Are you thinking about selling your home? If you are planning on selling a home, you may want to use a professional realtor or a pro to sell your home. I’m going to give you five reasons why it may be best for you to hire a professional when selling your home. One of the biggest transactions you will make. So let’s get right into it. 

As you know, the market has taken a turn. As of 2021 and 2022, the market is totally different, not only in the local market, but also on the national market. The interest rates have jumped, and I mean really jumped double of what they were. House prices have pretty much peaked.They’re very high right now. Inflation is still very high, and the stocks are down anywhere from 10%-40%. So there’s a big slow down in what we call the financial markets. 

1.) So the reason, number one, that you may want to hire a pro when you sell a home is because they know the local trends.They are experts at what’s happening in the local market. And selling a home is about what’s happening locally. If the prices are going down nationally by 5%, your local market may go down 10%. There’s a prediction, for example, that in the West Coast, prices may go down as low as 20% from the peak time in the next year or so. But the same forecast in the Midwest and some of the states, it may only go down two or 3%. So what’s happening nationally may not affect you locally. And by hiring an expert, they know the local trends, what’s happening on the market, what has happened and what’s coming up that you may not be seeing right now. So that’s the reason, number one, that you may want to hire a local expert. They will really help you sell your home faster.

2.) The second reason why you may want to hire a pro is that they may help you set the right price. Now, if I’m a seller, I know my number one goal is to maximize my price. I want the most price I can get. Don’t blame you for it, because I would want the same thing. But what you want and what the buyer will pay you is two different things. In the hot market, when you listed a home, let’s say for a million dollars two years ago, it was selling for a million and $50,000. Or in other areas of the country, if your house was listed for $170,000, they were selling for $180,000 or $190,000. You were getting over bids on the price. But that market has changed. 

You can no longer expect to get the higher prices. You may even get a lower price. So setting the price right, so you can sell your home within 17 to 30 days is the best thing to do. And your local agent knows what’s happening in the market. They’ve probably seen a home similar to yours, a similar model, so they know what they’re selling for. If the comps are $800,000 and you want $900,000, they may tell you, hey, a similar home sold for $800,000 and you will not get $900,000. 

Of course, it’s one of your biggest transactions that you will do. So you want to maximize your price, but the price is what the buyer is going to pay you based on the comps. Just like sellers, when they talk to Realtors and get the comparatives in the market of what homes sold, buyers do the same thing. Not only that, the buyer have access to online evaluations. They can go to Redfin, they can go to Zillow, they can go to opendoor a lot of other websites, and they can check your price. And based on the average, they’re going to offer you that price based on your terms and conditions and the location. 

Just because you want a certain price doesn’t mean you’re going to get it. And also be aware that in a normal market, almost 30% to 40% of the homes don’t sell. Yes, 30% to 40% of homes don’t sell in a normal market, even in the hot, hot market,10%-20% of the homes did not sell. Why is one home getting 10 or 20 bids in two days and one home is sitting there? Well, usually it’s a one and number one reason. It’s way overpriced. 

If comps are a million dollars, and excuse me that I’m using a million dollar range, I’m in Orange County and the median home prices are a million dollars. I’m using that figure. If the comps are a million dollars, you cannot ask for a 1.3 or 1.2. That’s way out of range. Not only will the buyers not pay you for that price because they’re smart, they’re not dumb. They’re dishing out $100,000 to $200,000 down payment and they’re going to get a mortgage payment of $6,000-$7,000 a month. Last thing they’re going to do is pay you a high price. But the other issue is it will not appraise. And the other issue is, if it doesn’t appraise, they will not get a loan. So there’s a lot of reasons why you want to price it right, and your local pro will help you do that. 

3.) The third reason why you may want to hire a pro when selling your home, again, your biggest transaction of your life is because they have a large pool of buyers. Now, when it comes to Realtors, you may know as an individual seller some of the buyers in the area, and you may do an open house. But with Realtors, they have two kinds of exposure. One is they have their own buyer pool. They’ve been in the business. They talk to buyers and sellers everyday, every weekend, they do open houses. So they have a large pool of buyers. So they have a database of a lot of buyers. Not only their own database, but most of them work for a company. And these companies have a pool of buyers ready to go. But that’s one avenue. 

