It doesn’t matter if you are buying or selling a home. Most everyone that you talk to about it will have some advice. Some of the advice is good and some of it is bad but usually the intentions of the advisor are very good. Most people only buy or sell a couple of homes in their lifetime and no two home sales or purchases are the same because the houses are not the same and the buyers and sellers are not the same.
Laws change every year and there are a bunch of mortgage programs and they are ever changing. Buying a home in today’s sellers market is very different than buying a home during the recent buyers market.
Most of the time your friends or family will tell you that “reel-it-ters” charge X amount and that number is usually more than I charge but sometimes I just say yes to it because why would I turn it down? It is true that our rates are always negotiable. It is also true that some real estate companies won’t let their agents charge less than X amount or they strongly discourage it. At Boardman Realty everything is negotiable.
After participating as a real estate agent in hundreds of home sales, over a 13 year period, I have a feel for how it all works and my instincts are pretty good when it comes to figuring out what to list a home for and how much to offer on a home that is for sale. My job is to give expert advice, and the decisions are made by my clients and when I negotiate an offer on a home I act as though it is the very best offer even if I think it is a bad offer because my job is to negotiate for my clients and to represent them to the best of my ability.
My advice to anyone buying or selling a home in today’s market is to forget most of what you think you know about buying and selling houses and do some research and listen to what your agent tells you and research that information too. Your friend who bought a house last month may have some useful advice to add based on his or her experience, so research that too.
When working with an agent you are paying for experience. A good agent saves her clients more money than she charges them.
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