The Pros and Cons of Hiring a Real Estate Agent

So, you’ve decided to sell your home, now you’re probably sitting there thinking “what do I do now”? This can be a quite confusing process, especially if this is the first property you’ve ever considered selling. You’re probably thinking “is selling your home as simple as calling a local relator”, “should I just let them take care of the process”, or “do I even need to hire a relator”?

You really need to sit down and think about how quickly you want your home sold, how much you want for the home, and how much time and money you’re willing to put into the home to boost its value. Another thing you need to consider when using an agent is how much of the sale price are you willing to pay your agent in commissions. In some cases, using an agent is in the seller’ s best interest and other times it’s not. It’s extremely important that you understand all of your options along with the advantages and disadvantages of using a real estate agent.

If you can find the right agent that suits your needs then there are many advantages to using a real estate agent. Now I’m going to discuss some of the advantages. First, you can avoid the large amount of paperwork that’s involved in the selling process. An experienced and highly trained agent will be able to sort through dozens of pages of paperwork. They will be able to ensure that your sale is done by the book and therefor you can ultimately avoid any errors and omissions that may arise if you were doing FSBO. Unless you want to devote your evenings and weekends to trying to sell your home, then hiring an agent can also save you a ton of time and energy.

One huge advantage of using a real estate agent is that you will have an expert in your local market on your side. A qualified real estate agent will know the market and market trends better than the average person. They will be able to guide you when setting the price of your home and they will know what price point you should be at in order to get your home sold quickly and on time. Lastly, you won’t have to do all the negotiating on your own. Most people have little experience with negotiating and if you have an expert on your side, buyers are more likely to skip the lowball offer and give a reasonable one.

So, now that we’ve discussed some of the pros of hiring a real estate agent we are going to talk about some of the cons. The big disadvantage that everyone thinks about is the fact that you must pay commissions, which can be very costly. If you hire an agent, you should accept that you are going to be one of the many clients this agent has. Therefore, depending on how busy they are with other clients, your home may not get the attention it needs. Lastly, you will be at the mercy of someone else’s timeline. Lastly, you will have to bring this real estate agent’s timeline into the mix, which may or may not fit with yours. There you have it, now you just have to decide whether or not hiring an agent will be in your best interests.