Thursday, October 18, 2007

Sell your own house

A little article on CNN has some tips on selling your own house. You can save a bundle by cutting out the real estate agent who basically drives people to your house and saves you the agony of being there while they look at it. With the power of the Internet, RE agents are essentially worthless. I personally found my home on the Internet and did my own financing. The RE was "there", but he didn't do much that we couldn't have easily done ourselves.

6% commission is way out of proportion to what they actually do. You'll need to do a ton of research to sell your own house, but when you're talking about $10k or so in fees, it is well worth it.

I would hate selling right now though. Someone I knew was selling recently, and it was just a pain because many of the "buyers" couldn't secure financing and had to back out at the last minute.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I recently had a realtor acquaintance admit that all she does to sell a house is put a sign in the yard, post it on realtor.com, and place an ad in one of those homes magazines. She said she won't do anything else unless it's requested by the home owner.

Unfortunately, I think she represents the rule and not the exception. My last seller's agent worked hard but we had weed out a lot of lazy ones to find her.