Buddy, You Need an Agent

Let’s say you enter the real estate market as a first-time buyer.  The process at first seems to be a matter of identifying your budget and wish list (must: open kitchen; maybe: wood-fired brick oven), getting pre-qualified for a mortgage, looking at listings, pursuing your favorites, making an offer, etc.  As you start, though, you realize that with all this money at stake, so many variables in the process, and nobody interested in getting you the best deal, you could use an advocate on your side — a seasoned hand who can help guide you past serious mistakes, act as a sounding board to your evolving ideas, and help you optimize negotiations with the selling agent.

This is a broker.  The good ones are worth their weight in gold (especially the smaller good ones).  You can get them to clear an enormous amount of brush for you — weeding out the bad listings, giving you a sales history of any property on the market, speaking the secret language of brokers with the other side.  They save you time and ultimately money.

It occurred to us at Helen Marie, after many years of working with clients of all stripes and sizes, that this is desperately needed in the design and interactive industry: a kind of creative broker.  Clients often need to commit large amounts of funding, human capital, and time to a project with an outside agency. Ironically, while this is the stage where they most need expertise, they’re often unaware of, or resistant to, the option to bring in an outside specialist right from the beginning.  We want to change this.

Read the rest of this entry »