Before you hire an agent, look at the answers to your most important questions.
Will a property I sell myself be at a competitive disadvantage compared to properties sold by real estate professionals?
No-and often, you’ll have an advantage. First of all, today’s buyers find their homes on the internet on their own time. If they like your home, they’re going to contact you no matter what-and the odds are good that they can be happier dealing with you than with albany resort bahamas an agent. It is no secret that and endless choice of homes are not selling and run out before the agent ever gets the home sold. Join in a Google search and you’ll see the amount of training material the real residence industry offers to explain their agents how to persuade sellers to replenish their listings for a year. There is no magic in what an agent does.
To give you an example of the advantages of selling your home yourself, think about signs. When you list with an agent, they get to place a mini billboard in your yard that includes hardly any advertising for your home and plenty of advertising for their company. The whole industry should have moved on to customized signs a long time ago-but they haven’t. You will find a significant advantage by tailoring your on-the-ground marketing plan to your home, together with your FOR SALE sign.
Do homes sell for more when listed with an agent?
That’s what the National Association of Agents funded by real estate professionals says, but there’s no independent data to support their statistics. If an agent informs you they can get you more money for your home, ask them to bring you a buyer; if they can’t, they need to leave you alone to sell your house. A few listings handled by agents run out, unsold.
An agent’s opinion is not going to get your home sold. It’s simple for visitors to make guesses and conjectures, but to win in today’s market, you have to deal with hard facts.
How much time and effort is this really going to take?
It takes about as much time to sell your house as it takes to plan a long vacation. The marketing side requires the most time up front, but when you have gathered your facts, it shouldn’t take you many hours to get your marketing plan started. You’d have to gather that same information for an agent, if you used one. And the process has been streamlined for you on sites like simpleandsold. com.
If you’re cynical, take the amount you’d pay in commission to an agent and split it by the number of hours it takes to plan a secondary. The result should help you see that time you put into selling your house will be time well spent.
An agent said it would be dangerous to sell my own home, since I’d be letting unknown people in my house all the time. Can i be concerned?
Unfortunately, you’re going to have to let unknown people in your home to sell it. But you have to do this with or without an agent, and this is practically a moot point. Remember that you can open your home any way you want: you can remove information for safety purposes; you can schedule your viewing appointments so that you will won’t be alone in the house; and you have the directly to stop the process should anyone ever become uncomfortable with a fighter’s presence. This is something even real estate professionals face.
Do I must use a Multiple listing service (MLS) to get the exposure I need for my home?
First, you should determine what YOUR LOCAL MLS is. It was not designed as a marketing venue for homes; rather, it’s a simple means for brokers to negotiate compensation with each other, so that Real estate agent A can tell Real estate agent B, “Sell my listing and I will pay you X. inches Period.
My local YOUR LOCAL MLS, which was named #1 in the country, is still way behind the changing times. It allows me to include approximately eight tiny (two-by-two-inch) pictures and about three sentences of description. I’m not even allowed to backlink to anything. How is that a viable marketing tool?
Look at Zillow, Trulia, and Yahoo! Real estate and you’ll observe much the YOUR LOCAL MLS has been eclipsed. It’s become just an outdated method for real estate professionals to protect their lawn. Some systems are not even Apple compatible.
With Simple and Sold, you can put your home up for viewing on hundreds of websites, and you can soon add up to thirty-six large, high-definition photos in your listing. You can have grammatical construction of description about your home. You can attach listing brochures and other files, which interested buyers can view online or download. You can vocals or a voice-over about your property’s features; you can provide links to area schools and anything else you want.
What is the NAR?
NAR stands for the National Association of Agents, the lobbying group listed at #4 on opensecrets. org’s list of political heavy hitters. It’s the organization about which Joe Nocera of the New york Times once wrote: “You have to wonder sometimes what they’re smoking over there at the National Association of Agents. inches
According to Bloodhound Realty Blog, The NAR has stayed under the radar while doing a gigantic amount of damage to the economy, the housing field, and most notable, the consumer. Bloodhound Realty Blog states (this blog does a great job of getting the the NAR), “It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing increase, the sub-prime lending tragedy, the wanton bundling of deceitful loans, the ongoing subsidization of the extra mortgage market, etc. The villain behind all the villains in the break of the American economy is the National Association of Agents. inches
“The real estate licensing laws, written in their original form by the NAR, exist to limit competition in real estate broker, eliminating alternative sources of real estate broker to synthetically sustain higher commissions for NAR brokers”
John Crudele of the New york Post recently stated: “The real estate industry lives by the saying: “location, location, location. inches Next week it’ll be known for “deception, lies, lies. inches People want the truth and the NAR is tricking the public all to save the almost holy real estate commission. Crudele also reports: “The National Association of Agents publicly stated that it has been coverage bad figures on sales… Jeez! Tell the truth!… The Agents aren’t doing the country any favours by sugar-coating their numbers… and the people at NAR aren’t worried by the practice. inches
Don’t most people trust real estate professionals to get them the best deal?
Unfortunately, people don’t trust them. In the most recent Gallup poll, they ranked below brokers but higher than congressmen in terms of honesty.
In all fairness, it’s not the behavior of real estate professionals that has been underhanded; it’s the way their organization, the NAR, spent some time working to block their competition. As i notice, and as most Americans notice, competition is for the competent. You possess your home, so you need to have the decision to sell it any way you choose.
The NAR got a public slap on the hand in ’08 from the Justice Department when the organization tried to stop real estate professionals without a physical office from participating in YOUR LOCAL MLS. The Justice Department had to file suit the NAR to allow mobile, internet-based brokers-the kind who operate from laptops and Starbucks instead of fancy offices-to practice their trade.
I think the NAR should be humiliated of making taxpayers pay for this lawsuit, which (in the text of the DOJ itself) “requires NAR to allow Internet-based residential real estate brokers to completely overcome traditional brokers. inches The Department said the settlement would enhance competition in the real estate broker industry, giving consumers more choice, better service, and lower commission rates. NAR is now bound by a ten-year settlement to ensure that it continues to abide by certain requirements of the agreement.