Bryan Sereny is a founding member of the Bill and Bryan Team, and director of luxury sales for Douglas Elliman working in Miami.
Every week, we ask a real estate professional for their Short List, a collection of tips and recommendations on an essential topic in real estate. This week, we talked with Bryan Sereny of the Bill and Bryan Team, who shared his top strategies for finding clients the perfect home.
4. Ask questions – A mistake that many agents tend to make is not asking enough questions. You really need to spend time getting to know and understand your clients – their wants and needs. A lot of people moving from out of town have a really romantic view of Miami and the beaches. They’ll say they want to be on the ocean and touch the sand, but if you ask those people whether they’d actually go to the beach or not, you’d be surprised to find out that many of them aren’t beach people. They just want the nice view. Well, if they only want a nice view, save yourself a trip to the ocean and find them a property near the bay, where prices are much lower but the views are still just as gorgeous.
3. Leverage the information – Once you’ve discovered what a client is truly looking for in a property, use the information to seek out qualifying properties. It’s not enough to simply know what your client is looking for, you need to put in the legwork using that information, which means thoroughly reviewing listings.
2. Learn Your Listings – Since you’re going to be researching listings anyway, do it before you have to. When agents know the listings in their neighborhoods inside and out, narrowing down options for clients will be streamlined. You’ll end up saving a lot of time in the long run.
1. Prioritize Wants and Needs – It’s important to know what’s a luxury and what’s a “deal breaker.” Your first priority will obviously be price. Even if it’s a wide range, like $500,000 to $1 million, it’s still important to know and will guide the rest of your search. Once you nail down a price range, then you go through bedrooms and bathrooms and see if they have any preferences there. Look at the kitchen; whether they want a multilevel house; do they need a building that accepts pets? There’s a laundry list of questions to ask, and each are important.
An exceptional professional with encyclopedic knowledge of Miami’s most prestigious waterfront properties, Bryan Sereny is one of Miami’s most reputable and respected brokers. Realizing early on that long-term success in real estate could only be achieved by maintaining a superior understanding of the market, followed by providing clients with honest astute counsel, Bryan has taken an analytical and evidence based approach to his practice. Because of this unique service, he has earned a substantial referral base with numerous clients (mainly financial services executives) purchasing property based heavily on their trust in his interpretation of the market. Besides offering clients a great return on their investments, he provides clients “insider” access to properties beyond the MLS and has an uncanny ability to close complicated sales where others have fell short. His professionalism is unmatched in his field as he maintains the strictest of broker – client privilege.