The wife and I have interviewed two real estate agents to list our Pearland house. The first agent is the 'top' producer in the area. This agent told us that she does not do open houses (regular and realtor) or flier tubes on the for sale sign. She said that neither is really effective in selling homes. (Open houses don't really bring in targeted buyers. Tube fliers are mostly snatched by neighbors and other non buyers; interested buyers will call the numnber on the sign.) What this agent does do is market online (which everyone does) and in local and Houston newspapers (difference maker?). I am unconvinced that the marketing that she does will be more effective in selling our home. I can see that this marketing being good for drumming more listing business (her concern not mine.) The second agent is from a name firm. This agent does do open houses (as much as we can stand) and tube fliers. The problem I have with her is that she tried to strong arm us into selling the house at the bottom on the selling range (as determined by price per square feet). Looking at the her bottom line on the sale, she makes about the same commission no matter what we sell for; she just gets it quicker with a reduced price. Thus, I am not thrilled about either agent. The more I think about it, the more I am unsure what a 'good' listing agent can do for the seller. They all will give the same advice wrt getting the house in show condition. They will all put the house in MLS and online, which in my mind is 95+% of the marketing that needs to be done. The rest of the selling it appears is up to the buyer's real estate agent. The buyer's agent is highly motivated in showing houses that the buyers want to see, regardless of who lists it. The first listing agent even said that less than 10% of her sales come from her lisitngs. There is a low cost realtor in our neighborhood (something like For Sale By Owner?) that charges a flat fee to list your house. They don't get a lot of listings so I am concerned that the full cost realtors may be blackballing them. Any ideas or suggestions?
A couple of things (wife and I are in real estate): 1) I agree with the first agent on open houses. Believe it or not, alot of people that go to open houses are "hobbyists", that is, they just like to go look at houses on the weekend and aren't serious about buying usually. Others just end up being nosey neighbors. Over the last 5 years, my wife has done probably 30-40 open houses and never once found a buyer, much less someone that is interested in the home. Most realtors nowadays don't do open houses, and when they do, its only when the seller insists on it. 2) I agree with the 2nd agent on fliers. They are cheap, and although they probably won't find you a serious buyer, some people that are previewing neighborhoods will grab them and might just be interested in your home. If not, hey ....it costs your realtor less than $10 for a batch of 50. What my wife did, was put black and white fliers outside (cheap ..in case neighborhood kids get ahold of them) and nice color fliers, printed on photo paper on the inside. 3) Regarding the price per square foot. Ask your agent to take you to preview other houses in your neighborhood that you are competing with. Don't focus so much on price per square foot. Focus on making your house competitive in your market (neighborhood). By previewing other homes, you can get an idea where you should price your house at (just have an open mind and try to acknowledge if other houses are nicer than yours or not ....DON"T BE BIASED) 4) FSBOs have their advantages and disadvantages. Yes, it saves you money versus a full comm agent. However, the biggie is, most buyer agents find homes for their clients through the MLS. If your home isn't there, then you are missing out on a huge portion of the market. And if it is, if a buyer's agent doesn't see 3% comm for their end, they are going to ignore your listing (since most others do pay a full 3%). A few other tips: Make sure your house flows well and if you have any odd colors, make sure they are neutral. Remember that buyers come into your house trying to picture what it would look like with their furniture in it. Its hard for them to do if they see a loud color and bad decorations. Make sure whatever agent you use does a "virtual tour" on the MLS listing. Base MLS listings only allow 16 photos. With a virtual tour, you can add up to 50 more. This is beneficial when you have a showing, since a potential buyer won't see anything they didn't see on the virtual tour. We just sold our house and we got 3 showings, an offers on the 2nd and 3rd one. Giving them multiple photos up front ensures that the people that are coming to see your house are serious. Make sure the agen't directions to your home are accurate. Alot of agents are lame and don't put good directions. If an agent has a client, and they are seeing 10 houses that day, if they have trouble finding one, they will just skip it for the sake of time. Last, talk to your agent about adding a BTSA (agent bonus) and/or closing cost assistance in the agent remarks. It will make your home a much more attractive option, to both the buying agent (who will get a bonus) and the buyer (who will get cash assistance at closing). We did a $1,000 BTSA and $1,000 closing cost assistance on our own home. We sold it 5 days after adding that to our listing. My wife listed her father's house in Richmond. After sitting on the market for 4 months, with no activity, she added the BTSA and closing cost assistance and he sold his house 2 weeks later. Hope that helps! Insist that your realtor
My girlfriend is a real estate agent. It seems to me that the listing agent really does not do as much. The buyers agent is the one who finds the house. Agents have a bias against for sale by owner. They see that as another agent losing out on a commision and will not want to show a buyer the property. So the same thing is probably happening with the buget agency. Also don't start out too low. You can always reduce the price later if your house is not generating any interest. The agent should be able to show you what comparable houses in your area have sold for so that you can set a fair market value.
