A Practical Guide:
Hiring a Desert Mountain Listing Agent

“Know More.  Do More.  Aim Higher.”
Listing Agent in Desert Mountain

Your Expert Guide to Choosing the Right Listing Agent in Desert Mountain

A Guide written by an industry veteran with thirty-four-years of Desert Mountain experience to help sellers of Desert Mountain property navigate unexpectedly challenging waters when trying to select a listing agent.
This Guide was written to help Sellers of property in Desert Mountain choose an agent wisely.  Doing so requires deciphering disingenuous marketing messages promulgated by some brokerages and agents about why they should be chosen.  It also requires looking hard at data comparing how candidate agents do against one another in metrics that matter to sellers, not metrics of interest to the agents or their brokerage.  Details on every underlying element of such a decision are available below.  We unpack our tagline: “Know More.  Do More.  Aim Higher.”
Click any of the links below to jump to a section. You can also download the PDF to this Practical Guide by clicking the link below.
Overview of Key Desert Mountain Listing Agent Qualifications
What Listing Agents Do (or don’t do) is What Matters
Regarding the importance of the Original List Price
Ignore Marketing Claims Made by Agents not Based on Actual Results
Listing Agent Selection Metrics that will Save You Time and Money
desert mountain listing agent Davis Driver Group

Davis Driver, Ashley Hills, Ann Driver, Jeff Barchi

Real estate Agent in Desert Mountain

Summary Points on How to Pick the Right Listing Agent in Desert Mountain

Working with a team of agents leads to faster sales, better marketing strategies, and more personalized service compared to a solo agent. Here are further insights into how to pick the right team.

🔹Hire an agent team, not an individual agent

A team or group will have more collective resources, imagination, listing appointment coverage capability, a wider marketing perspective, and greater collective critical thinking skills than an individual agent.

🔹Hire an agent team that has a mix of males and females on it

Male and female agents often bring unique perspectives to the table—females may notice details that males might overlook, and vice versa. This balance of insight enhances property presentation, marketing strategy, and buyer engagement, making a gender-diverse agent team more effective in selling Desert Mountain homes.

🔹Hire an Agent Team That Limits its Work in Order to Have the Time to do an Excellent Job

If they have more than about five or six homes per agent, they likely will not have time to do an excellent job for you. Having many listings is good for agents and their brokerage, but not that good for their clients. Listings, and listing clients, suffer when agents have more work than they can handle.

🔹Hire an agent team based on their professional qualifications, not because they are friends who are also real estate agents

With prices as high as they are in Desert Mountain, you will pay a considerable amount of money in commissions. Trusting a friend whose listing track record suggests it will be difficult to meet your goals and maximize your net effective income is an effective way to put your money, and your friendship, at risk. Avoid that risk and get the best return possible out of your commission expense investment

🔹Hire an agent team who can (and does) sell the entire Desert Mountain experience

Agents who are members of the Club, live (or have lived) in the community, are familiar with Carefree, Cave Creek, and north Scottsdale, and who have been selling in Desert Mountain for many years, will be much more effective in selling your home than agents without such credentials.

🔹Hire an agent team with seasoning and experience, especially for a larger or more complicated selling assignment

Consider that the longer they have been performing the art of real estate, the better the chances they will say or do the right thing at the right time, and not say or do the wrong thing at the wrong time, keeping a deal on track to your advantage.

🔹Hire an agent team whose members present themselves professionally

Professional appearance matters—good grooming and attire that reflect the high-value nature of Desert Mountain real estate, help build credibility and buyer confidence. An agent who presents themselves professionally reinforces the premium image of your property and sets the tone for a successful showing experience.

