Knowing whether or not you should hire an agent to sell your house is one of the biggest questions facing home sellers. Are they worth all the extra money you may be losing out on your sale? For many people, deciding whether to hire an agent to sell their homes or not is a balancing act between the benefits it provides and the loss of some of the profits from the sale. Here are 5 ways to know if you should hire an agent to sell your house in Atlanta:
YOU’RE SHORT ON TIME
Selling your own home takes a lot of time. You’ve got to get it prepared and staged to list, research and determine how to properly price it, create and advertise a listing, show the house to potential buyers, and negotiate with interested parties. If you have a job, a family, or other obligations, the amount of time you need to spend selling your house can get overwhelming. When you hire an agent to sell your house, a lot of that time spent shifts over to them, leaving you free to live your life.
YOU DON’T WANT THE HASSLE
Dealing with all the different moving parts of a sale can be frustrating. You have to talk with people who may be interested in the home and entertain all sorts of questions and potential offers. Plus, you need to know where to list the home to get the most visibility and potential offers. If you’d rather just have someone else do all that work for you, it’s probably best to hire an agent.
YOU DON’T HAVE THE MONEY
Selling your home can be an expensive venture. It costs money to research the best listing price, to get the home ready for pictures, and it sometimes costs money to get the house listed online and in publications. If you sell your home on your own, you have to absorb all this cost up front.
However, when you hire an agent to sell your house, they pay all those costs, getting reimbursed when you close on your house as part of their fees. So, if you can’t see yourself paying out-of-pocket for these items, which can add up quickly, it may be best to work with an agent.
YOU’RE NEW TO THE PROCESS
Knowing exactly how to price a house to maximize profits while avoiding having it sitting, as well as all the other little details that go with the home sales process, takes time and experience. You may think you’re going to get a ton of great offers because people will see that the sale price isn’t going to be inflated to include an agent’s fees, but that isn’t always the case.
Selling a home quickly and for a great price takes skill. When all you do all day long is sell houses as a real estate agent, you can get really good at the little details.
YOU’RE AFRAID YOU’LL MESS UP
There are a lot of things that can go wrong with the home selling process, including forgetting to disclose a major issue with the home or missing a deadline. All of these mistakes can add up to a lot of lost time, lost money, and even potential legal trouble.
When you hire an agent to sell your house, a lot of the liability for these mistakes is absorbed by the agent, protecting you. If your agent forgets to disclose a long-ago basement flood, for example, that you told them about, you’re not in trouble for this failure.