The Hidden Cost of Hiring the Wrong Agent in Augusta

By Ann Marie McManus

Ann Marie McManus, a proud Augusta native, brings over four decades of real estate experience, making her one of the top professionals in the area with a sales record of 2,200+ homes.

It seems like a perfectly reasonable idea. You’re getting ready to buy a home, and you have a friend or relative from your old hometown with a real estate license. Why not have them ride along and help you look at houses? It feels comfortable, it feels loyal, and on the surface, it even feels smart.

I’ve been doing this for 43 years here in Augusta, and I want to tell you why that decision can cost you a lot more than you’d ever save. This is a growing trend, and I see it most often in the spring, when families are relocating for the medical college or sending a child to the dental school, and a parent back home happens to be in the business.

I understand the instinct completely. But every market is different, and the things that protect you in a transaction are almost always local.

Let me put it plainly with my own family. My two daughters have lived in Atlanta for a long time now, and Atlanta is only two and a half hours up the road. I could tell myself that because I know real estate so well, I’d do a wonderful job for them up there.

It’s just not true, folks. I don’t know Atlanta’s neighborhoods, its builders, or its block-by-block quirks the way I know Augusta’s, and pretending otherwise would do my own daughters a disservice.

What a local agent actually sees. That local knowledge shows up in ways an out-of-town agent simply can’t see. A local agent knows the builders and the quality behind them. A local agent knows that an out-of-town agent might reflexively order a radon test here, when in all my years I’ve never once seen radon come up in Augusta.

But a local agent also knows when to spend money, like recommending you scope the sewer line all the way to the street on an older home, because those lines only last 75 to 100 years, and a fifty-year-old one is worth checking. Not knowing those things, in either direction, can be very costly.

You can pull a lot of statistics online, but an algorithm won’t tell you whether a neighborhood has had recent crime activity or how close you are to the parks and schools that fit your life. A local person will.

The listings you never even see. It’s another piece that most people never think about. Right now, within two blocks of my own house, there are three homes listed by out-of-town agents.

I call them the secret listings because hardly anyone knows they exist. The agent told the seller they’d put it on Zillow, but not everyone watches Zillow, and it isn’t the most reliable source for real estate information anyway.

One of those homes, I don’t think the agent has even made the drive down to put a sign in the yard. None of the neighbors know it’s for sale. When an agent isn’t local, the natural network that sells homes just isn’t there, and that costs the seller real exposure and the buyer a real opportunity.

Local networks are everything. That network is everything, and I’ve watched it work my whole life. I wasn’t in the business yet, but I remember when local agents sold homes without much technology at all. People moving to Fort Gordon would write a letter to my father, and he took every one of them seriously.

He’d go look at every single house himself and tell them everything they needed to know. Things moved a little more slowly then, but someone who truly knows the market is so much more conscientious than an agent who just wants to get the deal done. To this day, I keep a school directory on hand.

When I list a home in a certain neighborhood, I’ll make calls because I know families who want to be near a particular private school, and I’ll reach out to neighbors who might know of something coming on the market. All of that is local. And all of that, you deserve.

There is so much that matters in a move that you will never pick up from an algorithm. So before you make one of the biggest buying or selling decisions of your life, choose someone with real local expertise. Don’t sell yourself short. It truly is the best bargain out there.

If you want to know what I know and how I can help you here in our little green acre, I’d love to hear from you. Call or text me at (706) 481-3800, email me at annmarie@annmariemcmanus.com, or visit annmariemcmanus.com, and I’ll give you the local knowledge and expertise you deserve.