Before you hire a realtor, investigate answers to your most important questions.
Will a property I sell myself be at a competitive disadvantage compared to properties sold by realtors?
No-and in many ways, 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 will be happier dealing with you albany bahamas real estate than with an agent. It is no secret that a huge number of homes are not selling and reach its expiration date before the agent ever gets the home sold. Start a Google search and you’ll see the amount of training material the real real estate industry offers to instruct their agents how to persuade sellers to restore their listings for a year. There is no magic in what a realtor 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 handful of advertising for your home and a huge amount of advertising for their company. The whole industry should have moved on to customized signs a long time ago-but they haven’t. You’ll have significant advantage by tailoring your on-the-ground marketing plan to your home, including your FOR SALE sign.
Do homes sell for more when listed with a realtor?
That’s what the National Association of Realtors funded by realtors says, but there’s no independent data to support their statistics. If a realtor lets you know 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. Quite a few listings handled by agents reach its expiration date, unsold.
An agent’s opinion is not going to get your home sold. It’s straightforward for individuals 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 once you’ve gathered your facts, it shouldn’t take you more than a few 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 hesitant, take the amount you’d pay in commission to a realtor and break down it by the number of hours it takes to plan a vacation. The result should help you see that time you put into selling your house will be time well spent.
A realtor laughed and said it would be dangerous to sell my own home, since I’d be letting guests in my house all the time. Must i worry?
Unfortunately, you’re going to have to let guests in your home to sell it. But you will have to do this with or without a realtor, which means this is nearly a moot point. Remember that you can open your home any way you want: you can take down information for safety purposes; you can schedule your viewing appointments so you won’t be alone in the house; and you have the right to stop the process if you happen to become uncomfortable with a personal presence. This is something even realtors face.
Do I need to use a Multiple listing service (MLS) to get the exposure I need for my home?
First, you should know very well what LOCAL MLS is. It was not designed as a marketing venue for homes; rather, it’s a simple path 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. inch Period.
My local LOCAL MLS, which was named #1 in the country, is still way behind the occasions. It allows me to publish approximately eight tiny (two-by-two-inch) pictures and about three sentences of description. I’m not even allowed to hyperlink to anything. How is that a viable marketing tool?
Look at Zillow, Trulia, and Yahoo! Real estate and you’ll observe how much the LOCAL MLS has been eclipsed. It’s become just an outdated method for realtors to protect their turf. Some systems are not even Mac pc compatible.
With Simple and Sold, you can put your home up for viewing on hundreds of websites, and you can add up to thirty-six large, high-definition photos in your listing. You can have sentences of description about your home. You can attach listing brochures and other files, which interested buyers can view online or download. You can include music 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 Realtors, 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 Realtors. inch
According to Bloodhound Realty Blog, The NAR has stayed under the radar while doing a massive amount of damage to the economy, the housing sector, and most notably, the consumer. Bloodhound Realty Blog states (this blog does a great job of revealing the NAR), “It was the NAR that lobbied for each law and rule change that resulted in the housing thrive, the sub-prime lending accident, the wanton bundling of deceptive loans, the ongoing subsidization of the supplementary mortgage market, etc. The villain behind all the villains in the fold of the American economy is the National Association of Realtors. inch
“The real estate licensing laws, written in their original form by the NAR, exist to limit competition in real estate brokerage house, eliminating alternative sources of real estate brokerage house to unnaturally sustain higher commissions for NAR brokers”
John Crudele of the New york Post recently stated: “The real estate industry lives by the slogan: “location, location, location. inch Next week it’ll be known for “deception, deceptiveness, deceptiveness. inch People want the truth and the NAR is misleading the public all to save the holy real estate commission. Crudele also reports: “The National Association of Realtors said that it has been credit reporting bad figures on sales… Jeez! Tell the truth!… The Realtors aren’t doing the country any party favors by sugar-coating their gambling… and the people at NAR are not troubled by the practice. inch
Don’t most people trust realtors to get them the best deal?
Unfortunately, people don’t trust them. In the most recent Gallup poll, they ranked less than lenders but higher than congressmen in terms of life values.
In all fairness, it’s not the behavior of realtors that has been underhand; it’s the way their organization, the NAR, worked as kitchen staff to block their competition. As i find it, and as most Americans find it, competition is for the competent. You keep your home, so you will have the option to sell it any way you choose.
The NAR got a public slap on the arm in 08 from the Justice Department when the organization tried to stop realtors without a physical office from participating in LOCAL MLS. The Justice Department had to prosecute 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 uncomfortable of making taxpayers pay for this lawsuit, which (in the language of the DOJ itself) “requires NAR to allow Internet-based residential real estate brokers to contest with traditional brokers. inch The Department said the settlement would enhance competition in the real estate brokerage house 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 the prerequisites of the agreement.