If you’ve decided to sell your home, you have an important decision to make – whether to hire a realtor, or to list your home as fsbo (for sale by owner). The apparent benefit of selling yourself, is that you get to keep more money to yourself, not having to pay the commission, or only to pay half the commission to the agent who brings the buyer. Same logic goes with representing yourself in a legal case, self-diagnosing and self-medicating – sometimes it works great, other times you wish you haven’t done that – the cost of not knowing what you need to know can be high in all of these examples, and real estate transactions are no exception.

No, selling a home is not rocket science, but there are nevertheless a lot of considerations involved. Here are some, just as food for thought.

Pricing the property

First thing’s first – pricing your property. Unrepresented sellers tend to perform a biased research to determine the value of their property. Professional agents know how buyers look at the value of the property, and have a sober look at comparative properties on the market – after all, when we have buyers who want us to find them a home, we know how we sort through available properties to make best suggestions to our buyers. Hence, we know how to use that knowledge to benefit the seller, by making an effective listing with the sufficient amount of information, and priced to sell.

Some sellers think it’s better to overprice the property in the beginning, as you can always drop it down later. That is simply not true. Serious buyers always make it a point to look into the history of the sale price, and inquire into the length of time the property sat on the market. Substantial price drops as well as time on the market always prompts buyers to make lowball offers! Expectations for sales strategies don’t always line up with statistical data, so choosing the right strategy is essential, if you are serious about selling your property.

 Showings

When you just list your home for sale on your own, you may be very excited about requests to see the property by prospective buyers. The first few times you welcome them with all their million and one question, but here ‘s the thing – after a dozen showings that haven’t brought any offers subsequently, sellers tend to lose excitement and instead start developing irritation and hostility towards future potential buyers. Have you even seen a used car salesman who gave you a “I know you’re just wasting my time” look? I bet you have, and I bet you wouldn’t want to buy from him, but instead you’d buy from the guy who walks up to you in a professional manner, and addresses all your questions and concerns in an utmost patient and courteous manner.  I can’t stress this point enough - buyers approach buying a home not only on logical level, but also on an intuitive one – if they feel they are not welcome, or that necessary information is not being made available to them, they may just walk away because they don’t want to deal with a person who is showing the property! A professional agent’s essential skill is that he or she approaches every new potential buyer with a clean slate – it doesn’t matter if 10 people this week were not serious buyers – this one may just be!

So, to sum up this point, not only is it that a fsbo seller must make himself/herself available to show the property again and again, but also buyers expect the “owner” to have a lot more information than an agent would, making showing appointments unnecessarily longer. On the other hand, the agent gathers all necessary information from you once, and practice shows that when people are not really interested in the property, they are less likely to wait to find out answers “out of curiosity” like they would have, if they were speaking to the owner.

The bottom line

That’s what it’s all about – increasing your bottom line. Perhaps you negotiate for living, but most people don’t, and even those who do would tell you –  they wouldn’t negotiate on their own behalf if personal interest is at stake. People engaged in negotiations as part of their business (lawyers, business owners, etc) recognize how important it is to have a knowledgeable and sharp middleman. That’s one of the reasons many lawsuits come to a settlement through mediation. Real estate transactions are no different – the buyer wants to pay as little as possible, the seller wants to get as much as possible for his/her property. In a face to face conversation between a buyer and a seller, a deal is easy to be lost, many times simply because of personal emotions. Help from an experienced agent is invaluable when it comes to negotiating with buyers, “testing the waters” and addressing their concerns in a neutral yet effective way. We know what buyers are concerned with, and may be able to come to terms in structuring the deal in a mutually beneficial way, allowing the seller to get a good value for his/her home, and, at the same time, being accommodating to the buyer, as there are occasions when the seller can get his bottom line pay in several different ways of structuring the deal, but only one of those ways will allow for the buyer to get approved for financing. That alone can make a difference in whether the "willing" buyer can be converted into an "able" buyer!

We’re here to help

What defines doing something professionally, is having an in depth understanding of one’s trade. When you don’t engage a professional, you may find out along the way that you were lacking essential piece of information that you didn’t even realize you needed, and when you don’t know what to look out for, mistakes can be costly. Think of it as a blindspot. 

Call us for a free in-house consultation today – we don’t sell our services (we won’t show up with the contract for you to sign), we sell homes. We are professional, punctual, and we know what we are doing. 

Call to speak with Arthur or Iryna today

305 699-2450