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In a soft housing market, home sellers need help. And real estate professionals are there to provide it. While the Internet and other tools are indeed useful for those looking to buy a home, home sellers still rely on the expertise and knowledge of their real estate agents.

For nearly half of all home buyers, what they want most from their real estate professional is help finding the right home to purchase. This is also true for first-time buyers. But real estate agents provide a number of other services as well. For 77 percent of first-time buyers, their agent helped them understand the home buying process. Half of first-time buyers report that their agent pointed out unnoticed features or faults in properties they were considering purchasing. Well over a third of them indicated that using a real estate agent shortened their home search.

So where do first-time buyers turn to find a real estate professional? As is the case with repeat buyers, the majority of first-time purchasers – 54 percent – rely on referrals from a friend, neighbor or relative to find an agent. In fact, first-time buyers are more reliant on referrals than are repeat buyers. An agent’s honesty and integrity is the most important quality in a first-time purchaser choice of real estate professional.