What real use are real estate agents if we can sell our home ourselves?
In: Economics
How do you market it? Can you access sites like Rightmove, Zoopla etc? Do you have the time to produce a brochure and show people around everyday? Negotiate the price without it being awkward? If you can answer yes, then you don’t need an estate agent
It’s a lot of work.
That’s the skinny. You gotta advertise it. You gotta do paperwork. Make sure it’s to code.
Hit deadlines. It goes on and on.
If you are willing to do the work yourself, more power to ya
>What real use are real estate agents if we can sell our home ourselves?
You can also build your own house, do your own dental work, devise your own defense strategy in court or cut your own lumber.
Would you be able to do it speedily? Proficiently? Safely?
Would you even *want* to do it?
If not, luckily there are professionals to do the job for you.
What use are chefs when we can cook for ourselves? 🙂
Selling a home is a process, which means depending on the law where you live, there might be serious consequences for missing out a step in that process. You absolutely can do it yourself but then you are liable for any mistakes in the process. And the fact you do this very infrequently means you’re more likely to make a mistake.
An estate agent should be doing the process frequently enough that they do it efficiently. And if they make a mistake they are accountable (and probably have professional liability insurance to cover the cost of the mistake).
So in the same way a professional chef probably will turn out a better meal than you or I would (and is covered by insurance if they do give you food poisoning) a professional estate agent should provide an easier process for you selling your house than you would do on your own.
In both cases, expect to pay for this.
I was thinking the same thing until i realized they have to show tons of homes & if you decide not to buy from them that’s hours that they put into the job that’s unpaid.
The biggest reason is the property chain – and this is why people love ‘cash’ buyers or first time buyers.
So A is selling to B, but B is selling to C and C is selling to D – This is a pretty simple chain of 3 sales. This all has to be negotiated, contracted and synchronised with all the relevant parties to occur on a single day.
D has to have loan approval from their bank and their deposit lodged, C has to have their currently bank’s approval to sell as well as approval for their new bond to purchase B’s property, B similarly needs bond approval both sides and A needs only his selling bond approval. So you are dealing with paying off and closing down 3 existing mortgages and opening up 3 new mortgages so that’s a total of 9 contracts (including the sale contracts) that are each worth a significant amount of money. If buyer C is delayed because a compliance certificate was held up this delays the entire chain. If buyer B pulls out the entire chain is broken.
So can you imagine where you have a chain of 10 houses and each person decides that they want to sell without using estate agents. The breadwinners are all working fulltime normal working hours and none of them have previous experience selling a house… now add in that each person is married and is buying in joint names.
They have more exposure/potential buyers, than you would on your own
They also try to sell the house actively to the potential costumers and help you with various paper works and such
Aome people do sell their houses without one though. Saves a pretty penny in many cases
What’s the value of a good salesperson? A realtor charges about 6% of the value of your home. When you use a realtor, you are betting that they will find and convince a buyer to pay at least 6% more than what you could get on your own. I don’t have that kind of market knowledge or sales skill, so I think that’s a safe bet.
Another historical factor, in the US, is that the National Association of Realtors controls the Multiple Listing Service, which for decades was the only national database of home sales. If you wanted buyers from outside your neighborhood to see your house, or see what similar homes sold for, MLS was your only option, which meant you had no choice but to use a realtor. This has changed recently thanks to sites like Zillow, but the MLS is still a very valuable tool that’s worth paying a realtor for.
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I don’t believe they are that useful. Buying home involves big money, so industries have been created off of injecting them selves into the transaction and taking single digit percentage of the cost. Which adds up when your talking $100k + deals. There’s agents on both sides, home inspector, underwriter, lender, title insurance, lawyers, and appraiser. Out of all of those people, the agent is the least qualified to do anything with the purchase or sale of a home. They will say, “how will you market your home then”. With all the home selling sites now. It’s as simple as posting it on zillow or some other site. Every time we bought a house we searched these sites and then sent them to our realtor. She rarely had anything above and beyond what these sites offered.
That being said, I believe there are some smart people that know the game and can help get you the best deal out of the transaction, but most of them probably are not worth 10k on a single deal.
But then again, if you don’t want to apply any effort then pay them to do it.
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