If you’ve been looking to put your home up on the market, chances are you’ve seriously considered pulling off the sale entirely on your own. You’ve probably seen other people do the same thing with success, so why can’t you? Furthermore, you probably aren’t keen on giving up around 6% of your sale price for your real estate agent’s commission.
While selling your home on your own is perfectly doable with planning and research, there are still a number of risks you should know about when taking this option.
1. Selling for the Relatively Wrong Value
One of the things that a real estate agent is responsible for is conducting research on the market value of your home. They do this by assessing your property and comparing it with the prices of other similar homes in the same general area. Frankly, the average private individual doesn’t have the skills nor the experience to do what a real estate agent can do, at least in this respect.
In fact, there have been too many instances of buyers either severely undervaluing or overvaluing their selling price because of this, and that’s a problem. Undervaluing your property means you’ll sell for a lot less than you could have. Overvaluing your property will result in it staying on sale for too long or never selling at all.
2. Failure to Properly Screen Walk-ins
With so many things happening all at once when handling the sale of your home on your own, it can be easy to loosen the reins when it comes to screening the people who express interest in buying their home. Proper and informed screening could save you from spending too much time on someone who’s just curious about your property or, if you do screen, from unwittingly turning away someone with serious potential for being a buyer.
Hiring a real estate agent opens you up to a full range of home-selling services that you’ll find may be essential to your sale. Particularly, agents screen the people who express interest in checking out your property. But because of their extensive experience in the field, they know best precisely the type of people to look out for when screening.
3. Not Doing a Good Enough Job of Marketing Your Home
Unless you have some sort of marketing background of your own, you may want to leave promoting your listing to a professional. In most cases of people attempting to do their own marketing, they either spend too much, too little, or just can’t put together the right marketing mix. On the other hand, while real estate agents may not have a full background in marketing, they undeniably know the ropes to selling a property and the right channels to reaching that goal. Another thing: agents work under brokers who are the only ones who can put your listing up on the crucial Multiple Listing Service (MLS), further stressing their necessity.
Real estate agents do way more than most notice or give them credit for. All these services come together to give you the best home-selling experience. Having a quicker and safer sale, more efficient use of resources, and time to spend on things other than the sale make the 6% commission well worth it.
But if you don’t have the time or resources to work with an agent, you can still sell your home to an investor like Blue Hen Homebuyers. As a home investor, we buy all kinds of homes, regardless of their age or condition. Call our offices today at 910-802-2222 to learn more about how we can help you.
Photo by Fons Reijsbergen from FreeImages