by Blanche Evans
Special to Realty/Builder Connection
Sellers, especially FSBO sellers, may be tentative about making a commitment to you. What can you tell them to reassure them that you are the right person to help them sell their home? Put the following ideas into your own words, based on these typical questions and statements by FSBO sellers.
“Homes are selling really fast around here. Why should I list my home with a Realtor?”
Eighty-three percent of sellers listed their homes with Realtors in the first half of 2003, and that’s up from 77 percent in 1999. That means that during one of the greatest housing booms ever recorded, most sellers were represented by Realtors. Maybe that is one reason why homes are selling so fast.
“Why can’t I just run my own ad to attract buyers?”
If ads sold homes, you wouldn’t need a Realtor. Ads are useful to attract attention, but most homes aren’t sold through ads.
What an ad does is invite buyers to contact you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you will attract real buyers. A Realtor is experienced at screening these people and developing a sense for whether or not they are valuable prospects. Getting people to call isn’t hard. Getting them to buy is much more difficult. It requires skill, instinct and experience to make a deal happen from a phone call to closing.
“It just doesn’t look that hard to sell a house and not for the huge commissions Realtors want.”
Most Realtors are professionals and they develop their expertise in getting homes sold. If you are thinking of whether or not you should hire a Realtor, you should think in terms of what jobs you are going to do instead of the Realtor.
What are you willing to do to get your home sold? How available are you? What marketing do you plan to do? How will you handle problems when they come up? What resources do you have?
Realtors do much more than facilitate a transaction. They share the risks of the transaction with you, from advertising costs to many liabilities associated with the transaction.
For example, do you know how to properly fill out a disclosure? Most real estate lawsuits are brought by buyers and the most frequent reason is a dispute over property condition. A Realtor knows what you should disclose and how to avoid liability.
If you want to do the job of a professional yourself, you need to be willing to take on the responsibilities, risks, and expenses of what a Realtor does, but you also have to know what those responsibilities, risks and expenses are to do the job properly.
“My neighbor got the most money for his home of anybody in the neighborhood without even trying. If he can get the same that a Realtor can get, then why should I split that with a Realtor?”
Everyone knows someone who has successfully sold his own home, but what is the measure of that success? In a rising market, there are new highs reached in price all the time.
We don’t know the terms of your neighbor’s transaction, but we can’t assume that he made the best deal or the worst deal because there are too many possibilities in between. He may have gotten the most money possible at that point in time for his home, but that doesn’t mean a Realtor would not have helped him get even more.
There are also variables among houses. Perhaps his home had more improvements or some other desirable factor than other homes that have sold in the area.
Perhaps your neighbor’s idea of success was to sell as quickly as possible. It’s possible that he could have taken less for the home for a quicker sale. Or he could have taken more for the home, but with concessions to the buyer that we don’t know about. Perhaps the seller loaned money to the buyer to buy the home, or left appliances and furniture for the buyer. You see, there are a number of explanations for why he got a high price.
If a price is unusually high, then the comparables won’t support it. Moreover, neither will buyers. And your home may sit on the market without selling and you’ll never know why.
We don’t know the motivations of other sellers, but when you deal with a Realtor, there is always a paper trail. We can go back and know the history of the home, what it listed for, what it sold for and other circumstances of the transaction. Realtors network with other Realtors and find out information about homes that wouldn’t be public knowledge, plus there are resources like tax data that can supply even more information.
— Blanche Evans is the publisher of Agent News and the associate editor of Realty Times. She can be reached at [email protected].
add this if there’s room
“I just don’t want to overpay in commissions.”
Even if you sell your home yourself, a commission could still be paid out of the transaction proceeds — to the buyer’s agent. Seventy-five percent of buyers are represented by Realtors, and if the buyers are buying a home from the owner, they are going to expect the amount they pay for the home to be reduced because you aren’t paying a Realtor for yourself.
So if you don’t hire a Realtor, all you’ve done is allow a professional negotiator who is working for the other side to get paid out of the transaction proceeds, and you have reduced your price, and received no help on your side to boot.
So you tell me — how did you come out ahead?