As home-buyers and real estate professionals, we get this questions a lot.

Here’s some advice from STL Real Estate Co-Owner & Broker, Jim Manning as discussed in the video above:

“This is a tough question. There’s a lot of important things to understand about the home selling process and there’s a lot that goes into it.

It’s kind of like anything– you can cook your dinner at home or you can go out to fancy restaurant and pay someone else to do it. In order to make this decision, you really need to know everything that goes in selling the house.

At the very beginning, you have to market the house and put it up on the MLS. Then, you have to figure out what you’re going to do with scheduling showings. How are you going to get buyers into the property? Are you going to be able to take every phone call to schedule a showing or not? How are you going to deal with that?

Then if you find a buyer, what type of paperwork are you going to use? An additional thing to realize is people who are looking to buy homes “for sale by owner” (also known as FSBO), without an agent is typically a type of person that is looking for the best deal possible. If they’re able to find your property and if they end up deciding they like it, they’re going to potentially try to low-ball you and get your property for the lowest price possible.

Real estate gives you a lot of situations where you have the ability to save pennies but is going to cost you dollars by the end of the deal.

What I’ve learned:

Early in my career I had a property that when we first got it under contract it was for $280,000. We haggled over this and that. There was an inspection item that I just didn’t want to budge on. Long story short, the deal was falling apart and it was just a couple of hundred dollars to fix the item. From the first offer, to the final offer was only a $15,000 difference.

To have someone that has experience, to have someone that can help guide you in situations where maybe it is better to give a little bit to pick up dollars at the end of the day. If you’re so fixated on what you’re spending, you may miss out a big picture of how to maximize the value for your home.”

-Jim Manning, Licensed Broker

Call us!

If you’ve got any other questions in regards to the sale of your home, call us. We’ll talk you through it.