Insights from NAR's 2024 Buyer & Seller Profile

Main Points:

• Method of Purchase: Realtors have maintained their involvement in the market even as large iBuyers, investors, builders, and lawsuits threatened them. Opportunity to try and help buyers buy from builder or FSBO with representation.
• What buyers want from agents: Both first-time and repeat buyers are mostly focused on finding the “right” house. Negotiating terms and prices are next in priority. First-time buyers want more hand holding on financing and budgeting than repeat buyers.
• Benefits of working with agents: In this order, buyers saw the benefit of agents helping with navigating the process, inspecting the home, finding service providers, negotiation, and speeding up the purchase process. Interestingly, modifying the property search wasn’t very popular, but it could be because few agents actively do that.
• How buyer found their agent: Most popular by far is referral. Overall, there’s a variety of ways to find clients and creating a speciality approach will help you enhance your conversion rate rather than trying a little bit of everything. Most importantly, you must ask for referrals and stay in touch with existing clients to get repeat business for the largest returns.
• Number of agents interviewed: First-time buyers are more likely to interview at least 2 agents, but the majority of people find an agent and end up working with them. This signals that we should build our businesses to get in front of the most people possible in a way that gets us the opportunity and 3 out of 4 times you won’t have to compete.
• Importance of agent communication: Quickly communicating information via calls and text are the top priories. Email was important to ~50% of all clients. There’s a difference between finding an agent and working with one. Many of the categories with lower scores are more important when connecting with a client and then not as important once you begin working with them.
• Satisfaction with agent: One way to look at this is that agents can get 10% better in every category. There’s always room for improvement. Perhaps, the largest area of opportunities come from better insights about local markets and negotiation skills. Are you purposely improving in those areas?
• How many times does the buyer recommend the agent to others: NAR focuses on the 61% with 1 or more referrals, but I think we should be far more focused on the 39% with 0. This is low hanging fruit because you’ve already worked with them and know them. What systems do you have in place to stay in front of your people and encourage them to refer you to others? Find the natural connectors in your database and stay in front of them.
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