The only way I know is is to ask. However, keep in mind that listing agents very seldom sell their own listings, the odds are very much against them.

Yes, that's true that the listing agent isn't always the seller. I was just wondering how one goes about finding a good realtor. We don't have a lot of time before we have to move to a newly built house. It's a lousy time to be trying to sell, but if we can get a realtor with a good track record, it may help.

If you know people in your area who have sold talk to them about who they recommend or don't recommend. The last 2 times we sold our house we didn't know anyone to ask so did it differently. We looked around our area for who were the individual dominant agents listing and selling homes in the area. We talked to them to see if we were in sync with them and we felt comfortable with them and whether they were straightforward. I wasn't looking for the pie in the sky guys. In one case, we actually did sell to a buyer of our selling agent. In fact, it was the first day of our listing so that was very easy and went well.

This time in our current listing we used an agent we had used before to buy and to sell some vacant land. We didn't follow the procedure above. In retrospect, this wasn't the right choice. Our listing is about to expire and I went through all the sales this year in the area and found the couple of agents who had more sales than anyone else. Those are the ones we plan to interview.