We had a great realtor in Crosby when we sold our house 2 months ago. He had an open house and we sold it in 4 days. We also sold our house in Omaha after 2 weeks with one open house, so I guess it was not the norm but it worked for us. when we sold our house in Crosby we interviewed 3 agents and ended up going with the one who we felt good with, Rick Martinez. It was more of a gut feel then anything else since gthey all had good ideas.
We had our house on the market last year. I was very disappointed with our realtor, and we encountered some of the same stories you're hearing. Here are our thoughts: 1) Regarding agent who doesn't do open-houses and filter tubes (but markets online and in newsappers). Translation: this is a lazy realtor who will not try to sell your house. This is exactly what our realtor did. Any newspaper and internet listings will be done by the realtor's company, not the realtor. After the first 48 hours, after your house is listed online and in the newspapers, you're going to be asking yourselves, "okay.... well.... what else is he/she going to be doing to sell our house?" Answer: nothing. This is a buyer's realtor, not a seller's realtor. 2) The truth here is, you will get an MLS number from ANY realtor, meaning that your house will be listed at har.com, for online shoppers. For the first realtor to tout this would be like a car salesman saying, "Hey - our cars have steering wheels!". It's a given. 3) You need a realtor who will actually say to you: "I personally will show this house at least X times each month." "When this house is viewed by other realtors, I personally will hunt down feedback from each realtor that shows the house" "I personally will have an open house strictly for other realtors to get them familiar with the property and to network with them to get the house sold." I believe, also, that the open-houses and flyers don't really bring in serious buyers. But least it shows you that the realtor is actually making an effort to get the house sold. Realtors try to force your price down so that they can sell it faster. Don't allow them to do this. Have the realtor provide you with printouts of all the houses in your area that have similar specs to yours and have sold or been on the market over the last year (they have access to this information). This will help you determine a correct price range. I recommend that you list it at the higher end of this price range because when people make you an offer, they're gonna try to force you down a little. Also, a realtor will try to get you to sign a contract with them. If you do, you need a clause in the contract that let's you fire the realtor at any time. Either that, or you don't sign a contract at all. This is very, very important.
There is a low cost realtor in our neighborhood (something like For Sale By Owner?) that charges a flat fee to list your house. Assist-2-Sell (http://www.assist2sell.com/) is the discount realtor in our neighborhood. They charge a flat $2995 commission.
Assist-2-Sell only charges a flat fee if they both list and sell your house. If they list but another agent sells, they charge a 1.5% commission. I still have concerns about the full charge RE agents black listing the "have-not" discount agents.
If you are not offering 3% commission to the buyers agent you can pretty much forget about any agent bringing their client to the property, it is just not going to happen.
We are building a home out in Magnolia, and the house next door just finished being built by the owner...he used assist2sell ....the effort they put into the marketing is 1/10th what a good full comm realtor puts in
assist2sell lists with MLS which means http://www.har.com/ here in the Houston area. What more marketing are you talking about?
Well, meant more about the quality of the marketing. Example: The assist-2-sell home next door to where I am building, the agent took 5 photos ...total. 1 of the front entry to the neighborhood, and 4 of the front of the house. No interior photos. Bad directions. No fliers. No detailed descriptions of the rooms. As a matter of fact, the agent is just giving out the key code to the lock box and not even accompanying people there.
This really sounds like a bad agent working for Assist-2-Agent, although their agent compensation versus ReMax et al probably does not attract or retain the best and the brightess.
What kind of % are we talking about with your $1,000 BTSA? 1%? WRT the $1,000 closing cost assistance, was this in addition to any give backs that came out of the inspection report?
$1,000 is a flat fee on top of the 3% the buyer's agent gets Its advantageous because if that agen't client is trying to decide between 3 houses, and yours is one of them, that agent will push your house over the others because of the BTSA. Repairs based on inspection reports is always negotiable. But the $1,000 closing cost assistance has nothing to do with that. I know it seems like you are giving away $2,000, but keep in mind how much you are paying in mortgage and property taxes, plus insurance every month. Plus, sometimes you can get away with a slightly higher asking price to offset this. Its all just a marketing tool, and ultimately, you will be robbing Peter to pay Paul so to speak.
Say my house is worth $250K. The 3% buyer's agent commission would be $7500. Adding a $1000 kicker to the commission would be less noticeable than say on a $125K house. I am thinking about adding a 0.5% or 1% kicker ($1250 or $2500) instead. I am also willing to chip in on the closing costs, if the inspection turns up have-to-fix problems. I think my house is really worth closer to $260K, given the median price per sq ft selling prices in my area. Add in the 1% BTSA kicker and I arrive at a $262,600 list price I guess I could add in the $1000 closing cost give back to the buyer and have a $263,600 list price. I am still on the fence wrt getting a 3% listing agent or a 1.5% listing agent (Assist-2-Sell). 1.5% of $263,600 is about $4000 (which buy me most of a home theater system before install ).
I talked to three realtors now. The first two wanted six month contracts. The last one (Assist-2-Sell) wanted 4 month contract. All three want me to believe that the contract length was non-negotiable. Can you really get away with not having a contract?
