I was in the market to sell a rental property I owned. Most of my rentals are in the city of Chicago and I had one or two rentals still out in the burbs. I kind of wanted to consolidate everything to one area so was looking to dump a property in the burbs. Now I've sold houses on my own before and like many people say, it's not rocket science, if I can save myself 30K I'll do it myself. Your right, its not rocket science but having a realtor can be valuable for the paper work, doing the showings for you and is just more convenient.
Sometime back I had started a thread on a forum asking about inexpensive flat rate realtor services. I wanted to share my experience with others who may be wresting with whether to hire a realtor or go it alone. Now if you have time to kill may as well try selling on your own first, it can't hurt and maybe you save yourself 10's of thousands of dollars. In a time crunch however I'd almost have to say go with a realtor.
I wound up paying a company $250. They had a licensed Reatlor on staff but it was basically a flat fee self service type agreement. I filled out a document with relevant info about my home and picked a price to list at. I did do some research and looked at some comps before selecting the amount. I actually wanted to list it lower but a realtor working in my neigbhorhood urged me to list higher. Why I listened I don't know but I did. I feel I listed a bit high.
There weren't many showings, pretty much few and far between, especially for the market my home was in. I feel this basically boils down to a few reasons. First off, I was priced a bit high. I was selling in the winter when most families don't want to move plus all the Christmas chaos. I think would I have waited til Spring things would have moved quicker.
Secondly, they listed my property in a confusing way. It said something to the effect of this was a exclusive right propert and said I would show the home and do all the paperwork. This is not normally how self service listings appear. I feel this hurt me as people maybe wrote me off as a confusing deal or short sale or something along those lines.
After a few weeks with little action I contacted the companies appraiser to find out how far off on price I was. He actually really helped me out by talking me out of his services and giving me some info and advice which I really appreciated. He told me I was priced too high and also said this error mentioned above is scaring off realtors most likley.
As far as pictures the company I hired took pictures, I have a decent camera and though not an expert kinda enjoy photography. I threw their pics in the trash, well the trash box on my computer at least and used my own. Their photographer sucked. I feel like along the way I maybe made some mistakes with potential buyers and agents.
At this point I had another apartment building in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago and wanted to sell before that was off the market so decided to go with a traditional realtor. I did negotiate the commission to 1/2 of his normal commission as I buy and sell a fair bit of properties and he knew he could get more of mybuinsess in the future.
It wasn't that I couldn't handle the paperwork or anything like that but time was a factor if I wanted to pick up this other property. If this wasn't the case I probably would have held out til spring and did a price reduction. A few months prior to my listing I was even seeing bidding wars on some properties in my area.
After talking to several realtors I settled on a local realtor who specializes in investment properties, I figure maybe I'll use him sometime down the road as well. The property owund up selling in 3 weeks and I had to do almost nothing. Yeah it's great to save a few bucks but don't do this if you don't have a clue what your doing and don't do this if your in a rush, just go the route of a traditional Realtor.
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