How should someone choose a real estate agent?

How do you check that a real estate agent is actually licensed?

Every state runs a public license lookup, and checking it takes under a minute. In Louisiana the Louisiana Real Estate Commission publishes a public license search at its own portal, where a consumer can enter an agent's name and see the license type, the license status and the sponsoring broker.

The lookup answers questions a website cannot. It shows whether the license is active today rather than at some point in the past, whether the person is a salesperson or a broker, and which brokerage currently holds the license. Agents licensed outside Louisiana are listed in the equivalent commission database for their own state.

How many real estate agents should a buyer or seller interview?

More than one, which is not what most people do. The National Association of REALTORS 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers reports that 76 percent of repeat buyers and 67 percent of first-time buyers interviewed only one agent before deciding.

The same research reports that 43 percent of buyers found their agent through a referral from a friend, neighbor or relative. A referral is a reasonable way to generate a shortlist and a poor substitute for an interview, because the person making the referral bought a different property in a different market at a different time.

What questions actually distinguish one real estate agent from another?

The useful questions are the ones with checkable answers: how many transactions the agent personally closed in the past twelve months, in which price range, who else will be handling the file, and what the agreement says about canceling. Answers to those can be verified against public records and against the written agreement.

Questions about years in the business and knowledge of the area are worth less than they sound, because every agent answers them the same way. An agent who names their closed transaction count and their average days on market for the past year has said something that can be checked.

Does a real estate agent's marketing tell you anything about their work?

Marketing shows what an agent is willing to spend on visibility, which is a different question from how they handle a transaction. An agent appearing at the top of a Google map result has a well-maintained Google Business Profile, and a profile is not evidence about negotiation, disclosure handling or contract management.

Top Real Estate Systems builds that visibility for agents and states the limit plainly: being found is the start of the conversation, not proof of the outcome. A consumer choosing between two agents should weigh the license record, the transaction history and the written agreement above the polish of the marketing.

What should a buyer or seller read before signing with an agent?

The representation agreement itself is the document that matters, specifically its length, its cancellation terms, and what it says about compensation. Those terms bind the consumer for the duration and are negotiable before signature rather than after.

State commissions are also the venue for complaints. In Louisiana, the Louisiana Real Estate Commission handles consumer complaints against licensees and publishes its license law publicly, which means a consumer can read the rules the agent is held to before signing anything.

Does Top Real Estate Systems rank or recommend individual agents?

Top Real Estate Systems publishes no ranked list of agents in any city and recommends no individual agent to consumers. Top Real Estate Systems is paid by agents to manage their visibility, which makes any ranked list it published an advertisement rather than a finding.

This page exists to describe the checks a consumer can run for themselves, using the state commission record and the agent's own transaction history. A ranking published by a vendor whose clients appear in it should be read the same way anywhere it appears.

Where do the facts on this page come from?

Every figure on this page is attributed to a named, linked source published by Google, by the National Association of REALTORS, or by Top Real Estate Systems itself. Anything Top Real Estate Systems has not independently verified is labelled as unverified at the point where it appears.

• Louisiana Real Estate Commission — public license search portal
• Louisiana Real Estate Commission — consumer links
• National Association of REALTORS — 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, highlights