Back before smartphones and electronic document signing, Humberto Vasquez had a real estate client who needed to sign a contract offer on a short deadline. He was flying into town on a red eye and had a full day planned starting early the next morning.
“No problem,” said Vasquez, now a broker associate at DCG Strategies. “I’ll meet you at 1 a.m. after your plane lands.”
Property buyers and sellers have a lot of options when choosing a professional to represent them. What sets the best agents apart are their commitment to their clients and their experience in their market.
Client Commitment
“A lot of agents take days off, and during those days off, they lose deals for their clients,” Vasquez says. “Houses go quickly. That’s why I work seven days a week. And when I take a vacation, there is always someone left in charge of my deals. No calls go unanswered.”
Vasquez represents residential real estate clients for DCG Strategies. Residential property includes single-family homes up to four-plexes.
The real estate market in California is heating up. Many new people are getting their real estate agent license and representing clients as a side business on nights and weekends. Often they start by helping family and friends.
That might work if everything goes perfectly. Sometimes, though, getting a house for a buyer in a hot market means putting in an offer on Friday morning. Sometimes, closing a deal for a seller means negotiating repairs with a buyer’s agent on Monday afternoon.
“Real estate is not a job,” Vasquez says. “To do it effectively, real estate becomes a lifestyle. You have to be there for your clients when they need you.”
Local Expertise
As with client commitment, expertise and experience make a big difference in non-standard deals — and because no two deals are the same in real estate, there is no such thing as a standard deal.
A nice subdivision home that backs to trees might seem perfectly ordinary. But will an online brokerage or a brand-new real estate agent know that the city is in the planning phase of extending a local through-way through those trees? A local expert will.
“I’ve lived in the Bay Area my whole life — I know all the different neighborhoods in all the different cities,” says Vasquez, who has worked for 15 years in Bay Area real estate. “An agent not in the area doesn’t know the schools your home belongs to or where the nearest library is. They don’t know a lot of the facts.”
Those facts help brokers and agents (broker is the highest certification level) negotiate a good price and make a complete representation of the property to potential buyers.
Complete Care
Vasquez joined DCG Strategies because of its focus on local communities and their members — DCG specializes in representing churches, schools and local governments — and its complete suite of real estate services. Click here to contact us and discover how we can serve you.
Residential clients might own more than one type of property. At DCG, experts in commercial sales, property development and property management are all down the hall.
“DCG has the support systems in place to let their people focus on what they’re good at,” Vasquez says. “That allows me to be out there working with clients.”