Why You Need a Professional to Sell Your Home
I got asked today by a For Sale By Owner why they should list the house with me because everyone knows houses are getting sold in 24 hours. I thought it was a very insightful Q&A that you might be interested to hear too.
1) If you use Zillow or similar sites to see Zestimate values for your home to decide the listing price, you need to know that estimate is incorrect. They simply average out all listings without taking into account the location, all the unique features of the house, and analyze all the numbers and decide what number to use and not to use. We Listing Agents spend a huge amount of time every day to analyze the market to be able to come up with an asking price. So often I see the houses “In Contract in 24 Hours” that actually have potential to get a lot more money, sometimes as much as $20K! Do you want to leave that money on the table?
2) Do you know what improvements are needed to get the house market ready and what appeals to mass consumers and gives you the highest return? Do you know what options you have if you don't have cash on hand for improvements? What contractors you can trust to use (that do not break the bank)? Should you use a stager and who and how much? What do actual stagers do? Photography also plays a big part in real estate, iPhone pictures will not cut it.
3) Can you buy and sell at the same time? How do you manage the timeline? Who are the lenders you should talk to? How many lending options do you have? Do you know if it's challenging to get your offer accepted when you have a house for sale? How to convince sellers to accept your offer? Will they trust a professional or an amateur?
4) When the house is ready, when is a good month or day of the week to list? Do you have a marketing plan in place to pull buyers to the house? Do you know potential buyers who are already on the market? Do you belong to numerous networking groups to sell the properties to other agents to? Do you know how to run an open house?
5) How to screen a potential buyer vs a lookie loo? What’s the difference between convention and FHA loan and what does it mean for you as a seller? Do you know the good and bad lenders on the market (who actually can make or break the deal 30days after it’s in contract)? What happens to your title? Who should you use and what are you looking for for that process?
6) Multiple offers – perfect! Do you know how to negotiate against the 12 other offers, successfully? What are you looking for? Can you negotiate with the other professionals that negotiate all day? By the way, do you know you also have to pay that buyer agent too? Did you just agree to pay someone to negotiate against you?
7) How to read inspection reports? Do you pay for everything the buyer asked you? Oh no, appraisal comes back short. Do you accept it or file a dispute? How do you dispute it? Have you done this before and know how to convince the appraiser to listen to your reasoning? Better yet how to avoid this low appraisal nightmare from the beginning?
I know it was a lot of questions, and I raise them for a great reason...to get you thinking. I hope you at least had those questions answered rather than never thought of them. If you have an answer for all the questions – great! If not, this is what I believe; when I get sick I go seek help from a doctor. I don’t trust my mom's advice or Google (but I love my mom for sure! Haha!). When you need real estate advice you go seek help from a professional – that’s it! Well, you need to make sure you hire a professional. So how do you hire the best listing agent? Starting off by asking them those questions :)
-Tracy Keffer
