Questions to ask a real estate agent in San Diego

How do I check that a San Diego real estate agent is actually licensed?

Ask any San Diego agent for their DRE number and look it up. The California Department of Real Estate runs a free public lookup that takes a name or a license number and returns the license status, the expiration date, the broker the licensee hangs their license with, and any disciplinary action on record.

An agent who cannot produce the number on request, or whose record does not match what they told you, has answered the question. California requires the number on marketing material, so it should not be a request at all — it should already be on the page you found them on. Every licensee on this site carries theirs on their own page and in the markup a search engine reads.

The lookup is linked at the foot of this page. It costs nothing and takes about thirty seconds, and it is the only question on this list with a definitive public answer.

Which areas does this agent actually work?

Ask which San Diego communities they work, then ask what they have published about them. An agent who covers everywhere covers nowhere in particular, and the gap between a service-area list and genuine local knowledge is the gap that costs a buyer money.

The checkable version of the question: what does a community’s tax bill carry, which district assigns its schools, and who governs it. Those have answers, and an agent who works an area knows them or knows where to look them up in front of you.

On this team the assignment is published rather than claimed: the coverage map names one licensee per community, and each of the 50 neighborhood guides carries the name of the person who wrote it. That is a claim you can hold someone to.

Do I have to sign an agreement with a buyer's agent before seeing houses?

Since 17 August 2024, an MLS participant working with a buyer must obtain a written agreement before touring a home. A San Diego buyer will be asked to sign something before the first showing, and what it says about compensation is the part to read rather than initial.

Two things changed at once under the National Association of REALTORS® settlement. Offers of compensation to a buyer’s broker came off the MLS entirely, and a buyer’s agent may not receive compensation from any source exceeding the amount or rate agreed in that written buyer agreement. So the number is set with you, in advance, in writing.

The questions that follow from that: how much, for how long, over what geography, and what happens if the seller offers less than the agreed figure or nothing at all. Compensation is negotiable and always has been — there is no standard rate, and any agent who quotes one as customary is describing something that does not exist.

The seller side of the same change, and what it did to the listing itself, is on what the MLS no longer shows.

What will this San Diego house actually cost me every month?

Ask for the whole carrying cost of a specific address, not the mortgage payment. In much of San Diego County the property tax line is a base rate plus voter-approved bonds plus fixed charge special assessments, and the last of those is set parcel by parcel rather than by neighborhood.

An agent who answers this from the list price has not answered it. The figure that decides affordability is the one on the tax bill, which names every district that applies to that parcel, plus association dues where the housing is a common-interest development, plus insurance — which in the fire and coastal parts of this county is not a rounding error.

How the tax half of that is built, and the supplemental bill that arrives six to twelve months after closing, is on San Diego property tax explained. The special-tax half, community by community, is on the Mello-Roos pages.

Which schools does this address actually feed?

Ask about the address, never the city. San Diego County school district boundaries and municipal boundaries were drawn separately and never had to agree, so a mailing address is not evidence of a district and a ZIP code is not evidence of a campus.

The county is full of examples. Scripps Ranch and 4S Ranch both carry City of San Diego addresses and sit in different districts. Cardiff-by-the-Sea has its own elementary district inside the City of Encinitas. Lake San Marcos has a San Marcos address and is not in the City of San Marcos at all.

A good answer names the district and then tells you to confirm it with the district office, because attendance areas are redrawn. The method is on the schools page.

What is this agent's actual track record, and where can I check it?

Ask for the number of closed sales and where it can be verified independently. A San Diego agent’s own website is not a source for its own claim, and the useful follow-up is narrower: how many in the community I am buying in.

Team-wide numbers hide a lot. An agent with hundreds of sales county-wide may have none on your street, which is fine if they say so and a problem if they do not. This site states the per-community count on each guide and says plainly where the record is thin, because a thin record disclosed is worth more than a deep one implied.

Ask too whether you will be working with the person you are talking to, or handed to someone else after the agreement is signed. Both arrangements are legitimate; only one of them is what most buyers assume they are getting.

What would make you tell me not to buy this house?

Ask the question that has no good scripted answer. An agent who has never talked a San Diego buyer out of a house is either very new or not listening, and the specifics of the answer tell you what they actually check.

Useful answers sound like conditions rather than feelings: an unpermitted addition that will surface at resale, a fire hazard severity zone that changes what an insurer will write, a special tax whose payoff and end date nobody has established, a bluff or landslide setback that governs what can ever be built. Each of those is a real reason to walk, and each is checkable before an offer.

An answer that is really a reassurance — that everything is fine, that this market always recovers — is the answer to a different question.