Orono, MN Real Estate

"My home had failed to sell with my previous agent and I take the blame for that. I did not ask the correct questions and thought my home would sell quickly. I was so frustrated by the time that I had been on the market five months that I fired my first agent a month early. I was not going to make the same mistake again. My wife and I contacted five agents that had good reputations. The first one seemed good and she told us that our home was worth about what we told him we thought it was worth.

When the second agent came over, she seemed good also. I was excited with the price that the first agent had told us so I told the second agent that we thought our home was worth about 20,000 dollars more and we were shocked when she showed us that she could get that.

We told the third agent that we thought our home was worth 25,000 dollars more and amazing, she told us that she could get us that much for our home. It was now obvious that the agents were telling us whatever we wanted to hear so we decided that we would see how far it would go. Every agent that we interviewed asked us what our home was worth and every agent told us close to the price we told them. We decided to try the reverse and we told the next two agents that our home was worth 50,000 and 100,000 less then the first agent told us and they showed us those numbers were correct. We were so frustrated that it was comical.

The on the 12th agent, we interviewed Angela. We were professionals by now and thought that we had heard everything. Angela was different. She did not tell us that our home was the best or things like that. She talked to us, asked about the home. Took notes as we showed him the home and she talked about all the things that she was going to do to market our home. It took him an hour to talk about marketing and she was pretty excited about quite a bit of it. Then she pulled out his laptop and had us sit on each side of him and she started doing a market analysis with us. She showed us exactly what she was doing, what criteria she was searching, to find similar homes etc.

As she was working on it, my wife started to tell him what she thought our home was worth and she stopped her in mid sentence and told her that she did not want to hear any numbers from us until she had told us his number. She used a phrase that my mother use to use and said that she did not want to sell his soul to the devil and be tempted to tell us what we wanted to hear vs what the truth might be. She said she would rather talk about his value vs our value if they were not the same. As she continued working with us and asking us about pictures from each of the homes that we looked at on his computer, she narrowed down our value and then told us that our home was worth about 325,000 dollars. Not to be thrown out of our game, I told him that I thought she was 50,000 dollar low and she asked what our home had that make it worth 50,000 more than the seven comparable homes that the three of us had picked together just 15 minutes earlier. I told him that our home was in better shape and she pulled up the pictures of the similar homes and said that she did not see a big difference between most of them and our home.

My wife then told him the range that other realtors had told us and she asked if we had the information that the other Realtors had left. We did and we showed him. She started showing us different foundation sizes, lot sizes, great rooms and other things that she said determined value on the homes, that the other Realtors that told us our home was worth 50-100k more, and it was obvious that she was not going to take the bait so we came clean and told him what we had been thru and that she was the 12th Realtor that we had interviewed.

We listed with Angela and she sold our home in 17 days. Angela was fun to work with and the entire time we worked with him it was smooth and she was easy to get a hold of if we had questions. I would recommend anyone that is buying or selling to work with Angela as she is willing to tell you the truth, spend time explaining what sells homes and what a home is worth and worked very hard. "