OH well. It was a nice try.
As a former RE agent, I know that you have to have insured personnel (lockbox trustworthy) to take potential buyers to view properties.
I’ve got it!
Old discarded Petrocks easily could replace them!
I’m doing real estate and get leads from Trulia.com. Then I have to go out and find them a house they can actually buy.
Yeah....somebody has to do the lying with a straight face, up close and personal like...
I am a real estate appraiser who has spent 30 years studying market reaction to the locational and physical characteristics of real estate and make no mistake good real estate agents do more than simply provide access to properties. It the go go days a few years ago you could easily sell a home on your own but in normal times and especially right now a good agent is essential to effectively marketing your property.
They will be around for a long time.
Having just bought some rural property after over a year searching and quite a few offers, including a few that went to contract, here’s my opinion.
The agents — both buyer’s and seller’s — definitely added value during many parts of the process.
However, after the initial offer (the preparation of which was added value from our agent), having not ONE but TWO agents in the middle during negotiations really gums up and distorts the negotiating process. It’s like an adult version of that kid’s game “telephone”. Whatever you tell the agent gets twisted into the funniest shapes by the time it comes out the other end (except it really isn’t funny).
Several times I had to insist on cutting through the agent-intermediary crap and working directly with the seller, which saved lots of time and frustration.
There’s a place for disintermediated (i.e. direct) real estate transactions, and I wish the damned Realtors(tm) boards didn’t have such a lock on the process so that more such transactions could occur. But there is also a place for agents, and the better ones *do* add value.
Just my 2c
When we moved to another state last year, I searched the internet for houses on the MLS for that city. I viewed several thousand houses and narrowed it down to 2 to actually look at with one being the preferred choice. All the RE agent did was to let us in the house to look, and then call in our offer to the listing agent, then hook use up with a closing agent. The RE agent did almost nothing in the deal to earn a commission. There will become a time when property sales will not need the agents at all.
When I bought my previous house, I met with the seller, handed my money over in front of a notary public at the bank, and took my notarized bill of sale to the courthouse to have the deed changed over; as simple as selling a used car; no agents involved at all.