So I’m exploring the idea of selling my current house and relocating into a new one. Obviously this is early and we haven’t even found the right house yet, but I have to start somewhere.
So, I have been talking with some people who say the average commission for a broker to sell the house is around 7%. I just looked up America’s Choice and it looks like they require $500 up front, whether the house sells or not with no commission paid when it sells. So what’s the catch? I’ve never sold a house before, so I’m looking for some advice and possibly some insight from someone who might have done this locally.
I haven’t had to sell a house before but several friends have and I’ve heard mixed reviews. I think the reasoning I heard against it that made the most sense was that while you think you’re saving money it can end up being a wash or worse when you get less traffic from agents that don’t want to deal with your basically “for sale by owner” property. Less traffic often means a lower eventual sale price.
Here’s my thought…my house is what I consider a great “starter home”. The location is excellent, the price is excellent for the amount of bedrooms/bathrooms you get and it is newly updated. With today’s technology, most people looking to buy my house will be tech savy enough that if my house was on Zillow, enough people would see it that it would get the exposure I need.
It’s a 3BD, 2 Bath house that is in a central neighborhood and would sell in the 100-110k range. Very reasonable I think and kind of speaks for itself.
most people work with an agent. If there’s no commission for the agent they will not show buyers your property. rarely does anyone look for themselves. At most they will get pre generated emails from their agent, and if your house does come up the agent will do anything in his power to steer them away from it. I would avoid this idea.
I just sold my house. I had planned on going this route, but since we were relocating out of the area, I didn’t really have the time to deal with it. My former boss used Americas Choice and sold his house in a little over a month. If you say that you’re willing to work with agents(which means giving them 3%-3.5% of the sale price), you’re likely to get more traffic.
We listed it with an agent for 6%, he had a stager come in (she only suggested 1 change to us) and a professional photographer to photograph the house. The house had almost 30 showings in 3 days(we didn’t take any offers until day three) and we sold for 10% over the asking price. It was totally worth it. He even took care of having a waterproofing contractor come in to review a question the bank’s underwriter had about he basement.
If you have a good agent(and I would highly recommend mine), they will take care of just about everything for you, contracts, showings, etc. It just depends on how much crap you want to deal with if you go FSBO. This year my time was more valuable than that.
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Good point, and since he’s dealing with a starter house, he’s more likely to be dealing with first time home buyers, which are far more likely to be using an agent.
I’ve had a few friends sell their house with America’s Choice. From what I get out of it, it seems like it’s basically a “for sale by owner” with some marketing perks to get your house shown online. For the price I think it’s a good way to go as long as you have the time to deal with doing everything yourself.
My last friend to sell started with America’s Choice then when he didn’t get shit for offers or traffic hired an agent and had the house sold in a few weeks.
This is all good stuff guys. I appreciate the input so far. In looking at new houses, I have found some very nice ones on America’s Choice website. It makes me wonder if they are still for sale because of the things you guys are saying here…
Could very well be. We found the house that we ended up buying on Americas Choice, but when we attempted to contact the owner, they had just listed it with an agent, so we had to go with an agent anyway.
I found out that they had listed the house last summer (for far too much money) when that expired they did Americas Choice, then listed with another agent this spring.
I’m in no huge rush to sell my house, so I think when I am close to being ready, I’ll pay the $500 to list it and see what happens. I may setup a few open houses too just to see what happens from there.