Well, lots of reasons, actually.
First, however, we will acknowledge that sometimes, selling
a home without a listing agent works. Lots of sellers do it actually, and some
even liked the experience. Unfortunately, it would require us
to cherry-pick examples of good cases compared to all of the less
successful ones out there to try to offer that point. The truth most of
the time is that you're better off using a skilled listing agent to get this job
done. The good ones know what they're doing, will keep you informed, and make
the stressful process of selling your home as non-intrusive to your life as
possible. You have better things to do than try to handle all of the
home-selling duties alone, if it's just an attempt to save a relatively small
amount of money!
Let
us begin with some statistics from the National Association of Realtors to
illustrate the larger picture when it comes to FSBO. (These can also be seen at
www.realtor.org if you want to look more closely at any of these). Since
the primary reason most sellers attempt to sell their home on their own is the
perceived savings on the typical 6% broker commission:
In 2014, FSBO home sales accounted for a mere 8% of all home
sales. While the national average agent-assisted single family
residence sale was for $249,000, FSBO homes sold for $210,000 (nearly
84.5% as much as agent-assisted). If the seller sold the home to a buyer they
knew, the median gross sale price was $151,900 (about 61% as much as
agent-assisted). An agent-assisted gross sale of $249,000 would cost the seller
$14,940 (6% commission, which excludes the costs the broker and buyer's agent
incurred to sell the home/procure a quality buyer) , but that's nothing
compared to the $39,000 loss due to the average FSBO sale price, or
especially the $97,100 in average lost proceeds if the seller sold to a
friend or family member! (Source:
National Association of Realtors)
Ok, we don't mean to use what appear to be "scare
tactics," but the logic just doesn't add up to cost yourself twice as
much on the home sale, in the form of underselling due to improper
pricing (as well as the additional costs of marketing, inspections, cleaning,
staging, etc.) by going FSBO instead of using a solid listing agent. Aside from
the costs of selling on your own, let's now check out the usual duties that
your listing agent does every day, behind the scenes so-to-speak, to make that
magic happen and sell your home within a reasonable amount of time.
1.
Negotiations!
If
we left off every other reason to use a listing agent, negotiation skills and the resulting savings on costs are the
summary of this article as to why you should never attempt to sell your home
on your own (unless you have experience doing all of these really
well, that is!) Negotiating with buyer's agents on the price and terms of
the sale, negotiating with attorneys, negotiating with lenders (short
sales especially), negotiating with home stagers, inspectors, appraisers, and anyone
else involved in selling your home - it gets to the point where you
would gladly pay 6% of the sale price of your home to not have
to talk to any of these guys! All of these different professionals, and
possibly the buyers, are very experienced in their area of real estate
expertise, and without a savvy listing agent to handle negotiations for you,
the sale price could end up very low and the costs incurred to pay for anything
that could have been negotiated in the deal might be very high.
2.
Timeliness!
You're
busy, right? It takes nearly a full-time person to handle just one of the many
tasks involved in selling a home within what would be considered a short amount
of time, like 30 days. Just answering all of those emails and voicemails after
a long day of working already can add hours to your day, before you can relax
and get ready for the next one. Then being home to show the house to
potential buyers, to let the appraiser in, to lock up the dog if you have one,
to clean up and stage the interior and exterior, to be online marketing
the property, to have access to the Multiple Listing System (MLS) at all, and
the list goes on. Trying to keep all of this on track is only
possible if you have a very flexible weekly schedule, or are Superman/Wonder
Woman and can juggle so many time-sensitive tasks at once on your own! The
"tax" on taking too long to sell a home that is out there being
marketed to buyers' agents is that the longer the listing sits on the MLS,
Zillow, and other websites, the less likely it will be to get market-value offers
(and beyond that, any offers at all). The listing goes "stale" and
nobody likes stale anything, let alone home listings!
3.
Experience!
