Selling Your Home

Selling a home seems like it would be an easy process, but it’s not and many For Sale By Owners (FSBOs) find out the hard way that selling a home involves a lot more than they anticipated. Make a mistake with your pricing and/or the way you list your home, and it could cost you thousands of dollars in loss and lots of frustration.

Here are some things to consider when selling a home:

• Solely putting a for sale sign up in the front yard does not sell a home. A home needs to be properly marketed through various marketing channels to ensure maximum market exposure in order to bring home buyers to the property.
•  A home needs to be ready for sale – issues that arise while listed for sale could be disastrous. Staging, upgrading a few features and a pre-sale inspection will go long way in facilitating a sale.
• Pricing a home diligently based on recent market activities (and not emotions) is lot more complex than it appears. That’s why Realtors prepare CMAs so that all factors that influence home values can be taken in consideration in pricing the property. Price a home too high and it will sit on the market for a long time creating a stigma that something is wrong with the property. This is an open invitation for “low-ball” offers and if you are pressed by time to sell, you could lose thousands of dollars. Price it too low and you could lose thousands in lost profits.
• Realtors who work with home buyers are called Buyer’s Agent. They work with home buyers who are willing, ready and able to buy a home and are pre-approved by a lender. If you sell your home on your own, you will end up showing your home to individuals who are not qualified, under-qualified or just looking. Since you will be making your own phone number public as the main contact number, you may also end up getting calls and unannounced visits at any time of the day (or night!). A Realtor working for you as your seller’s agent (you are the client) will filter inquiries and handle the entire process on your behalf.

The advantages of working with a Realtor as your seller’s agent are many. Think about it, Realtors are experienced helping people buy and sell homes. They know the market; They work at it every day.  They are real estate experts with hundreds of real estate transactions to their names. They know how to market homes, the process involved in selling homes, how to set the right price based on market data and how negotiate with other agents so you get the best deal for your home. Do you trust yourself more with selling your home than a professional that does this every day for a living?

 

Off course, in exchange for your Agent’s experience and help to sell your home, a fee (brokerage fee) is charged upon the sale of your home. That fee is divided between the buyer’s agent who brings a qualified home buyer and the seller’s agent who marketed your property and handled all the details for the sale. Cornerstone Realty’s fee is 6% – 3% for the buyer’s agent and 3% for the seller’s agent. When you hire our real estate firm to sell your home, we promise to work hard to get you as much money as possible for your home and to sell it as quickly as possible.