PICK THE RIGHT REAL ESTATE ATTORNEY
For many buyers and sellers, a real estate agent is all that is needed to get through the buying or selling real estate process. A real estate agent can provide valuable advice on the current state of the market, the best way to stage your home for sale or good areas to look at when investigating a home purchase. What a real estate agent cannot do, however, is provide legal advice and in some situations, such advice is critical to the real estate transaction process.
A real estate attorney can be a great way to not only get that valuable legal advice but to protect yourself every step along the way as well. A real estate purchase or sale is a complicated transaction impacted by countless laws and regulations. With a piece of merchandise so expensive changing hands, issues are bound to crop up and sometimes a real estate attorney is the best way to deal with those issues.
So, you’ve convinced yourself that you need a real estate attorney and value the piece of mind a real estate attorney brings enough to spend the money to retain one. The question now becomes where to find one and rather than simply pick the real estate attorney with the nicest ad in the yellow pages, there are some better sources you can use to select the real estate attorney that is right for you.
Referrals Help Generate Leads
While that tenet may be universally true for sales, it is also true for the search of a solid real estate attorney. Randomly picking a real estate attorney can lead to communication problems later fostered by the incompatibility between you and your real estate attorney. Instead, it can be more beneficial to seek out recommendations from friends and other acquaintances that have gone through a home purchase or sale.
However, many people simply don’t know a friend that has gone through the process of hiring a real estate attorney and thus have no one to ask. For those people, the Bar Association in your area can be a great resource for generating a list of potential real estate attorneys that have a positive standing with the Bar. Additionally, there a number of different directories that keep contact information for competent attorneys and many have subsections designed specifically for real estate attorneys.
Interviewing Sorts Out Competition
The best way to land a great real estate attorney is to be exhaustive in your search process. While few of us have time to interview 10 or 15 different attorneys, we can all probably spare the time to interview a handful of potential candidates to ensure that the fit is right between attorney and client. Many attorneys will charge for personal meetings, so asking the right questions on the phone may have to do in most cases.
Be sure to get all of the financial requirements up front from a prospective real estate attorney. Many will also have particular areas of expertise, so ask about them to make sure that the expertise relates to your particular situation. Also, asking some general questions about the process each real estate attorney usually goes through on a property can help you learn about the process while still filtering out attorneys.
While not every real estate transaction requires a real estate attorney, the added expense of hiring one can make sense for customers that want some extra security for the transaction or that envision complications along the way. Your real estate agent is perhaps your primary resource as you pursue a home sale or purchase, but a real estate attorney can be a sound, legal, additional resource to deliver the best possible real estate selling or purchasing experience.
This is another original article by Joe Lane, co-owner of The Lane Real Estate Team at http://www.joelane.com/. Are you looking for an experienced Tri City WA Real Estate agency? With 20 years of service based, business experience, Joe and Colleen Lane work hard to serve home buyers and sellers for the Tri Cities of Washington's Kennewick, Richland, Pasco, and surrounding areas.
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