The Davis Driver Group

desert mountain listing agent Davis Driver

Davis Driver

Associate Broker

(602) 399-0116
davis@davisdriver.com
desert mountain sellers agent Jeff Barci

Jeff Barchi

REALTORÂŽ

(602) 558-5200
jbarchi@fineprop.com
desert mountain real estate agent Ann Driver

Ann Driver

REALTORÂŽ

(480) 586-7766
davis@davisdriver.com
desert mountain listing agent Ashley Hills Arias

Ashley Hills

REALTORÂŽ

(480) 760-3514
ashleyhsellsaz@gmail.com
Desert Mountain Davis Driver group

Why Your Desert Mountain Listing Agent’s Actions Matter More Than Their Brokerage Brand

Discover why an agent’s Brokerage’s brand (or ancillary corporate affiliations) is irrelevant to a successful listing in Desert Mountain, and why success hinges entirely on the actions (or lack thereof) on the part of the agents working on the listing.

When evaluating a potential real estate team, don’t be distracted by the flashy image or marketing spin of the brokerage they represent. Brokerages don’t do the hard work required for listing success - the agent team does. Here are key areas where The Davis Driver Group shines.

🤝 More Thorough Pre-Listing Consultation

Any agent team will meet with a prospective listing client at their home to get acquainted with each other and for the agent team to learn about the home. Details matter in this business, and we get into more of them, by far, than our competition. We look at everything: the client’s goals, timing, what they want and expect to have happen, what they don’t want to happen, and physical details on the home that other agents won’t collect because they don’t have a proprietary analytical system in which to place those details and get actionable, AI-like, pricing and marketing intelligence out of it, like we do.

🏡 In-Depth Property Profiling

Our proprietary system, custom designed for Desert Mountain real estate and refined over thirty-four years, has the ability to track over 200 datapoints in addition to membership access, most not included in the MLS.  The majority of these are things a buyer might want in a home, and therefore support a certain pricing argument as well as informing our marketing and showing strategies; others are things that would work against the attractiveness of a given home to a buyer, and therefore detract from a certain pricing argument (also informing our marketing and showing strategies!).  Our System also has a unique component : “Rooms, Spaces, and Places”.  There, we note everything about every place in the home: wall, floor, and ceiling heights and surfaces; doors (quantity and quality), windows (same), window treatments, electronics, appliances, fixtures, lighting, HVAC systems, driveway surfaces, pools, patios, even garden sheds and cold plunges, and more.  No other agent team, much less individual agents, has this fundamental informational advantage.  We really do “Know More.”

📈 Better Data Pays Off for our Clients

We don’t work with clients who are not serious about selling.  It is a waste of our time and resources.  For those who are serious, we use our informational advantage to identify the one or two homes on the market that are our most logical competitors, from both a physical and rough pricing perspective. Then, with our data-backed, deep understanding of what usually motivates Desert Mountain buyers (and looking at how long these “competitors” have been on the market and how well they have been marketed), along with understanding what our candidate listing’s relative strengths and weaknesses are, we make highly educated guesses about how well our candidate listing will do vs. these competitors at different price points (and how well the other homes are likely to do at their current list prices).  We price our listings to sell, but for the highest rational price likely to be obtained, given the time constraints imposed by our seller. This “pinpoint” pricing, and our super-informed marketing and showing strategies, usually produce quality results for our clients in less time than our logical competitors tend to take.  By “quality” we mean contract prices closer to list price, if not equal to or above, and if not, at lower discounts from Original List Price than our competitors tend to have to make.  Our typical List Price Analysis and Preliminary Marketing Plan showcases all these elements.  We invite you to compare our work to that of our competitors.  There will be no comparison.

🚀 First Impressions Make All the Difference

We maximize our chances of quick success not only by pricing against current competition in today’s market, but also by presenting our homes impeccably in every respect on Day One.  MLS “blurbs” that are well-written, not only mistake-free.  Descriptions highlighting our competitive advantages, and minimizing any disadvantages.  Educating readers who are not already intimately familiar with the details of Desert Mountain or our surroundings about why they might want to give unanticipated attention to our offering.  Annotating photos in the MLS, explaining what, in the photo, the reader should focus on.  Creating on-camera, narrated videos, not merely animated slide shows.  Making our listing clients proud.  Earning their trust and commission dollars. We really do “Do More.”

