Questions to Ask a Realtor (And How We Answer Them)
Choosing a realtor is a little unusual because most people do not hire one often enough to know what a good interview should look like.
There are plenty of lists telling buyers and sellers which questions to ask. What is harder to find is what a thoughtful answer should actually sound like. So we decided to answer the questions ourselves.
Below are the things we think you should ask any realtor you are considering, including us, along with how we approach them in our own practice. Ask different agents the same questions. Pay attention to how specific the answers are, whether they can explain the reasoning behind what they do, and whether their approach actually fits what you need.
You are not looking for someone who has a perfect answer to everything. You are looking for someone whose experience, judgment, communication, and way of working give you confidence that they can properly represent you when the decisions become important.
How we work with our buyers
Before we start booking showings, we like to sit down with our buyers and prepare them for the process ahead.
Our team puts together a home buying package based on the person we are working with. A first-time buyer does not need the same conversation as someone buying their fourth home, and an investor is usually looking at the property through a very different lens again.
We go through the market together, including what has been selling, what buyers are competing for, where we think opportunities exist, and our actual opinion of what we are seeing. We also review the documents the buyer will eventually be asked to sign, how an offer works, what happens during conditions, the timeline from an accepted offer through possession, and what they should expect from us throughout the purchase.
We do this before there is a house on the table. It is much easier to understand financing conditions, deposits, inspections, condominium documents, possession dates, and contract terms when you are not simultaneously deciding whether to buy a home you have fallen in love with.
We also start a group chat with our team. If a question comes up, the buyer is not dependent on one person's inbox or waiting for the next scheduled meeting to get an answer.
By the time we start seriously looking, I do not expect a buyer to know everything about real estate. That is our job. I do want them to understand what they can comfortably spend, what the market is doing, what will happen when they find the right home, and which decisions they will eventually be asked to make.
From there, we help with the search, showings, property evaluation, offer strategy, negotiation, conditions, financing, inspection, condominium document review where applicable, and the steps leading to possession.
The goal is not to turn our clients into realtors. It is to make sure important information is explained before they are being asked to make an important decision.
What to listen for when an agent explains their listing process
If you are interviewing agents to sell your home, ask each one to walk you through what happens from the first meeting until possession. Pay particular attention to what happens before the property goes online.
Does the agent ask why you are selling and what you need the sale to accomplish? That matters because the strategy can look different for someone who needs a specific possession date, someone who is buying another property, someone prioritizing certainty, and someone whose primary objective is maximizing the sale price.
Then ask how they arrived at the suggested price. I would want to see the comparable sales, but I would also want to understand the current competition and how buyers are likely to compare my property against what else is available. Pricing should be a conversation about strategy and trade-offs, not simply an agent presenting one number and asking for a signature.
Ask what they think you should do to the home before listing. Then ask the more useful second question: what do you think I should not spend money on? A good preparation plan should distinguish between work that is important, work that would help but is optional, and work that probably will not produce enough benefit to justify the time or cost.
I would also ask what happens immediately before the listing goes live, who reviews the photography and marketing, how showing feedback is handled, how often you will hear from the agent, and what happens if the market does not respond the way everyone expected. I do not believe a predetermined price reduction every certain number of days is much of a strategy. If something needs to change, I want to understand what the market is telling us and why we believe that particular change will improve the outcome.
Our complete listing process, from the initial conversation through closing, is explained in Selling a House in Calgary.
The questions I wish more clients asked
Most people naturally ask about commission, experience, and what they think their home is worth. Those are reasonable questions. There are others I think reveal considerably more about how an agent thinks and how they will behave once you are actually working together.
These are some of the questions I wish more clients asked me:
- I've been approved up to $X. Based on my income, lifestyle, and short-term goals, do you think I would be stretching myself too far at that price? I want a realtor to be willing to distinguish between what a lender will approve and what may actually be comfortable for the client.
- Where do you see the best opportunities in the market right now, and why? The useful part of the answer is the reasoning. I would want to know whether the agent is looking at property type, location, inventory, price range, rental economics, redevelopment, or something else entirely.
