Client Review on Urban Durham Realty, a full-service real estate co

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This review is for Susan Herst. My wife and I hired Susan to help us purchase a home last year and were quite dissatisfied with the job she did for us. I don't want to go into great detail about every issue we had with Susan. These were the main concerns:1. Susan was not terribly responsive to our questions and/or concerns. On two occasions, I asked Susan the same question three different times over a two-week period before receiving a response. That seems like an unreasonable amount of time to wait for a question to be answered. 2. Susan was not all that helpful. Being new to the area, we asked Susan shortly after meeting her if she could drive us through some of the neighborhoods in our desired area of Durham and give us some information about them. Her reply was to read about the places online and drive to them ourselves. Ok, that's an option-- yes. But I have read tons of reviews of many agents and a lot of them do, in fact, drive their clients around to a handful of neighborhoods if the clients are completely unfamiliar with the area, as we were. Susan seemed uninterested in doing that. We also asked her to tell us a bit about the neighborhood we had just viewed a house in, and she told us to come back after dark and get a feel for it ourselves. She had no information about the area to share with us.3. The biggest disappointment with Susan is that she did not appear to have our backs during a particular situation during the buying process. To be brief, my wife and I discovered what looked like a material misrepresentation by the sellers. When I brought it to Susan's attention, she said that if the house was, in fact, misrepresented in the way that it appeared, it would be a "very big deal" and that we would have a great deal of leverage to negotiate a price reduction. Great, sounds good. Fast forward to a few days later when we confirmed that yes, the house had been misrepresented by the sellers, and Susan's tone changed. Suddenly, according to Susan, we should not expect a price reduction and don't have a lot of leverage to ask for one. Seriously?! We ended up resolving the misrepresentation with the sellers without needing a price reduction, which was good because I doubt Susan would have gotten one for us after she turned pessimistic about the issue. That was really disappointing.There were a few other minor annoyances, but they are not worth mentioning here.Overall, Susan was not all that helpful to us, seemed disorganized at times when we needed her to know what was going on, and was generally disappointing to work with. On the positive side, Susan seems like a nice person. Then again, the vast majority of people are, right? And most would want a lot more than "nice" from their agent.I have talked to enough friends and family members who have bought a house in the past couple years to know an exceptional agent from a mediocre one. Susan, regrettably, was just mediocre in our experience with her.We will look for someone exceptional next time around. I recommend you do the same.