Most people interview agents on the wrong things. They ask about the commission and they ask what the house is worth, and then they hire whoever gave them the biggest number and the smallest fee. That is how a lot of houses end up sitting.
You are not hiring a price. You are hiring the person who is going to handle the largest transaction of your year, negotiate on your behalf, and be reachable when something goes sideways at four thirty on a Friday. Here is what I would ask.
Can you afford to list my house?
It sounds like a strange question to ask the person you are paying. Ask it anyway.
Getting a house ready and in front of buyers costs real money. Photography that is actually good. Getting the place cleaned up and staged enough to show well. Signage, marketing, the time it takes to hold it open and work the traffic. An agent who is thin cannot spend that, so they list it, put it in the system, and hope.
You will know from the answer. Somebody who does this seriously will tell you exactly what they spend and what it goes toward. Somebody who does not will change the subject to the commission.
How do you negotiate?
This is the one almost nobody asks, and it is the one that decides what you actually net.
What I want to hear is a person who picks up the phone. Deals get made in conversation, where you can hear what the other side actually cares about, and then you write it down once everybody already agrees. An agent who does all their negotiating by sending documents back and forth is going to lose you money and probably a deal or two along the way. I wrote about why in negotiate verbally, paper it once.
Ask an agent to tell you about a deal they saved. If nothing comes to mind, they have not been in enough of them.
Ask what they do when an offer comes in low. Ask what they do when the inspection comes back ugly. Those two moments are where a listing either holds together or falls apart, and you want to hear that they have a plan rather than a reaction.
How do I reach you, and how fast?
Accessibility is not a soft quality in this business. It is most of the job.
Offers have deadlines. Inspection windows have deadlines. Lenders ask for things that have to be answered the same day. If your agent is hard to get on the phone, you are going to feel it at the worst possible moment, and so is every agent on the other side trying to bring you a buyer. Showings that are hard to schedule quietly stop getting scheduled.
Ask for their cell. Ask who covers for them when they are away. If the answer is an office line and a promise, keep interviewing.
How did you get to this price?
Notice the question is not what is my house worth. It is how did you get there.
Any agent can say a big number to win a listing. It is the oldest move there is, and it works because it is what the seller wants to hear. Then the house sits, and six weeks later you are having a very different conversation about a price cut, and by then you have spent the best weeks you were going to get.
You want to see the comparable sales. You want to hear why yours is worth more than one of them and less than another. You want somebody who will tell you the honest number even when it is not the one you were hoping for. That is the whole substance of pricing a home in the Memphis area, and it is the single biggest lever on how your sale goes.
What should I fix, and what should I leave alone?
A good listing agent will walk your house and tell you plainly what is worth doing and what is not. Some of it is smaller than people expect. Bulbs, squeaks, counters cleared off, a clean attic. Some of what sellers want to spend money on right before listing they will not get back.
An agent who says everything looks great and never suggests anything is not doing you a favor. They are avoiding an awkward conversation at your expense. What I look at when I walk a house is in shoe covers, light bulbs, and a clean attic, and the money question of which improvements come back is in the forever home fallacy.
The thing you are really deciding
Selling a house is not complicated, but it has a lot of moving parts and a fair amount of money riding on each one. What you are hiring is judgment and follow through. Somebody who tells you the truth about the price, who answers the phone, and who knows how to hold a deal together when it wobbles.
If you are weighing whether to hire anybody at all, that is a fair question too, and I went through it honestly in what really happens when you sell without an agent.