How savvy are you about real estate? Take our quiz.

You hire a real estate agent to help you buy or sell your home, your largest financial asset, but how do you know if he’s doing his job well? Even more worrisome, how do you know his financial incentives are aligned with your interests? As we show in our new book Inside the Sell, the best way to navigate the potential minefield of residential real estate is to find a great agent, but consumers are often asking the wrong questions. Take our quiz to test your real estate savvy:

11. Your listing agent urges you to respond to an offer immediately. That’s:

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters/File
A US flag decorates a for-sale sign at a home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington in this August file photo. A great real estate agent can make all the difference in buying or selling a home.

A great negotiating tactic

A poor negotiating tactic

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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