Interviewing two agents and they are opposite kinds of useful

Take the volume agent and do the underwriting yourself, at least for the first two.

My reasoning is about where deals die. I'm eight deals in now and I have never once lost a property because nobody explained cap rates to me. I've lost three because an addendum went out late, or because the seller's agent needed a call back on a Saturday and mine was at a soccer game. Contract mechanics are a volume skill. You get them from writing a hundred offers, not from owning nine doors.

Where it breaks down is later. Around deal four or five I hit a wall where MLS stopped producing anything that worked, and the agent who was great at paperwork had no idea how to find me a seller who wasn't listed. That's the ceiling. At that point the guy with eleven years of relationships is the one worth chasing, and by then you can also tell whether his Sunday-only thing is a boundary or just disinterest.

One thing I'd push on with the fast one. Ask her what she does when your offer is the low one. Investors are almost always the low offer. If her answer is about presenting it nicely rather than about terms, closing speed, and inspection posture, she doesn't yet know how to get an investor offer accepted.

Both of your descriptions skip the number I'd want, which is how many of the volume agent's 60 closings were non-owner-occupant buyers. Sixty retail transactions tells me she can process paper. It tells me nothing about whether she has ever sat across from a seller of a tired fourplex.

And four transactions for the investor agent, all his own account, is a flag worth naming. That isn't a practice serving investor clients. That's a licensed investor. The economics are different: his time is worth whatever his own next deal pays, which is a multiple of a 2.5% buy-side fee on a $150k house. When you compete with his own pipeline for attention, you lose. Five days on an email is that math showing up.

What I'd actually do is price the two of them. Ask each what they'd charge and how, then ask what happens on a deal you source yourself. Then you're comparing service against cost rather than personality against personality. Compensation has to be written into the buyer agreement now and the specifics vary by brokerage and by state, so get it on paper before you're emotionally attached to a house.

Dirt has no sold comps, so on land I'd take the owner every time. Volume agents price houses, not entitlement risk.

@ledger's point about competing with his own pipeline is the one that got me. I signed with an agent who owned about a dozen units, and for four months it was great, then he got a portfolio under contract of his own and I stopped existing. Not malice. There were only so many hours.

The thing I'd add for @pike is that eleven minutes is not a small feature. I lost a 3 unit last spring by nineteen hours. Listing hit at 4pm on a Thursday, my agent was on a plane, we walked it Friday afternoon and it was already accepted-with-a-backup by then. The seller had two showings and took the first clean one. Judgment doesn't help you when you never got in the door.

So my vote is the fast one, and I'd tell her plainly that you'll be sending her addresses she didn't find. Most volume agents are fine with that. They'd rather write your offer than hunt for you.

Speed, speed, speed. I run thin margins on quick turns and my whole business is being the offer that landed first with terms nobody has to think about.

But I want to argue with the framing a bit. You've set this up as if you have to sign one of them exclusively and forever. You don't. My buyer agreements now are per-property or short-dated, and I've had three agents at once with no drama because each one knows exactly which pipeline they're on. One writes my MLS offers because she's fast and cheap and never fumbles a deadline. One is an old-timer who owns a bunch of small commercial and calls me maybe four times a year, and two of those calls have turned into deals that never got listed.

What you can't do is take the slow investor guy's Sunday tour and then send his address list to the fast agent to write on. That's how you burn a relationship you can't rebuild. Keep the pipelines clean and tell both of them out loud what the arrangement is.

@keystone is right that the low offer problem is the real test. My best agent's answer to that question was about who calls the listing agent's broker when an offer goes dark for six days.

Reading this as somebody with zero closings, the part I hadn't considered is that I'd be the one supplying the numbers to the fast agent. I assumed an investor-friendly agent would tell me whether a deal worked, and everyone here is saying that's my job either way.

That changes my vote. If the analysis is mine no matter which one I pick, then I want the one who answers the phone and knows how to get a contract through, and I'll spend my nights getting better at the spreadsheet.

Though @parcel's point makes me wonder whether it's different by asset type. A duplex has comps. The weird stuff might genuinely need the owner-operator brain.