What real use are real estate agents if we can sell our home ourselves?
In: Economics
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.
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