understand that everyone has their baises. But for the past 6 monhts we've been casually tracking all properties within a 5 block radius of our home, and she was suggesting a price point about 20% lower than what I expected and what the other two brokers put forward. As Comps, she used a bunch of homes that were i) about a half mile away and in a less desireable location and ii) seemed to cherry-pick those, as I noticed quite a few properties with similar square feet, bedrooms and specs were noticably absent from the comps she showed.
I was left wondering why she would even do that - was my valuation of my own property so far off, or was she underselling? Isn't commission-based sales supposed to eliminate this?
To that I have a theory (feel free to comment on its validity) - at 4% commission, often split between buyer & seller, the selling broker earns just 2%. For a home that's ~$250k, that would translate to $5,000, but if the price was dropped to $220,000 it's still $4,400 - a reduction of just $600. By setting a 'rock-bottom' price the agent hopes to move the property in 1-2 months instead of the typical 3-6 months for this area.
In other words, selling by volume beats selling for maximum price.
However, from my perspective I'm better off setting the price $30k higher, even if it means taking an additional 4-5 months to sell
Anyway, with that first agent I mostly listened and felt like she was trying to convince me to set the price as low as I could, while I gave little input to what I thought it was worth.
During the next two brokers I had printed out my spreadsheet listing the metrics for all the various properties. Both sat with me and talked about the various properties and how they compared (favorably and unfavorably). In the end both (without me giving them a number) arrived at a very similar evaluation that was actually about $10k higher than I thought we'd list at.
So there you go. What should I think of it?
Could I be correct that agent #1 was just trying a volume-selling approach and should be avoided? FWIW pre-screened the agents, selecting only the ones who had listed multiple properties in the area in the last year, had very good photos on their websites and had been working for several years.
I'm also a bit frustrated that the one coming from a smaller firm is joining the largest realtor on July 1st. She assures me it won't change anything for me but now I have two agents from the same company and a third from another large company.
Finally, I can't help but be left with the sensation that we shouldn't even need realtors in the first place. IN my case I do because I won't be in town to show perspective clients, but little of what was offered by any of them was information I didn't already have or could not have gotten online. There's a popular fee-based service here to assist people selling without an agent, but it requires people to actually be around. C'est la vie.