Why does it make sense to hire an agent if you’re thinking about selling your Wilmington home?
In this extremely hot market, a lot of sellers feel like they don’t need a real estate agent; they can just sell their home on their own. Those are called For Sale By Owner, or FSBO sellers.
A recent study indicated that you can actually end up costing yourself more money if you decide to sell your home as a FSBO listing. Why is that? There were a few reasons:
1. Buyers will expect a discount. If you’re saving 6% commission off that property, then buyers expect to pay that much less.
2. FSBO sellers sell their homes for less money than they would if they had used an agent. They go through the process that real estate agents go through when it comes to preparing their home for sale—they stage, clean, and market the home on their own. However, your first showing is online, and it’s critical to make sure that your property shows well. The process an agent uses to market a home online is going to be different if you do it on your own, since agents have access to databases and sites that you don’t.
3. Law of exposure. It’s simple economics—the more people that you expose a property to, the better the price you’re going to get whenever you get around to selling it. If you can create more demand for the property, then you’ll end up with buyers making higher offers. We created demand by exposing a listing to thousands of buyers that we work with. That’s not to mention that we’re in contact with agents from local Realtor associations who are working with their own buyers, which is even more exposure.
Further still, agents work to hone their negotiation skills. Since you probably don’t know how to negotiate real estate transactions, along with the lack of exposure your home will receive and the sheer amount of work that goes into marketing a home and communicating with buyers, you aren’t likely to meet with optimal success.
If you’re thinking of selling your home and you want to get the most money possible from it, reach out to us. We’re happy to give you an estimation of your home’s value and to come up with a marketing plan to make sure that your home is seen by as many buyers as possible.
