Argument 4 choose real estate agents (f)
4) The following appeared in a letter from a homeowner to a friend. Of the two leading real estate firms in our town—Adams Realty and Fitch Realty—Adams Realty is clearly superior. Adams has 40 real estate agents; in contrast, Fitch has 25, many of whom work only part-time. Moreover, Adams' revenue last year was twice as high as that of Fitch and included home sales that averaged $168,000, compared to Fitch's $144,000. Homes listed with Adams sell faster as well: ten years ago I listed my home with Fitch, and it took more than four months to sell; last year, when I sold another home, I listed it with Adams, and it took only one month. Thus, if you want to sell your home quickly and at a good price, you should use Adams Realty.
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
According to the author of the letter, his friend should try to sell the home through Adams because the company has more full-time agents, sold more homes at higher average prices and had a record of selling homes faster. A number of assumptions had been made in the argument and we need to examine them critically to decide if the recommendation is reasonable.
To begin with, it is assumed that a real estate company with more full-time agents would always sell a home faster and better. It is true that, with more staff members working full time, Adams will have more human resources available to sell different homes. But it is important to note that they are also more likely to sell more homes. Therefore, the human efforts devoted to each home for sale are not necessarily greater in Adams. It is also assumed that full-time agents are always better in selling homes than part-time agents. But it is possible that selling a particular home requires the networking with a particular groups of customers that only part-time agents with more time to spend with other people may have. In cases like this, using Fitch may even be more desirable.
It is further assumed that an agency that sells more homes at a higher average price can do the job better. For one thing, comparing average price of the homes sold could be a bit misleading as the company could have sold one home at a extremely high price that boost the average price while in reality most homes were sold by the company at a lower price. Meanwhile, it is also possible that the friend’s home is at a relatively low price which Adams’s agents are not very good at selling. It is more reasonable to look at the individual homes that Adams and Fitch had sold in the past to decide if the agents in either company would have the expertise or experience to sell the firend’s home.
The author claimed that Adams sold homes faster than Fitch based on just two transactions that these two companies helped him with. It is unreasonable to assume that these two transactions that were ten years apart could accurately reflect the selling speed of each company. It is safer to assume that the time required to sell homes vary greatly across different types of homes, different prices and the individual agents that were responsible for the deals. Even assuming that factors such as demand and demographics remain unchanged in ten years, the fact that Adams sold one home faster than Fitch sold another home may simply suggest that the particular agent in Adams did a better job than the particular agent in Fitch. It remains unknown if Adams would do a better or faster job than Fitch in selling the friend’s home.
Overall speaking, the author needs to present more evidence to support the assumptions that have been explicitly or implicitly made in the argument to convince his friend that Adams should be used. In its present form, the argument is not very strong.