If you’re selling your home, you may be wondering if going through the hassle of finding a real estate agent is worth it. After all, it’s just a sale – right? Wouldn’t you be better off skipping a potentially hefty commission and going it alone on the free and open market?
The answer is probably not the one you’re looking for, but a real estate agent is an invaluable component to any home sale. This isn’t just because it opens the door for somebody to collect on your dream home or to help you push paperwork either.
It may seem, at first, like selling your home is just a matter of placing an advertisement or posting a sign. In this day and age of online auctions, you may think that home sales can be done online with little by way of red tape. It would be easier if it worked out that way, we admit, but life has its own series of complications.
Due to the massive volume of money generally exchanging hands in a property deal, it’s not really a good idea to handle the heavy lifting on your own. Buying and selling real estate isn’t like buying and selling a car and there’s an awful lot of paperwork and transactions to consider in a typical sale. There’s a lot of legal stuff to consider, too, and nobody is licensed to deal with that quite like a property agent.
According to compiled statistics, only about 10 percent of homes sold by homeowners alone go off without a hitch. Most sales crumble for one reason or another, unfortunately, and that can leave buyers and sellers without much by way of legal recourse or protection.
The statistics also reveal that it takes an average of nine months to move a property without an agent. We don’t know about you, but that’s a considerable length of time and a lot can happen in nine months. If you’re relying on a home sale to help you close in on another property, you can’t afford to wait nine months or perhaps longer to close things up.
A real estate agent can generally move a property in around 60 to 90 days. This is because he or she has access to a broad network of contacts and information that a typical homeowner does not have access to. Not only that, a property professional has to abide by a Code of Ethics that keeps his or her business dealings running under strict rules. An agent becomes your best weapon when it comes to selling your home.
A real estate agent also has access to a host of online tools and information databases that can help in moving your property quickly and for top dollar. You may be able to generate some interest in your property through an advertisement, but only a licensed agent has the capability to search thousands upon thousands of listings to find the perfect fit.
With a network of agents, buyers and sellers on tap, a real estate agent becomes an indispensable resource in any home sale.