That's
a simple one: a successful listing agent has experience. Where does experience
usually come from? An approximate 75-25 mixture of failures and successes
in life, which informs us how to do one thing or another like a natural, simply
because we've done it correctly before and know how to watch out for all of the
pitfalls. Just like if your kid said that driving a car looked easy - sure, it looks easy until they get in the driver's seat and realize they can't even reach the pedals! That's how any good professional is, in making their job of doing difficult tasks look easy. If you don't have time to build up experience in real estate
(especially if the motivation is just to save on a commission or in having to
work with a listing agent), then the logical conclusion is that this is just asking
for failure more than success in trying to sell your home. That's blunt, but
only intended to help. Let your listing agent use their experience in the real
estate business to judge and react to all of the things that could come up
during the process of selling your home. If the listing agent has had lots of
sales before, the chances are they will able to repeat that success for you. If
the listing agent is newer and has not listed any homes before but offers
customized strategies and has shown their business acumen in other areas, the
chances are also good that they will be able to apply their innovation and sell
your home more effectively than an agent using less cutting-edge tactics. There
are positives to both using an established listing agent and using a newer
listing agent with modern strategies, but the important thing is that they
understand the business of real estate.
4.
Marketing!
The
last but not least reason you're best off using a listing agent instead of
attempting FSBO is marketing. At first glance, the average person will think
"What does marketing have to do with real estate? Isn't that for TV
commercials and name-brand products?" Marketing has everything to do with
real estate. The best product in the world that could do anything you could
imagine would sit on the shelves/not get any orders online if it was not
marketed properly. Marketing is necessary to get the word out and tell the
story about the product or service in question. In the case of selling your
home, the property is the product! Marketing online, via social media, using
signs, mail, billboards, radio ads, etc. all takes up-to-the-minute knowledge
of what everyone else is doing, as well as the nuts-and-bolts of how to
actually use them. We won't bore you with marketing statistics here, but the
average consumer is exposed to thousands of advertisements each day, including
emails, phone calls, TV commercials, magazine ads, pop-ups and other online
ads, YouTube video ads, and plenty more. Now let's drill down to how the
consumer will be bombarded with ads and contact attempts by buyer's agents once
they begin searching for a home to buy. Ever seen one of those movies
where something falls into a piranha tank? Yeah, lots of bubbles! Just
joking with the visual and certainly not making a comparison to the real
estate industry (well, maybe... no, we're not), but there will be a lot of
activity targeting those potential buyers. Amidst that level of competition to
get the attention of a possible buyer, not even getting them in for a
tour yet, just getting them to even notice your listing at all, how do you
think an FSBO marketing campaign by someone who does not specialize
in marketing will go? "We just want to put a sign on the lawn
and wait for the phone to ring." Good luck with that! The callers, if any,
will usually be unqualified, low-quality buyer leads who will take a whole lot
of your time, but almost never come back to make a serious offer. A
professional marketing campaign using as many applicable
and cost-effective advertising methods as possible is your only hope
for going from a tire-kicking time-vacuum buyer (that's a good one, let's
call that the TKTV buyer!), to the quality pre-approved buyer who can and will
make a prime offer and follow-through to closing. Now, we're not talking
go full-throttle and spend a fortune on tons of advertising - it's all
about crafting a custom strategy which uses the avenues best-suited to bring
success for the lowest cost possible. That takes skill, and your listing agent
has it.
Premier
Midtown Realty specializes in listing single-family and even multi-family
investment properties. We have over ten years of combined real
estate, property management, marketing, digital media, and business management
experience, and a playbook of unique ideas for selling your home for the
top real-world sale price (as much as the market will bear at the
time is what that means), and as quickly as possible given market
conditions at the time. Since we're in the business of making sure that our
clients are as well-informed as possible in making their real estate decisions
before transacting those decisions with us (rather than just being here to
sell houses), we will always give you the honest, no-nonsense information you
need to succeed in selling your home.
See
why FSBO is probably not going to work out so well? We encourage you to do
some more research on why FSBO is a bad idea, if you aren't quite sure yet. We
wouldn't council using a listing agent if FSBO was the option with better odds
for success.
Call us today and we can advise you as to how to become a Premier Midtown Realty represented seller.
Consultations are free and your treatment is always as a VIP.
Ryan Wagner, California Real Estate Broker. CA BRE license # 01968073.
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