5 Reasons You Don’t Need Your Money Sucking Real Estate Agent
If you are willing to put some effort you could sell your home yourself. In most cases, you could get your own real estate license in just 2 weeks or sooner. You can do it yourself.
For homeowners, there are thousands of reasons to bypass real estate agents and sell your property yourself. “If you cut out all agents … you would essentially cut out on average about 6% of commission,” says Tom Tundy, vice president of operations at ForSaleByOwner.com, a Web-based company that markets homes for independent sellers says Local Records Office. “On a $300,000 home, that’s about $18,000 of savings.” But despite this huge potential savings, many home sellers — especially in today’s tough housing market — think that a real-estate agent’s expertise is essential.
Tundy begs to differ and offers five reasons home sellers don’t need agents:
1. Simple as a click of a mouse:
With the rise of online real-estate search tools, homeowners are no longer beholden to real-estate agents for the resources and information they need to sell a property. “The Internet has essentially changed the face of real estate,” Tundy says. “It’s essentially leveled the playing field across the market.”
2. Promote yourself:
With the emergence of online platforms designed specifically to market the homes of sellers not affiliated with agents — such as ForSaleByOwner.com — homeowners no longer need agents to get their property in front of prospective buyers, Tundy says. Plus, “agents leverage the Multiple Listing Service as their primary ‘marketing tool,’ ” Tundy says. But “anybody can access that if they want to pay for it.” (Homeowners can put their homes on the MLS for a couple of hundred dollars, according to ForSaleByOwner.com.)
3. Agents are not appraisers:
Appraisers — not agents — are the key to getting an accurate home valuation, Tundy says. “An agent is going to give you their perspective based on what they are seeing, [but] they have no true professional training in that aspect,” Tundy says. Home sellers working without an agent can obtain the services of an appraiser on their own for roughly $200 to $300, he says. “Even if you used an agent, you would still bring in an appraiser,” Tundy says.
4. Agents are not the law:
5. Anyone can do what an agent does:
The main service that real-estate agents provide is a convenience, Tundy says. All of the services they offer — finding a real-estate attorney, coordinating home viewings and so on — can be done by any homeowner willing to put in the effort. “Remember that a real estate agent license takes under two weeks to get,” Tundy says. “So after those two weeks, that person can be in charge of the selling or buying of a person’s home, which is one of the largest financial assets in a person’s life.”
