September 30th, 2009
If you visit home sellers forums on line, or read home selling tips books or blogs, one thing you’ll read in several places is that the listing real estate agent’s fees are always negotiable. What they are saying is that you do not have t simply accept the fee the listing agent quotes to you to start with. This is, usually, a true statement. There is no law that sets the commissions real estate agents charges for their services.
There are even discount rate real estate agents and companies that charge a substantially lower fee than other agents as a matter of course. Some of these discount real estate companies will even charge just a simple flat rate fee.
The sole purpose for hiring a real estate agent is to take advantage of their professional approach to selling your home. The agent has specialized knowledge of home sales, the local market, advertising and marketing campaigns, and other home selling skills. By contracting the agent you gain the advantage of these skills to sell our homes. The reason people want the agent selling their home is that they recognize that the agents have access to resources they do not have access to. They have a greater chance of putting a buyer together with the home and getting that buyers signature on the real estate forms that will sell the home. A faster sale, hopefully at a higher price offer, means more money in the seller’s pocket and fewer expenses getting there. Often the mortgage payments a homeowner will not have to
pay alone will make up for the agents commission. There is no other reason to hire an agent.
When you consider it this way it doesn’t actually make a lot of sense to use a discount agent or broker to sell your house. It also doesn’t seem as attractive to try to negotiate the commission with the real estate agent. If you get the agent to accept a 50% reduction in their fees, they know that at best, selling your home will earn them half of what selling another home in the same price range would earn them. If you knew that you could do the same amount of work and receive twice the compensation from one source as you would from another source, which would you invest your time and money in? The real estate agent’s answer to that question is the same as yours. Why would they push your home when, for the same amount of time and effort, they could push another comparable home and earn twice as much income.
Given this scenario, which home do you think is likely to have a new owner filling out the real estate forms and going to closing first? Think twice before negotiating on the agents fees, what little you save there may cost you a lot more before the home is sold.
September 26th, 2009
Buying of real estate property is a very tricky and risky investment to make, especially if you are not knowledgeable enough about the market, or about the value of your real estate property.
A lot of people do not know exactly how to determine the value of their property, and end up either pricing it too high or too low, something that you would not want to do, especially if you want to be able to make the most out of your investment. People who price their real estate property too high will not be able to sell the property for obvious reasons.
The price of the property should be reflective of its value, which should be determined not according to your personal assessment, but to the assessment of the real estate market. If you do price your real estate property too low, on the other hand, you only end up getting the shorter end of the stick since you are getting less than what you should be getting from your investment.
In order to be able to put the right value over your real estate property, you will need to have a better understanding of the real estate market in order to get the most out of your real estate property.
One basis for determining the value of your real estate property is called the cost or summation approach. This method determines the value of the real estate property by reducing the cost of any improvements that needs to be done on the property from the value of the land of the property. Basically, what this method does is it makes a person decide if whether the cost of modifying the existing home would be cheaper as compared to buying another home which already has those features. This approach, however, may not be the best way to determine the market value of any real estate property since this method has non-market based components, which is most noticeable when their exists a limited demand of a property in the market.
Another way of determining the value of your real estate property is by comparing the price of similar properties that are being sold in the market with your own existing property. You get the sales prices of the properties that are similar to your own, and you take into considerations the differences that are comparable between the two properties in order to determine the fair market value of your property. However, this type of method is only effective if there are good comparable sales that exist.
If the property’s current rental value and passing income are known, then the property value would be easily determined as well, just as long as the market-determined equivalent yield of the property is present. Also, certain factors, such as the revitalization or rehabilitation of a particular area can also affect the sales prices of such properties.
Determining the value of your real estate property can be very difficult to do, especially if you have very limited to no knowledge and experience about the real estate market. One good way of being able to make sure that you give the appropriate value to your real estate property is by hiring the expertise of professionals.
Vanessa Arellano Doctor
http://realestatepress.org