The other thing that the Realtors have is they have a database of the local top agents so they can advertise to them directly. It’s called target marketing. So not only do they advertise to the buyers and target market of buyers, they also target market to local Realtors and other Realtors, not counting all the social media websites and the websites that they have and all the other multiple listing services they belong to. 

So by hiring a pro, you are exposing your home to a lot of buyers through that agent, which you may not have personally. This is what they do. They talk to buyers and sellers everyday and they have a database. Real estate is all about the database. The bigger your database, the stronger the database, the better buyers and sellers you have from there. And most Realtors have a certain database of buyers. So that’s another big advantage of hiring a pro when it comes to selling your home in the time that you want to sell and at the maximum price possible at your time, at that time in your local market and with the least hassles.

4.) The fourth reason you may want to hire a Realtor or Pro is that they have the negotiating skills to close a transaction. You may not have that deal. The Realtors sell anywhere from 5-20 homes a year on average on a yearly basis. So they have sold a lot of homes over their career, especially the well experienced Realtors and who have been in the business 5-20 years. 

The number one skill that you want from your Realtor is a negotiating skill. When a buyer brings you an offer that’s $100,000 less than what you want, how are you going to negotiate that? Some of the buyers may want to ask you for your furniture, or when the repair comes up, they may want to ask you to repair everything. When the vendors and inspection companies do the inspection and recommend that you fix this or do this, they want to negotiate with you and with the potential buyer, what’s best for everybody. If a buyer comes and say, hey, I’ll buy your house, but I want to sell my house first, will you wait for me to sell my house so I can buy yours? How do you negotiate that? So negotiating skill is very important in closing a transaction, because transaction is a complicated process. 

Selling a home is one thing. It may take you 17 to 20 days to sell a home, maybe up to three months to sell a home in a normal market, that’s one thing. And then closing the escrow is another thing. That’s where all the negotiating comes up. And most of the problems start when you open escrow. You may have lending issues with the buyer, you may have appraisal issues. There may be a lien show up on a property, on your property that you did not know about. There may be child support issues that come up with you as a seller or with the buyer. And all this takes a lot of negotiating. There may be issues in the homeowners association that pop up. 

I remember I sold a house back in June, and the lady was very professional and she was very meticulous and highly analytical. She wrote the whole HOA process, 100 pages. And she found out that they were having problems. The HOA was having problems with the insurance companies and they had some lawsuits, so we had to go through that. Took us two or three weeks. We talked to the attorneys, finally resolved that issue. 

So any of these issues can come up before you close the escrow. So again, there’s a negotiating with the seller if we are representing you as a seller, but also with the buyer. So negotiating is a big skill. So if there is one reason you want to hire a pro is because they are better negotiators when it comes to buying and selling. And when it comes to buyer, seller, lenders, appraisal, all of them put together trying to close a deal on your house.

5.) The fifth reason why you want to hire a pro or a professional or a realtor is because there’s a lot of fine prints to deal with and there’s a lot of disclosures to deal with. 

I’m in California, and California has a lot of disclosures when it comes time to selling a home. There may be up to 20-30 forms by the time we finish closing a home. Not only that, but when the buyer brings an offer, a lot of buyers have addendums attached to it. So not only do we have to read the fine print of what they actually asking for, we have to be able to negotiate those based on what they are saying. And we cannot miss the little fine prints that they have. Not only on the offers, but on the addendum. 

And also we want to make sure that you as a seller, when you sell a home, you have filled out all the required documents, all the required disclosures, like Megan’s laws, earthquake laws, carbon monoxide laws, Los Angeles County has flushing your toilet disclosures. How much is the tank flushing? We have all kinds of disclosures. You as a seller, are you disclosing it to the buyers? Because that is required in California. It’s required in writing that you provide certain disclosures without which we cannot close an escrow. 

So selling a home, there’s a lot to it. There’s marketing, there’s negotiating, there’s photography, there’s staging. But there’s also a lot of disclosures. And your agent, your trusted and professional agent, will help you do that. Good luck on selling your home. Feel free to call me if I can refer you an agent or if I can personally help you.