{"id":86,"date":"2008-04-03T17:51:28","date_gmt":"2008-04-04T07:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/real-estate\/sell-your-own-home-day-6\/"},"modified":"2008-04-03T17:51:28","modified_gmt":"2008-04-04T07:51:28","slug":"sell-your-own-home-day-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/real-estate\/sell-your-own-home-day-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Sell Your Own Home – Day 6"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"forsale-sign\"<\/a> Well, we’re officially on MLS.  Whoo-hoo!  Frankly, it’s been a bit of kluge, but I guess in the end it all works out.  Our very first day we get a call from a realtor to setup a showing.  My wife spoke with her and after setting a time for the showing my wife inquired as to whether or not she was a realtor.  Generally you don’t stay at your house for showings.  It helps the potential buyers see your home as their home if they don’t see the people that currently live there.  Also, it keeps you from answering awkward questions.  And, if you are very lucky, they may want to spend a lot of time going back and forth and talking about your house if they are very interested in it.  However, we aren’t going to leave strangers alone in our house without a realtor.  (The realtor is semi-liable and probably wouldn’t allow anything shifty.  It isn’t worth the trouble for them.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Now, this particular real estate agent upon being asked if she was a realtor asked my wife if she was.  She said no.  At this point the realtor said she needed to "check something" and then after a moment said never mind.  My wife asked why and the realtor said "because of the commission."<\/p>\n

We are selling our home ourselves but we understand that the buyers may not be doing it themselves.  So, we were offering 2.0% as a commission.  Now, apparently the "normal" commission for the buyer agent is 2.8%.  So, this realtor is not even going to show our house to her clients.  It doesn’t matter if it would be their perfect house of they would love to make it there home, she won’t show it to them because she won’t get her full pay day.  I work in finance and this kind of behavior is a specifically forbidden conflict of interest.  I guess real estate agents have looser ethics.  And, they wonder why there is a backlash against real estate agents and their commissions.  Here is a woman whose paycheck is more important to her than her client’s needs.  Keep in mind that we are talking about 0.8% here, so it isn’t like this was a big hit.  I guess selfish and self-serving is alive and well in the real estate business.  (Just for context, I mentioned this encounter to our usual realtor and she said that it made her sick to her stomach that someone would behave like that, so it isn’t all realtors.)<\/p>\n

We scheduled two showings anyway.  I guess someone who isn’t this woman’s client will be getting our gem of a house.  Maybe it will bite her when her clients see our house and wonder, why didn’t we get to see that one, it looks great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, we’re officially on MLS.  Whoo-hoo!  Frankly, it’s been a bit of kluge, but I guess in the end it all works out.  Our very first day we get a call from a realtor to setup a showing.  My wife spoke with her and after setting a time for the showing my wife inquired as to whether or not she was a realtor.  Generally you don’t stay at your house for showings.  It helps the potential buyers see your home as their home if they don’t see the people that currently live there.  Also, it keeps you from answering awkward questions.  And, if you are very lucky, they may want to spend a lot of time going back and forth and talking about your house if they are very interested in it.  However, we aren’t going to leave strangers alone in our house without a realtor.  (The realtor is semi-liable and probably wouldn’t allow anything shifty.  It isn’t worth the trouble for them.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[347,664,417],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-estate","tag-mls","tag-real-estate","tag-realtors","no-featured-image-padding"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/financegourmet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}