The interesting thing is that you need a good real estate agent now more than ever (notice we said "good" real estate agent). Sure, the less effective agents out there are going to have a harder time justifying their services if they are not among the best at negotiating, listing and selling homes, determining pricing and marketing campaigns that bring in the offers, and the other skills that an agent must have to do their job. The days of the agent who would add a listing to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), spread the listing around online, and send out mailers then wait for the phone to ring while working on getting more listings are certainly numbered.
Passive marketing has become increasingly difficult to count on in real estate because it's the majority of what the online or mobile real estate service companies these days are offering. You have so many options to advertise real estate and get information, but that abundance just causes the adverse reaction of losing your online home listing in the crowd, with no better chance of capturing attention than the others. As for getting real estate advice online, it is certainly helpful to have so much information at our fingertips. However, without an in-person guide to help put that theoretical knowledge into context from the perspective of a professional who knows how the real estate business really works, it can set up would-be FSBO sellers or self-represented buyers to fail in cases where they think they know what they're doing but do not fully understand the grey areas of how to do business in real estate. There's always more to anything than what you get from only reading about the topic, which is why practical experience always beats theoretical study alone. Just think of driving a car, for example. Would you expect to be an expert at driving if you had only read books and watched videos about it, but had not yet set foot inside a car? No, of course not! For this same reason, the top agents out there will continue to be quite necessary in real estate. Their ability to make something look easy enough that it hardly justifies what you have to pay them to do it for you is the mark of a true professional, and you likely know how much of a difference that can make, regardless of the field of expertise (Fixing the transmission yourself? Yeah, not unless you are a mechanic yourself!)
Top agents will avoid the glut of passively marketing agents and unrepresented sellers and buyers by aggressively marketing for their clients (or if that sounds too harsh, we can also call it "direct marketing"). This involves the simplest and most effective tool in real estate, which happens to have been around much longer than the online tools we have today: calling people, meeting people, and asking around within their network. That's right, people skills! The online options are pretty cool for what they can do, but they have trained us to think that we no longer need to talk to people to get business done. In fact, most individuals overlook how hard it is to effectively talk business with people, let alone doing it often enough to learn how to do it well and putting that skill to work for clients in buying or selling real estate. It seems easy to think about it, but here's an experiment for you if you are not a real estate agent: pick up the phone and call a stranger with it in mind that you would like to ask them if they are in the market for real estate. Give it a try, we can wait... Chances are you hung up before they said "hello," and that is perfectly understandable! If you lack experience in being comfortable actually talking business with people, with the first step being approaching potential buyers or sellers you don't know with the idea, then it's no fun having to learn how, since the only way to learn that skill is to jump in and make mistakes! Sorry, but the internet still can't handle the interpersonal aspects of real estate for us, and robots still aren't here to take over real estate agents' jobs (even if they were, a good agent could still out-negotiate the robot), so this is why the need for a good real estate agent is crucial these days if you are serious about your real estate transactions.
The fact that the real estate industry is propelled by sales activity is a simpler way to put it. Nobody likes the derogatory image of the duplicitous "salesman," but everyone loves harnessing the power of an effective sales professional who is working for them, right? Trained and motivated real estate professionals will always be needed because they are not only licensed and well-educated in how the real estate business works, but are also experienced in how the psychology of selling works. This is not just using the generic concept of how supply and demand, motivation, and pricing come into play, but the finely-tuned and sophisticated psychology of selling real estate.
In the real estate business, timing plays a huge part in everything, as you're probably well aware. In the case of the relevance of a savvy real estate agent in the Information Era, we're talking about their understanding of how timing affects the marketability of a home listing, as well as the strength of a buyer's offer. To grasp how this goes, we must first acknowledge that when listing your home, the top prospective buyers who will actually make an offer on your listing and follow through to closing will be using a buyer's agent. We can call these the "grade A potential buyers," as opposed to the "tire-kickers" who will take up your time but will not end up buying your home. Since a home seller is seeking these grade A potential buyers, it is vital to know how a buyer's agent will react to their listing. Buyer's agents know what they are looking for, based on industry experience, and it is to their benefit as well as their client's that they only spend time looking into attractive listings by motivated sellers. After all, who would you rather negotiate a deal with? You can make the mistake of dealing with someone unrealistic about what they should get for what they are selling, or you can spend the same energy cooperating with someone who comprehends that striking a deal always requires some level of compromise so that each party, the buyer and the seller, gets something they want.