- Where am I most exposed to risk during this transaction, and what do you do to reduce it? Every transaction has points where details matter more. The agent should be able to identify them and explain how they manage them.
- What happens when you run into a situation you have not handled before? Nobody has personally encountered every possible real estate problem. I care far more about whether someone recognizes the limits of their knowledge, knows when to slow down, and has access to the right lawyer, broker, inspector, accountant, contractor, or other professional when the situation requires it.
- Who are the professionals you rely on outside of your own team? Real estate regularly overlaps with financing, law, inspections, surveys, insurance, property management, accounting, and construction. I want an agent who has strong people to call without pretending to be the expert in every one of those fields.
- What would you do if I became emotionally attached to a property you did not think I should buy? This is one of my favourite questions. Sometimes our job is helping a client buy a home. Sometimes our job is telling them why I think they should walk away from one.
- What value do you provide beyond opening doors and writing the contract? Every agent should be able to answer this clearly.
- Why should I choose you over an agent who has been in the business longer? Years in the industry matter, but they are not the only measure of experience. I would want to hear about transaction volume, repetition, systems, market knowledge, negotiation, continued education, and how involved that person actually is in the work.
- What are you doing to become better at real estate? Markets change. Contracts change. Technology changes. Financing changes. An agent who stopped learning several years ago may have experience, but experience and current competence are not automatically the same thing.
- What part of real estate do you genuinely enjoy enough that you have stayed in it? I like this question because the answer tends to reveal quite a bit about the person you may be hiring.
You can ask us every one of these. More importantly, ask other agents too. The point is not to find someone whose answers sound exactly like ours. It is to understand how each person thinks before you trust them with the transaction.
How we talk about commission
For most of our residential listings, our commission structure is 7% on the first $100,000 of the sale price and 3% on the remaining balance, plus GST.
That is our commission structure. It is not a standardized industry rate, and no other brokerage is required to charge the same amount. Real estate commissions are negotiable and form part of the written agreement between the seller and brokerage.
When we discuss fees, I also think it is important to discuss what the seller is actually receiving for them. That includes the work before the listing ever reaches the market: evaluating the property, reviewing comparable sales and competition, developing the pricing strategy, deciding what should and should not be done before listing, coordinating preparation and marketing, reviewing the final listing, handling showings and feedback, responding to changes in the market, negotiating offers, managing conditions, and carrying the transaction through closing.
There is also one part of the fee conversation I think sellers should understand about us specifically. We will not give someone an unrealistic opinion of value simply because that is the number they want to hear and we want the listing. If I do not believe the market supports a price, I will explain why. Sometimes a seller may still decide they want to test a higher number, and there can be situations where doing that is reasonable. What I do not want is to win someone's business by telling them something I do not believe, then spend the next several weeks trying to talk them down to the price I thought was realistic in the first place. That wastes the seller's time and ours.
The fee should make sense alongside the work being done and the advice being provided. The lowest commission does not automatically produce the best result, and a higher commission does not automatically prove that an agent is better. The useful question is: what am I paying for, who is doing the work, and what does the process actually look like?
We explain the full commission structure, what the fee pays for, how compensation is distributed, and what may be negotiable in The Real Cost of Selling a House in Alberta.
Where these answers come from
The answers on this page are based on how we actually work with buyers and sellers. Jason has been a realtor for nine years and has personally sold more than 200 properties. The opinions throughout this guide come from those transactions, the situations our team has dealt with, and the way our process has developed over time.
Where something is our professional opinion, we try to make that clear. Where the answer depends on a contract, government rule, market statistic, financing guideline, or another source outside of us, it should be treated differently and supported accordingly.
And you should not rely only on what we write about ourselves. Our client reviews are available on the team page. Read them alongside what we have written here and decide whether the experience clients describe resembles the standard we say we provide: meet the team and read the reviews.