📸 More on our Visual Storytelling

These days, visuals are a key element in the “storytelling” process.  Our still photos are taken at morning, in the afternoon or evening, and at night if there are city light views from the home.  Aerial shots can highlight “setting” characteristics that otherwise might not be picked up by a reader.  We put the (annotated) photos in a logical sequence.  If access to a Desert Mountain Club membership is involved, we include photos showing Club assets and lifestyle.  We include maps, and floor plans when appropriate.   We want the reader to say “Wow.  These people are on the ball!”    It tends to make them want to see the home.  Without showings, no offers show up.  More showings sooner sometimes means multiple offers for more than Original List Price.

📤 Physical and Digital Marketing Materials, and Marketing Plans, that Shine

We cast a wide “net” very well to reach various target marketing audiences in powerful ways.  These groups include: real estate agents; prospective buyers searching online who don’t already know about Desert Mountain (or north Scottsdale, or Arizona!); buyers who do already know about Desert Mountain and are looking for that “special home” to come see; people on our own Prospective Buyer Database; and, people who live in Desert Mountain who may be shopping for a friend (or, maybe, themselves).  Our electronic marketing materials are excellent, as are our physical ones, to better impress buyers who come see the home in person.  All our focus on detail, our “Quality vs. Quantity” approach, our better pricing and competition research, and our better showing strategies, all come to a head when we open the front door and say “Welcome!!  We are glad you are here!!”  Our results show the benefits to our listing clients.

🛋️ Getting Homes Ready to Show, and Showing Them Ourselves

One of our partners, Ashley Hills, is a certified Staging Specialist. Ann Driver has a long history of successful Interior Design. Our other partner, Jeff Barchi, has utilized professional stagers for years in building his extraordinarily successful personal brand and business outside of Desert Mountain. Between these sources of expertise, we get our listings looking great and at their best, sometimes paying for staging ourselves. And, we show our listings ourselves, in person. No lockboxes for us!

🔄 Seamless Communication and Listing Management

Part of our private system is dedicated to recording every marketing activity we do for a listing, available to be reviewed by a client, 24/7, on a private website we create for each of our listings.  Not only are our activities instantly reviewable, so are a variety of reports detailing Desert Mountain’s market.  Each showing is recorded, and reported to the listing client.  Feedback is automatically requested from any outside agent involved, and communicated back directly to the client so they can hear what the agent had to say.  We have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this system; it eclipses any other client communication system about which we are aware.  A good example of “Aim Higher.”

Listing Agent in Desert Mountian

Regarding the importance of the Original List Price

The Hidden Costs of Overpricing Your Desert Mountain Home

If it is obviously too high, the listing will not sell promptly after coming on the market and will become “stale.” If the owners really are interested in selling, this strategy will eventually force one or more price reductions, costing precious time in the process.

Prospective purchasers recognize and shun unrealistically priced homes, causing the owners to eventually “chase the market” through price reductions. The prospective purchasers go from thinking “The sellers are not realistic,” to “There must be something wrong with that house. Let’s skip seeing it.” Eventually, a “bargain hunter” will appear on the scene, make a low-ball offer, and acquire the property (hopefully NOT represented by the listing agent who has mishandled the listing to their client’s detriment, as has apparently frequently been the case since January 1991 with some of our main competitors ).

The seller will have overpaid for inadequate services, wasted much time and ongoing ownership expenses, not received a price they should have for the property, and endured significant hassle and headache in the meantime due to numerous showings and, possibly, open houses. The tragedy in this is that if the selected agent team set the too-high Original List Price (either innocently, out of lack of analytical capability, or, perhaps less innocently, to get the listing), or agreed to an egregiously high price demanded by the seller, and their retention was further reinforced by marketing claims detailed in the next section, instead of on the basis of a cold-eyed analysis of how their past performance compared to other agents in metrics that matter to the seller, not the agent or their brokerage, that client will leave their poorly sold home never suspecting the dismal results they got were due to any reason other than “the market”. Our System does this “cold” analysis and we would be happy to share it with you. The good news for us is that we have outperformed our most logical competition over the last six years in five important metrics and are likely to continue to do so.

