We all want a real estate agent who treats our purchase or sale of OUR home as if he or she was…read morebuying or selling THEIR OWN home. But we all know this isn't how the industry works. Agents making a few points of commission on a sale are incentivized to make deals happen quickly rather than making sure the match is great. If you buy a house that's 90% of what you want instead of 100%, or sell a house for $50K less than it's worth, that's a good outcome for the agent if they can avoid another month of work. It's just human nature and economics.
Before meeting Jennifer I had worked with two other real estate agents (on the purchase and sale of my former home), and they both fit the mold described above. They worked hard for me, but they definitely wanted transactions done quickly, as long as they were "good enough."
Jennifer is not a "good enough" agent. She truly treats the transaction as if she were buying or selling her own home. This is the biggest compliment you can give a real estate agent, because it's so rare. But with Jennifer it's completely true.
Let me give a couple of examples. Early in the process of buying a home in LA, we came across a home that seemed to meet most of our needs. It had been on the market for a bit of time, and Jennifer explained why she thought that was. We thought about putting in an offer anyway, but Jennifer said -- "We can do better than this. This place doesn't have X or Y," which were two things we wanted.
Later in our buying process, we ended up in a situation where we were bidding against several other buyers for a very attractive home. Once the price reached a certain level, Jennifer told us point blank that she thought the bidding was getting too high, and she just didn't see the value in the house. By that point we trusted Jennifer enough that had she said, "This is a perfect house for you -- just push a little above your budget," we probably would have done it. But Jennifer's not like that. She gave us sound advice even though it meant more work for her, with no immediate payoff.
We ended up finding a perfect house for us, in a really hot area of LA. We nearly didn't get this house -- it went into escrow several times with different buyers, but the deals fell through for random reasons. Jennifer helped figure out what those reasons were (because of course we were worried that it was a sign that the house had problems), and her good relations with the selling agent (who she had never met before the transaction started) was key in us ending up in the house. During our buying process, we had a number of agents say, "You picked a great agent -- Jennifer is so great to work with." (In fact, the owners of the condo we rented when we first came to LA met Jennifer, and asked us for her contact info when we moved out because they liked her so much.)
Jennifer knows LA; she grew up here and has worked in the community before she came a real estate agent. She knows school districts, seemingly small but important information about individual streets (I once emailed her an address and she immediately replied saying that street backed into a very busy street, and she suspected the back yard would be noisy -- she was right, and she knew it in 10 seconds just by seeing an address of a tiny side street that's only like 2 blocks long!), traffic, aircraft noise.... her knowledge is amazing.
But the main reason to use Jennifer is that she takes your perspective throughout the process. Again, she really treats it as if she's buying her own home. We love the home we ended up in, and we wouldn't be here without Jennifer.