Excessive Advertising Costs are a Trap!
Excessive Advertising Costs are a Trap!
Excessive Advertising Costs are a Trap! Don’t find yourself with a regrettable experience.
Real Estate Agents have two primary roles when employed by a home seller:
- Find interested buyers. Different agents use different strategies to achieve this objective and focus on a combination of newspaper ads, underquoting, internet ads, just listed cards, signboards, databases, brochures, etc
- Negotiate the highest possible price with the best terms for the home seller. Some agents can achieve this objective and some can’t.
Some agents spend excessive amounts of money finding buyers and then use selling strategies, such as public auctions, that undersell properties. The excessive amounts of money being spent by agents looking for buyers is, in the majority of cases, the home seller’s money.
Q. If the home seller is paying upfront for advertising and carrying the risk to find a buyer, what is the home seller really paying for?
A. The agent’s negotiation skills….or lack of it in some cases.
To pay an agent $3,000.00 and upwards and non-refundable, in the hope of finding a buyer in this day and age of the internet is absurd! Furthermore, when the agent does find you a buyer they want to charge a full commission on top!
Questions to ask before listing:
- Who pays the advertising if best offer is below the price the agent quoted or below vendor’s reserve price?
- Can the outcome be achieved using a cheaper and much more effective marketing medium?
And, given that auction clearance rate has hovered around 40%, 6/10 home-sellers have learned the above through regrettable experiences.
Adapted from article by Peter O’Malley, author, Inside Real Estate.