Questions people ask
Common questions about choosing a realtor
What is the hardest month to sell a house?
In my experience, the most difficult stretch in Calgary is usually from mid-December through mid-January. The holidays slow activity down, the weather can make showings less appealing, and there are generally fewer buyers actively looking than we tend to see once the market begins picking up again toward spring.
That does not mean a home cannot sell during that period, and I would not advise someone to delay a necessary sale solely because of the calendar. A well-priced property can still sell in December. But if someone has complete flexibility over timing and asks which part of the year I would be least excited to launch into, that is usually it.
That is based on our experience working through Calgary market cycles rather than a rule that applies identically every year.
What is a red flag in real estate?
There is not one universal red flag. I tend to think about them in categories.
A property that looks like a bargain for reasons nobody has explained. Foreclosures and bank-owned properties are a good example. They are often talked about as though foreclosure automatically means discount. I am much more cautious. The purchase terms can be less forgiving, the property history may be harder to assess, and the physical condition can be unpredictable. They can absolutely make sense for an experienced investor, contractor, or buyer who understands what they are taking on. For the average buyer, a lower asking price does not automatically make something a better purchase. I want to know why it appears cheap before deciding it is good value.
Deferred maintenance that does not match the asking price. I look carefully at any property where maintenance appears to have been postponed for a long time. Tenant-occupied homes can deserve additional attention here because the owner may not see the property regularly, but the same issue can exist in an owner-occupied property. I would want to understand the maintenance history, age of major components, visible wear, tenancy and possession requirements if applicable, and whether a collection of small issues is pointing toward a larger pattern of neglect. That does not make the property bad. It changes what I want the buyer investigating before committing to it.
An agent who cannot explain how they work. I care about repetition in this business. Real estate transactions involve contracts, negotiation, financing, inspections, conditions, possession issues, and situations that rarely look exactly the same twice. I would ask how many transactions the agent has personally handled, whether real estate is their primary profession, who actually attends the showings and writes the offers, what happens when they are unavailable, and how they manage the transaction after an offer is accepted. Being newer does not automatically make someone a poor agent. Being experienced does not automatically make someone a good one either. What I want to understand is how frequently they are doing the work, how well they understand it, and whether there is a reliable process behind them when something does not go according to plan.
Pressure to remove protections without explaining the risk. There are markets and situations where buyers choose to write aggressively. What concerns me is when someone is encouraged to waive financing, inspection, document review, or another protection without clearly understanding what they are giving up and why. Sometimes taking additional risk is a conscious strategic decision. The client should know exactly what the risk is before making it.
Numbers that only work if everything goes perfectly. This comes up particularly with investment properties. If the investment only looks good using the highest possible rent, zero vacancy, minimal maintenance, optimistic appreciation, and no unexpected expenses, I do not think we have really analyzed the investment. A good opportunity should survive a reasonable amount of skepticism.
What is the most asked question in real estate?
Probably: "Is it a good time to buy?"
It is also one of the questions I am least comfortable answering without knowing anything about the person asking it. A market can be attractive and buying can still be the wrong decision for a particular person. I would want to know what their financing looks like, how much they can comfortably spend, how long they expect to own the property, what they are currently paying to rent, what they want to buy, and what is actually available in that segment of the market. Then we can talk about whether buying now makes sense.
The market matters. So does the buyer.
How do I interview a realtor?
Keep it simple. Tell the agent that you are planning to buy or sell and that you are speaking with a few people before deciding who you want representing you. Then ask questions that force them to explain how they actually work.
I would want to know:
- Is real estate your full-time profession?
- How many transactions have you personally handled?
- Who will I actually be dealing with day to day?
- What does working together look like from start to finish?
- How do you approach pricing, negotiation, and risk?
- What happens when you are unavailable?
- What would make you advise a client not to proceed with a transaction?
- What is in the agreement I will be signing with you?
- How are you paid?
- What do you believe you do particularly well?
Ask each agent roughly the same questions. You are not grading them on whether they use the same words. You are comparing how clearly they think and whether their answers give you confidence in the person you will actually be relying on.
