Whissel Realty's Real Estate Agent Jeremy McHone discusses why having a listing agent is so important when selling your home.

The Benefits Of Hiring A Listing Agent

We all know it's a crazy sellers market. So you're probably thinking, "I can sell my home myself." Or you're thinking, "It doesn't matter who I hire because we're getting multiple offers. It's going to sell itself anyway." Right? Wrong. I'm Jeremy McHone and I'm going to tell you why now more than ever it's important to hire a professional listing agent that knows the ins and outs of this market.

We know that there's more buyers right now in this market than there are sellers. So that means if you put your home on the market at a remotely reasonable price, you're probably going to get a bunch of showings and multiple offers. So you might think, "Oh, I've got multiple offers. Some of them are over list price. That means they got top dollar, right?" Wrong.

Why Does Experience Matter?

Just because you sell your home over the list price doesn't mean you got top dollar for your house. What's important when it comes to negotiating with multiple offers is the experience of the listing agent and their ability to extract every penny out of those buyers so they get you the absolute most amount of money. Not just the most amount of money, either. Also the best terms, because that's going to decide how smooth and comfortable you are throughout the process.

When it comes time to hire a listing agent, you need to make sure that you have somebody who's got experience in negotiation, has negotiated a lot of deals, and most importantly, has negotiated in this market because experience negotiate, experience in negotiating in the past markets doesn't apply to this market. It's not the same.

Communication is Key

In addition to negotiating and getting you the best terms and the most amount of money for your home, what also matters is how your experience was selling your home. Did you know what was happening every step along the way? Are you in the loop on everything? Do you understand what's going on in the process? Is the listing agent you hire answering their phone, communicating to you. Just as important as that, are they communicating to the buyers that are trying to reach out to them?

You're not going to get the best experience if you don't have someone that's going to be communicative, who's going to answer their phone, both for you and for prospective buyers, who can answer their questions and encourage them to place an offer that might end up being better than all the other offers that you received. Now, you put your home on the market. You got multiple offers. Great for you. Now, how do you weigh the offers against each other?

There's a lot more to an offer than just the price. In fact, did you know that offers are 10 pages long in California? That means if you get 10 offers on your home, that's a hundred pages of contract that needs to be sifted through. Now, if you're like 99% of sellers that I've worked with, you're probably not going to sift through all a hundred pages of those offers. You're going to rely on your agent to communicate to you what the pros and cons of each offer are and what the different terms are.

This is why it is extremely important that you have a professional agent that is detail oriented that can sift through all those offers, look at all the terms, and communicate all that to you so that you can know the pros and cons of each one and so that you can be in the best position possible to negotiate with all those offers. One thing you don't want to happen is you don't want an agent that didn't read the contract correctly, or even worse, didn't understand the contract correctly and then made an error in that contract or missed something, because they're not the one that ultimately suffers from that, you are.

Wrap Up

When it comes time to list your home, don't just sign with the first agent you meet or the first agent you talk to. Contact me and let me show you what I do to negotiate, my experience with that, plus what I do to analyze contracts and make sure that you understand all the terms and how I'm able to stay communicative and keep you in the loop through the entire process. If you're interested in selling your home anytime soon you want to learn more about this, drop a comment below, send me a DM, or give me a call or text at 619-971-0791.