The Cost of Selling a House in the New Millenium - A New Series
There are few things in life more emotionally charged than the value we place on our home. When the day comes to sell our house, we instantly become “value experts.” We begin to pay attention to the other houses for sale in our neighborhood or town. We hit the internet to compare prices. We seek out valuations from sites such as Zillow. We become arm-chair economists. We go to the bookstore and buy all the new tomes about selling a house. WE KNOW IT ALL!
Armed with all of this information, we then interview every real estate agent we can get our hands on. After all the interviews we discover, to our utter surprise, that it costs A LOT of money to sell a house. Some Realtors want 6% of the sale price in commission! Yikes! But, then there are other agents who will put us on the local multiple service for several hundred dollars. This gets us on the Internet but the rest of the process is left up to us. Hm, that sounds good but all our research revealed that there’s a lot to selling a house. Even without an agent, it looks as if we’re going to spend money. So we have a couple of choices:
A) Do I sell my own house (know as For Sale by Ower or FSBO) or
B) Do I hire a Real Estate Agent?
But wait, are there other choices?
Allow me to answer this: YES, there are other choices you have when selling your home. In this series we shall take a close look at how a house gets sold in the current market, what the costs are and why there are more options for homeowners than ever before.
So why hire an agent? Stay tuned for the answer.
Pictures courtesy of: giveawayboy, crawfishpie, rogiro on flickr.com