So there are expensive consequences to a serious seller if the original list price is too high. If the owners are not really interested in selling, and just want to test the market with a high price, that is a sure-fire way to probably not sell the home and get a lackluster effort on the part of the agent. Alternatively, properly priced properties sometimes result in immediate multiple offers and an ultimate sales price higher than the original list price.

How We Come Up With Our Pricing to Ensure Your Desert Mountain Home is Accurately Priced.

Producing a truly well-grounded list price is not easy, at least if the seller’s goal is to sell for a fair price more or less as soon as possible. It takes iterative, detailed comparative analysis of the subject property with individual members of groups of homes (Listed, Pending, Sold and Expired listings) sharing different sets of relevant comparable features. The more points of comparison used, and the more combinations of points of comparison used, the more perceptive and accurate the analysis will be. Our System was designed with these tasks in mind.  A less accurate effort can be made using the MLS, but it will pale in comparison to what The Davis Driver Group will do for you.  Ask us and your other agent candidates to give you  a sample List Price Analysis and Preliminary Marketing Plan so you can understand the difference.
Selling Home in Desert Mountian

Marketing claims made by candidate agents or agent teams, or their brokerage, about things other than selling your home quickly for the most amount of money, should be ignored.

Let's address this specifically:

🔹Claims of client benefit due to having sold more real estate than their competitors.

If an agent team has managed to get an abundance of listings over the years due to a wide and heavy Desert Mountain social footprint, or possibly due to unrealistically high initial list prices (set either by the agent or the owner), and then managed to sell them, they have enjoyed wonderful income. However, merely selling a property is a low bar to clear, given enough time and frequent or significant price adjustments. So, merely generating high personal income on the part of an agent or agent team, or an office bragging about how many listings they have sold, should not be construed as a measure of the quality of service and outcomes rendered to their listing clients.

🔹Claims of client benefit from the location of an agent’s office.

Where an agent physically works might make it easier for them to cover a listing appointment made on short notice but has nothing to do with the quality of work they will do for a client. An office location is irrelevant to proper pricing, promotion, presentation, follow-up, deal management, good grooming, and having the best data with which to work.

🔹Claims of client benefit due to the agent or agent’s brokerage “having the buyers.”

  1. This claim has nothing to do with performing quality work for a listing client. It is a “shiny object” disingenuous claim made to divert attention away from the consequences of not having enough time to do an excellent job on the fundamentals in the first place, and/or not having the data to do so, and/or not having the skills and/or inclination to do so. If the property is priced and marketed correctly, serious buyers will show up, period. And, unless a slight commission discount is negotiated in the event the listing agents represent both the seller and the buyer, it ought not to matter to a listing client what brokerage or agent represents the buyer. It would be foolish for a seller to value such a slight discount higher than the benefits accruing to the seller of a listing team doing an exceptional job of proper pricing, promotion, presentation, follow-up, etc. Desert Mountain buyers are represented by many firms, and even more agents. No one firm or agent team has a monopoly on them.
  2. According to data gathered by The Davis Driver Group between January 1, 2019, and May 31, 2023, from the local Multiple Listing Service, 1,011 Desert Mountain buyers were represented by 185 different brokerages, only three of which represented seventy-eight or more.
  3. If buyers will show up to see a well-priced and promoted home, a claim of “having the buyers” betrays a brokerage’s true desire, that of “double-dipping” as many transactions as possible, thus making more commission income, rather than promoting their desire and ability to do the challenging work necessary to price and promote a property properly in order to save a listing client time and money.

🔹Claims of client benefit due to a candidate agent’s or agent team’s brokerage office “having the most "walk-in traffic' ” (using different words to claim benefits from “having the buyers”).