What questions should I ask a realtor when buying?
If you are choosing a buyer's agent, I would ask:
- Who will actually be at my showings and writing my offers? If you are hiring a team, understand who you will be dealing with day to day.
- What is in the agreement between us? Ask how long it lasts, what each side is agreeing to, and what happens if the relationship is not working. Read it before signing it.
- How are you paid? Ask how the agent is compensated on the purchase and whether there is any situation where you could owe money directly. You should understand that before you begin writing offers.
- What happens if you are also representing the seller of a property I want? Ask what changes about the representation and advice you receive, and what options are available to you.
- Walk me through what happens after an offer is accepted. I like this question because the answer reveals quickly whether someone understands the less visible part of the transaction. Financing, inspection, deposits, condominium document review where applicable, amendments, condition deadlines, lawyer information, insurance, and possession all happen after the excitement of getting the offer accepted.
- What would make you tell me not to buy a property? This tells you quite a bit about whether the person sees themselves primarily as a salesperson or an advisor.
- Who else will I need during the purchase, and when? Mortgage professional, lawyer, inspector, insurance provider, and potentially condominium document reviewer or other specialists depending on the property. The timing is just as important as the names.
What questions should I ask a realtor when selling?
For a listing agent, I would ask:
- How did you arrive at your suggested price? Ask to see the comparable sales and understand how the agent is accounting for your condition, location, current competition, and market. Then ask: what would you tell me if I wanted to list materially higher? That answer can be more revealing than the original valuation.
- What happens before the property goes live? Ask about preparation, measurements, photography, staging, marketing, listing copy, showing setup, and who is responsible for each part.
- What happens during the first week on market? You should know how showing activity, feedback, competing listings, and buyer response will be monitored.
- What happens if we do not receive an offer? I would want more than a predetermined price-drop schedule. Ask what information the agent will use to decide whether something needs to change.
- What is in the listing agreement? Understand the term, commission, your obligations, how the agreement can end, and what happens with buyers introduced during the listing period.
- How will you communicate things I may not want to hear? This matters. If buyers repeatedly identify the same problem or the market does not support the price, you want an agent willing to have that conversation with you.
- What happens if one of your own buyers wants to purchase my home? Ask how representation works and what options are available to you.
- What should I spend money on before listing, and what should I leave alone? I would listen particularly carefully to the second half of the answer.
What questions should I ask a realtor when renting?
Renting is a different transaction from buying or selling, and our team is not a property management company. We do have first-hand experience as landlords and relationships with property management professionals in Calgary, so we can help our clients understand what to look for and connect them with the appropriate people when needed.
If you are speaking with someone about a rental, I would ask:
- Who is paying you, the tenant or the property owner?
- Is the tenancy fixed-term or periodic?
- What happens if I need to leave before the term ends?
- What is the security deposit and how is it handled?
- Will there be formal move-in and move-out inspection reports?
- What is included in the rent?
- What do I pay separately for utilities, parking, storage, or other costs?
- If it is a condominium, what building rules apply to pets, smoking, subletting, and other use restrictions?
- Who handles repairs and maintenance?
- Who do I contact if something breaks?
- Does the owner have any current intention to sell the property or move back in?
If you are renting because you expect to buy later, mention that as well. Your expected timeline can change what kind of lease makes sense and which questions matter most.
What questions should I ask when interviewing a realtor?
If you remember only three things, make them these:
Ask about process. "Walk me through exactly what happens when I work with you" tells you much more than "Are you a good negotiator?"
Ask every agent comparable questions. You learn much more when you can put the answers beside one another.
Ask for specifics. If someone says they provide great communication, ask what that actually means. If they say they are experienced, ask how many transactions they have personally handled. If they say they have a strong marketing plan, ask them to walk you through it.
And one question I would add at the end: what do you wish more clients asked you before hiring you? The answer usually tells you something that was never going to appear in the sales presentation.
Ready to put this into action?