Have you been thinking about using a real estate agent to list your house for sale? Realtors have historically been the most common way of selling a home, but things have changed! One of the biggest questions with real estate agents is how effective they are. Will they actually help your house sell faster? What do they actually do? We’ll answer all of those important questions in this article and even give you a fantastic alternative!
Selling a House in Today’s Market
Even if you’ve never personally purchased or sold a home of your own, you probably know that a real estate agent is a professional you should seek out for guidance. The term real estate can be thought of as actual, physical property, so a real estate agent is someone who can facilitate the buying and selling of physical property. It is true that real estate agents can help you sell your home on the market, evidenced by dozens of homes sold across the country every day.
However, one small problem with a real estate agent is that they charge a hefty fee in the form of commission. This is generally a percentage of your sale price, which even at a rare 2% commission rate (good luck finding that!) can be quite costly. If you’re going to shell out that much money to someone to help sell your house, you want to make sure that you’re getting your money’s worth from them.
What Does a Real Estate Agent Actually Do?
To understand if that is the case, you’ll need to know what a real estate agent actually does. When you picture a real estate agent, you may think of someone actively marketing your home, serving as its spokesperson and salesperson. Real estate agents are in fact quite different, instead serving as someone to oversee the sale of your house and provide you with the appropriate documents.
This means that they don’t actually do much in terms of helping your house sell. The job duties of a real estate agent include:
- Communicating With All Parties – This is fairly basic, but still important to facilitating any deal. Real estate agents will communicate with you as the seller and any potential buyers. This allows you to only speak with serious buyers, saving you time.
- Prepare Paperwork – There is a ton of paperwork involved with selling a house. From the title to sales offers and inspections reports, you can easily forget or simply not know about paperwork you need to fill out. A real estate agent will simplify this and provide everything at the correct time.
- Stage Homes – If you plan on staging your home, a real estate agent will do it for you. They can take an objective look at your home and see what would look best to potential buyers. They’ll also handle the transport of staged furniture.
- Host Open Houses – Probably the most important job duty a real estate agent has is hosting open houses. This is when potential buyers will come view a house and ask questions about it. Your real estate agent will need to supplement this with a strong marketing plan to ensure people actually show up to your open houses.
What Results Do They Produce?
When you put that all together, real estate agents serve as a middleman, provide you with the proper documents, take care of staging, and host open houses. When considering all of their responsibilities, open houses are really the only area where a real estate agent can make an impact. If your house does sell, was it because the buyer liked your home, or because your real estate agent really won them over?
Chances are, your real estate agent won’t actually influence the sale of your home. Unless their marketing strategy is extremely effective and draws in plenty of buyers making good offers, real estate agents are just glorified assistants. Is that assistance worth upwards of 6% of the sale price of your home?
Is There a Quicker Solution?
With that in mind, real estate agents not only have a minimal impact on whether or not your house sells, but they also probably won’t change how fast your house sells. This again comes down to marketing, but they likely won’t be the driving force behind a sale. So if real estate agents don’t actually help you sell faster, or at all, is there a better way to sell a house fast?
Absolutely. You can sell your house for cash directly to a home buyer, who will make you a fair cash offer no matter what shape it’s in! Instead of shelling out thousands to an assistant, you can keep all of the proceeds from the sale of your house for yourself! Considering you bought the house and are doing most of the work to sell it, should you have all of the sale price? If you want fast cash for your home in Indianapolis, you need to sell straight to a home buyer!
The Fastest Home Sales in Indianapolis!
Most home owners turn to a real estate agent when they want to sell their house, but real estate agents aren’t actually very effective at helping your house sell quicker. In fact, all that real estate agents do is maintain communication with all parties, give you the paperwork you need, arrange furniture for staging, and host open houses that they may or may not have marketed for.
Real estate agents can help your house sell quicker, but this is quite unreliable and doesn’t always translate to a sale. Considering how much of a fee a real estate agent charges, you should definitely get more value for your money. You can skip a realtor altogether by selling your home directly to Ben Buys Indy Homes! We’ll give you a fair cash offer that lets you finish the whole sale process in just days, and best of all, no commission fees! If you want a guaranteed way of selling your house fast in Indianapolis, reach out to us today!