  1. If a property is not well-priced, properly marketed, and properly shown it will not matter if a listing agent’s office has hundreds of daily walk-ins. None of them will want to buy the home.
  2. Second, as noted above, it should not matter to a seller what brokerage winds up representing the buyer.
  3. Much as they would like to, it is unlikely for an onsite sales office salesperson/candidate for a listing assignment to convert a given “Walk- In” visitor to a near-term purchase of his or her own listing for three reasons:
    • A given candidate listing agent who works at an onsite sales office would have to be “up” when a prospect comes in the door with an interest in a listing belonging to that agent. That can happen, but it is not something a candidate listing agent or team can imply will happen with any certainty when interviewing for a listing.
    • First-time visitors to an onsite sales office might ultimately buy property, but twenty-two years of experience working in Desert Mountain’s onsite sales office, and thirty-four years of overall selling experience in Desert Mountain, suggests that if they are just starting their “We might want to own some real estate around here; we just don’t know when, where, why, or what!” research, they will usually not conclude this threshold level of research while a listing signed in the near term is still active, much less “Okay, we have settled on Desert Mountain; now, do we want to buy or build?”, and “We want to buy, so which house fits our needs the best?”
    • Serious near-term buyers certainly could walk into a given brokerage office, but they are likely only doing so to find an agent who can take them to see a brief list of homes that their own online research has suggested might fit their needs. It would be unwise for the agent on floor duty at that brokerage office to try to talk a prospect out of going to see one or more homes on that list in favor of other homes listed by that agent, or to immediately “push” one or more of his or her own listings onto someone he or she just met. Perhaps, after the prospect’s list is exhausted and the prospect realizes he or she may need local help, then that on-site agent might be able to propose alternatives, but not before. Even then it would be a long shot that one of his or her own listings would be a fit for such a client.

The market is very efficient. Eventually, buyers will see the homes they should see, one way or the other, especially in times of thin inventory as is currently the case in Desert Mountain.

Desert Mountain Listing Agent

Your Bottom Line is (or should be) the One that Matters!

Key Agent Performance Metrics That Will Save You Time and Money

As stated above, there are many reasons a Desert Mountain seller might lean towards one agent or agent team or another.  We think the best reason is proof that the agent or agent team consistently has sold their listings over a significant span of time for their clients’ advantage.  That may mean different things to different sellers, but here are five metrics that should resonate with sellers who want favorable results and realize not all agents are the same:

  • Average Least % Discount from Original List Price
  • Fewest Average Days on Market
  • Largest Number/% sold for Original List Price or Higher
  • Smallest Number/% sold at 10% Discount or more
  • Smallest Number/% sold at 10% Discount or more to a client represented by the Listing Agent (“double-dipping”)

These values are impossible for consumers to obtain on their own, and somewhat complicated and time consuming for a brokerage to generate, never mind their willingness to do so and share with a potential listing client if it casts their operation and their agents or agent teams in an unfavorable light compared to their competition.

The good news for you is our System measures these values for every agent who has sold a listing in Desert Mountain for the last twenty years or more.  We can produce them in seconds, and would be happy to share them with you since The Davis Driver Group ranked # 1 in the first four metrics, and # 2 in the fifth, over the six years between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2024, compared to the other four agent or agent teams who sold at least 42 used, resale homes (we sold 49 homes, which put us 4th in volume.  The two agents or agent teams with the most sales (152 and 65) ranked 4th or 5th out of five in every metric).  All four of these other agents or agent teams work for the same brokerage.  They, and their brokerage, made a lot of money, but at great expense to their clients.   (To see a Summary Table of these metrics, click here.)

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Thanks for reading the highlights from the Guide.  If you would like to read the entire document, click here.  If the highlights were enough to cause you to want to interview us, call, text, or send an email to either Jeff or Davis.  Our contact information is immediately below.  Thank you very much!