Where timing specifically comes into play is that the seller only has so much time after publishing their listing to get offers before the buyer's agents out there will decide that the listing (which will show up in their reports every day as an active listing) has been listed too long and the seller must not be serious about selling the home. This leads into the other aspect of how timing is involved in the psychology of real estate: if the buyer's agent perceives the listing to be too much of a time-drain because either the price is too high, the seller sounds too picky or stubborn, or there are other potential snags that would waste a lot of time at the negotiating table, they will write the listing off and move onto better opportunities. Even with tight inventory, a bad deal is easy to spot for an experienced buyer's agent, and it's their job to help their client steer clear of bad deals (while still getting them the homes they want).
If the buyer's agents identify a listing as a bad deal, the listing will go stale on the MLS and elsewhere online, soon expiring unsold. The only way to ignite anyone's interest in the listing again would usually be to discount the price or sweeten the deal otherwise, with some kind of additional concessions at the expense of the seller. A good listing agent would not let their client get to that point because it would cause them to lose a lot of bargaining power, or leverage, and would therefore lower the chances of getting their client what they wanted by selling their home. Have you ever tried to sell something on Craigslist (not your home)? It's actually very similar, though on a smaller scale, and teaches firsthand how timing is critical in getting something sold. If too much time goes by, the attention received by the product for sale gets more and more negative (depicting low demand or bad pricing), and the product does not sell. In a nutshell, this is where your real estate agent makes a huge difference.
How about knowing which questions to ask? Someone could bring all of the mobile apps and their magic 8 ball (do they still make those?) to a meeting with a buyer or seller and try to work out the terms of sale on their own. Without knowing what to think to ask, however, their mind would already not be focused on the key components of the meeting that a good real estate agent would have known to concentrate on, in order to actually make the transaction happen. Again, it seems so easy to just cut a real estate agent out of the picture and save some commission money, but think of how much it could cost if you forgot to ask certain questions that could have set you up to have more negotiating leverage that would have kept the home price ten thousand dollars higher, in some cases. That already would cost more than paying an agent, and it could be worse. What about the legal mine field in so many transactions? Do you know what to ask if buying or selling a home, in order to avoid neglecting something during the pending sale which could lead to getting sued by the other party? That would definitely cost more than hiring an agent for their knowledge in keeping you clear of such pitfalls. The list goes on, but the point is that unless you have the years of daily practice dealing in real estate, the cost of paying an expert (the "good" real estate agents, that is) will normally be much smaller than the unexpected costs that could be incurred without their help. Since your home is the most expensive thing that you could sell or buy, remember that the losses, fines, and other costs of not professionally transacting in real estate can usually be the biggest ones you could ever have to pay. It sound too good to be true to just sell a house straight up, with no other expenses in doing so, because it will never work out like that in the real world of real estate!
The simple ability to think and adapt on the spot, and apply situational reasoning rather than following a theoretical model is exactly why NASA still wants to send humans to explore Mars some day, instead of just sending more robots. It's that human touch on the spot when it comes to critical thinking which will remain relevant and absolutely necessary now, and in the distant future. Real estate is no different in this regard.
The online tools and mobile apps have changed the real estate industry, without a doubt, but in ways that continue to highlight how a knowledgeable real estate agent fits into to the equation as the most important factor, rather than pushing them out. Call us, your friendly neighborhood real estate agents today to find out how else they bring irreplaceable value to realty. At Premier Midtown, we are millennial owned and operated, so we understand very closely how technology fits into buying and selling real estate, but the difference will always be the agent working for you. Our philosophy is to make technology work for us, not to compete with technology for business! This is just one of the many ways in which our approach to real estate is effective and can be put to work to get you the best results in your transaction. Consultations are complimentary, and we will always council the most profitable course of action for you, not anyone else. Come experience the difference!
(916) 502-0953
Premier Midtown Realty: "Your Partners in Midtown Sacramento & Central Valley Real Estate!"
Ryan Wagner, California Real Estate Broker. CA BRE license # 01968073.
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