While doing the work yourself can save you the significant commission rates many real estate agents command, for many, flying solo may not be the way to go–and could end up being more costly than a realtor’s commission in the long run. Buying or selling a home is a major financial (and emotional) undertaking.
1. Expertise & Experience
Even though you do not necessarily think that you need an expert to sell a home, hiring professional real estate agent who specializes in your area or property type is critical. With 16 years of experience as a Realtor and Property Manager, I have seen first hand hundreds of different scenarios when buying and selling a home. From all aspects of marketing and promotion to legal issues, a real estate agent can guide you through the process and in a lot of cases, saving you time and money. The key is to find the right agent that has all the professional and personal attributes that you require.
2. The Selling Process
Real estate agents can be put in charge of all the listing and selling requirements as well as client visits. This saves you a lot of time and effort so that you can do more productive tasks while they are taking care of the matters related to your home. For example, if you were to list your property let’s say on Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace, you would have to respond to a lot of inquiries (both from serious and non-serious viewers!). If you had to be the only one to sift through property listing responses and all open house viewing, all your free time would go to that.
With a real estate agent, we can do the following:
- Filter phone calls
- Take pictures of your home and market your real estate property
- Accommodate couples and families to view your home
- Reply promptly to messages regarding your property listing
- Look for other potential clients
- Do cold calls and client meetings
- Tap into their network and contacts for a potential buyer
- Handle all of the required paperwork to sell your home
- Double check the legal matters
3. Knowledge & Familiarity with the Neighbourhood
Real estate agents possess key knowledge and information about your neighbourhood. From Sherwood Park, Fort Saskatchewan, St. Albert, Edmonton and Surrounding Area, I have worked in these neighbourhoods gaining extensive knowledge of the market. We can help you identify:
- Key selling points
- Price points in the neighbourhood
- Data on schools
- Demographics
Your agent knows what kinds of upgrades will make your home look more attractive to buyers compared to other houses in the area. With a FREE Comparative Market Analysis (available here), we can take a look at the current listing/selling points around your neighbourhood – determining the current value of your property! This will give you an edge in terms of helping you sell your property more quickly.
4. Negotiation Knowledge
When you find a potential buyer, a real estate agent will try to get you the best price in all market conditions. Negotiation skills are very important when selling your home, since this makes or breaks your deal. With a real estate agent, you can rest assured that not only do you have someone working on your side, the agent is there for your protection so it’s a win-win situation.
5. Future Business Relationships
A successful real estate builds credibility based on the results of forming good relationships with his or her clients. To this day, I am in constant communication with all past clients! Because of this, they give great importance and attention to detail to make sure that their clients are satisfied and happy. These positive client relationships result in referrals of an agent to friends and acquaintances which builds trust based on past performance. It also means that agents have an established set of potential buyers that you can potentially tap into from previous listings.
As you can see, there are many extremely important benefits to hiring a real estate professional. The sale or purchase of a home can be one of the most important financial buying or selling decisions in a person’s life. As such, its extremely wise to get the help of a real estate professional working on your side.
If you are interested in working with me, feel free to give me a shout at 780-777-9703!
