Are you thinking about selling your home but don’t know if you should do it yourself or hire a realtor? In this video, I'm going to describe the whole home buying process to you so you can make an educated decision on whether or not it's best to hire a realtor or go solo. I’ll help you understand the roles a realtor plays in your transaction and explain the pros and cons of both selling options.
Why Choose A Realtor?
As a property seller, there are several creative ways you can use to sell your home. To decide what is going to be the best way for you, it’s a good idea to examine the pros and cons of using a realtor. You should also understand why people choose to hire a realtor to see if your situation could use an agent’s help.
In general, there are two categories of sellers: those that want to sell their home for top dollar, and those that need to get their home sold quickly. If you need to sell your home fast and you're not too concerned about the amount you walk away with, then you may want to sell yourself. You can go the nontraditional route and call iBuyer, Zillow’s buying program, or an investor. When you use these programs, you're going to find that you can close as quickly as possible, sometimes in as little as five days. You can get out and away from the property as quickly as you need to.
However, there is a cost that comes with selling via these programs. They don't charge you commissions, but they're going to give you a lower offer than what market value is. This is because they need to make it worth their time and energy to take over the property and resell the home. If they're going to turn it into a long-term hold, a rental, or something of that nature, they need to see that they're going to have equity to make that transaction profitable for them.
Getting Top Dollar For Your Home
While you can sell untraditionally, most people want to get top dollar for their home. While they might need it to sell rather quickly, they don't want to do discount pricing. The best way to get the most money is to put their home on the market and look for a buyer that's going to pay top dollar. Selling traditionally allows you to test the market by using tools such as the MLS, open houses, social media, and many other options. This makes your home open to so many more people, making it more likely that you’ll get more money because of increased competition.
So how does a realtor help you get top dollar? Our job is very simple: getting you the most money possible, making the transaction as smooth as possible, and helping you to make it happen in the timeframe that's best for you. So many people think that a realtor's job is just opening and closing doors and getting people into a house so they can see it. That's a very small percentage of our job. Our real job begins whenever we're negotiating and helping you through the entire escrow process.
Before we even get your house on the market, we need you to make sure that you understand the entire process, know exactly what to expect, and figure out what your game plan is. Once we come up with a plan of action that meets your specific needs, it’s time for us to go to work. To get your house ready to list on the market, we’ll start decluttering, get the house staged, and take professional photographs of the home. While all this work is going on, we’ll also be reaching out to other agents, potential buyers, people in our database, and our online audience to let them know your house is “coming soon.” This preparation of a complete marketing plan will enable us to hit the market full force.
The Roles Of A Realtor
Selling a house takes a lot more than just putting a sign in the yard. As an agent, we need to make sure that your home is positioned and marketed correctly. It's during this time that your house is actively being marketed that we're out there acting as tour guides of the neighborhood. We're telling prospective buyers about things that the neighborhood has to offer, whether that’s a nearby hiking trail, a community pool and spa, walking distance to school, or close to shopping. Whatever is going to make people fall in love with your home, that’s what we’ll highlight. We're not just marketing your house, but rather we're marketing the lifestyle.
Next, we also become the negotiator. This includes negotiating your transaction, trying to get the best possible price for you when an offer comes in. We're also going to be vetting all of the buyers to make sure that they're all qualified. This requires us to talk to their lenders and find out about their qualifications, what kind of work they're in, what their debt to income ratios are, and what their credit scores are like. My job is also to make this process as stress-free as possible. Realtors make sure that all the I's are dotted, the T's are crossed, and all guidelines and timeframes are being followed in the contract. We want you to just enjoy the fact that you're making your move to your next beautiful home. We're there during the entire transaction to walk you through every step of the way.
Lastly, you may not realize this, but during a transaction in the state of California, there are well over 80+ pages of documentation. As a seller, many of those documents require you to sit down and fill them out in person. As your agent, I’ll sit with you and go through all those documents to make sure that all disclosures are taken care of and filled out. For the actual escrow paperwork, my escrow company will do the same thing with you, though I’m always there for any questions during the entire time.
Is Hiring A Realtor Right For You?
If you’re looking to hire a realtor that can help you take care of all of the aspects of the transaction—and is not just there to open doors—please call the Cicerello team at REMAX with Santa Clarita. If you don't want to go through a sales process and have people coming over to see your home, you might want to go the investor route. You aren't going to net as much money, but at least you won't have the hassle of someone coming in and looking at your home.
I hope this gave you some things to think about. The bottom line is that it comes down to what's important to you—price or convenience. If you are trying to maximize the amount of money that you're going to walk away with, then putting it on the retail market is going to be your best bet. If you're curious about what your home is worth and what we can do to get it sold for top dollar, feel free to reach out to us and we’d be happy to help!