Every day, we make choices. While some choices are easy to make, others can be quite complicated and disconcerting, requiring you to get additional knowledge before making a choice. One such tough decision to make involves the sale of homes. Should you sell your home yourself or use the services of an agent?
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Making the Tough Choice
Most people prefer to recruit the services of a real estate agent to handle the sale of their home. However, there is an increasing pool of people who are catching up with the FSBO (For Sale By Owner) trend that involves the homeowner selling by himself. Before making the tough call as to which of the methods of sale should be employed, you must have all the facts and figures that will help you make the right choice no matter how tough.
Pros of Selling Your Home Yourself
Typically, real estate agents (the buyer and the seller’s agents) take between 3 and 6% of the selling price as commission for their services. For example, real estate agents in Sydney each take as much as 1.86% as commission while those in New South Wales charge an average of 2.04%. This can significantly raise the cost involved in selling the house. Selling yourself eliminates the need for you to pay any commission potentially increasing your net take-home.
Also, most agents typically take up the sale of multiple houses all at the same time. This means the agent’s attention will always be shared between the sale of all of those houses. However, when you sell on your own, you can devote much more time and attention to getting the sale done. Besides, unlike the agent who has a signed agreement that keeps him on his toes and may make him want to force a deal through, you have no such legal contract. As such, you can hold off on accepting any offer until you are satisfied with the price your buyer is offering. You can also decide to hold off on selling until the timing is favourable without bothering about the money you’ll be wasting on listings.
Again, nobody can know a home like its owner. As such, the homeowner is in the best position to talk about the fine points of living in the house, staying in the neighbourhood and talking about all other fine points which the house buyer may require to put his/her mind to rest and make a decision to buy. Of course, this same information can be related to the agent but the agent can forget some of these owing to shared attention between projects.
Cons of Selling Your Home Yourself
Like every rose, this one has thorns and it is important that before you decide to sell yourself, you know what these thorns look like
For starters, eliminating the agent commission may not increase the home sellers net profit seeing as statistics show that agents often end up selling homes at a higher price than any homeowner can. This may be traceable to the fact that real estate agents are professionals and skilled at negotiating offers. It may also be because of a better knowledge of the local real estate market and cost of selling a property . Also, exposure to a potentially wider pool of buyers through listing services exclusively available to agents can be what translates into higher selling prices by agents
Again, while your knowledge of the home is the highest, your knowledge of the market outlay and the laws, regulations and documentation guiding the sale and transfer of property is likely not as extensive and may invalidate your sales process
The Bottom Line
Selling your home by yourself may seem like a straightforward decision but it is not. Make sure you weigh the pros and cons well before deciding where to pitch your tent.
