Real estate investors represent a special group of clients for real estate agents. Following are five things that investors tend to look for in an agent:

1) Understand the numbers:  If you're pitching an investment, or helping the investor to understand one that he's found himself, you should be able to answer the questions:  Should the investor expect this to be a positive cashflow investment?  How much will the investor need to charge for rent to make the investment work?  What sort of property appreciation will the investor need in order for this to yield a decent rate of return? 

An investor who can't answer these questions is driving blind.  You can help. 

2) Understand the risks of investing:  Some clients will need some help here.  Generally speaking, investors take two kinds of risks:  speculative risks and operational risks.

• Speculative risk is high when an investment relies primarily on future property appreciation in order to be profitable. 
• Operational risks deal with all of the issues involved in maintaining a cashflow-positive property - vacancies, tenants, repairs, etc. 

You’ll get clients who think they are investors, but actually they're actually acting like speculators.  They might not know the difference - but you should. 

3) Be the investor's eyes and ears:  A real estate agent is valuable to an investor because the agent has ways of finding things out.  The agent is plugged into the community and is constantly talking to other brokers and agents.  Agents follow real estate this full time, whereas the investor generally doesn’t (the vast majority of real estate investors are part-timers). 

4) Screen opportunities:  Know what your investor is looking for.  Bring her opportunities where the numbers work out.  Shelve the rest.

5) Know the neighborhoods. Which areas are generating a lot of interest?  Which ones aren't?  Where are a lot of for-sale signs popping up?  You and your investor will come up with a strategy to decode this information; sometimes a preponderance of for-sale signs means opportunity, other times they signal trouble.
 
The playing field is shifting out there; agents who evolve will stay ahead of the curve.