Selling or buying a home this year? It might help to do a little John Lennon Imagining to put things into perspective before you decide how you might best market your home.
Imagine there are no real estate agents,
It’s easy if you try
No large commissions hanging over us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Keeping all their equity
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
No, there are many people who don’t have to dream. They live in a world where real estate boards and their agents don’t control the housing market. Places such as the U.K. and much of Europe.
People there can’t believe how much you and I are charged in commission.
They instead use estate agents, lawyerrun exchanges or sell privately and pay less than half what we routinely pay. Yet their homes still sell for fair market value. The world continues to revolve.
So, imagine that real estate boards, their agents and their multiple listing services didn’t exist here. Would you be any less likely to need to buy or sell a home?
Would the market for homes cease to exist? Would houses sit empty?
But we do have them, and we are paying too much. It’s a self-inflicted wound.
But imagine we were to start over and we hired an economist to design an efficient housing market that would cost us as little as possible, yet still be as effective. Economists are all about efficiency.
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So, first off, our economist would reject the current board-broker-agent-listing service model as not only too expensive, but too inefficient.
He or she would point out that there are always too many agents chasing too few houses. The brokers who hire them don’t care because they don’t pay them. We do.
The economist would cite studies revealing that, as a result of this inefficiency, agents spend much more time prospecting for new listings and clients than in actually marketing houses. So when an agent does sell your home and charges you a five-figure commission, a lot of that money goes toward subsidizing all that prospecting, as well as providing a slice to his broker, the franchise owner, the real estate board and a host of other people who had nothing directly to do with your home sale.
Not very cost-effective. Not very efficient. So our economist would devise a system that eliminates this waste so you’d only pay for what you need to sell your home: exposure through professional signage, an active internet site, magazine print advertising, feature sheets, automated 24/7 phone information, help setting your price, and, most important, support and training on all aspects of your sale.
In other words, pretty much the system thousands of ComFree clients have already used to sell their home and save thousands. Check us out.
The choice is yours: Put all of the equity from your home into your pocket or support the system that makes economists cringe.
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