Selling a home can be a very stressful situation for most people and you hire a real estate agent to relieve the stress from you. Unfortunately a common practice in real estate is to charge the vendor upfront marketing and advertising money which puts the financial commitment straight onto the vendors shoulders. This is done to make sure the vendor is committed to selling and the agent can easily condition the vendor down in price.
The question is if you are an agent that has been operating in the area for any amount of time shouldn't you have buyers already? So why do I have to pay for you to find more, and why would I pay advertising and then pay commission once the property is sold, that sounds too much like double dipping to me. You will find that the biggest part of any real estate advertisement is the name of the agency and probably a photo of the agent so you are actually paying for the agency to advertise their own profile.
Aside from advertising, another common trap is not putting a price on the property which you see way too often. The agent will say "its hard to tell in this market, its best to leave the price off and let the market tell us what its worth" This is a cop out because the agent is frightened of scaring you by telling you the truth about price and losing your business. Research shows that at least 50% of buyers overlook properties with no price, so in effect you are cutting out half of your inquiry.
That leads me to the next point which is over quoting the property value to get the business. Agents call this buying the listing and will then go through a process of conditioning the vendor in price which they refer to as "educating the vendor" There are many more practices in modern real estate which damage the value of property and cost home sellers tens of thousands of dollars each time they sell a property.
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