Done with playing FOLLOW THE LEADER WITH realtors! (commissions, mortgage, mortgages)
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First, I am a Realtor I want you to know that up front.
The people above who say a house is worth what someone will pay for it are really clued in to the market.
The newspapers, the internet, TV, all the media have been beating up Real Estate for the past year or two.
The prices went too far, too fast. There is a nationwide price correction going on.
You said in your post Realtors want to make a fast buck. Realtors would like you to sell your house and have nice things to say about them and buy and sell through them again.
One of the biggest parts of my job as a Realtor is to educate. Educate the sellers and educate the buyers. There aren't as many buyers out there because of the negative publicity. There will always be a certain number of people that have to buy and others that have to sell.
If you don't need to sell your home, take it off the market. But it will be a few years. I have been in the business for 25 years and the last slow market in our area lasted from 1988-1995 or there abouts.
I want to give you a good comparison.
Let's say you have IBM stock and it is selling for $100 today.
You tell your stock broker sell it for $115, you and I both know it won't sell.
Your stock broker is really good and he is in touch with the market he says...
The market is a little scary right now, I am pretty sure IBM is going to go down to $85.
Let's sell your IBM for $99 TODAY!
You sell and get the money.
Or... you hold out for the $115, it goes down to the $85 the broker predicted,
you ask for the $100.
It goes down to $75 you ask for the $85
so you "Follow the market" instead of selling.
Most good Realtors have sold at least 100 homes. Most home sellers have sold less than 5 homes.
Real Estate is one of the few businesses that buyers and sellers think they know more than the professionals. (Although lately sometimes they do.)
I hope this helps and good luck with your house sale.
It is reasonably sensible to discount the input of any RE Agent who pontificates about the market in general. There is far too much variability in the market for "universal truth". The course is set by what is goiing on locally.
The use of stock market anologies is another questionable practice. It has some minor import to investors but is quite meaningless in terms of primary residence.
Actually, I did wonder as I read through the thread if some of the first posters still feel this way, if they got their price, still live there, foreclosure...etc.
I also wonder if they ever figured out that Realtors do not control prices like some want to believe.
We were the learning curve for our realtor. Houses are still selling in our area still pretty quickly. But, they are selling for an average of $30,000 under asking. So now the realtors are pricing houses above what the seller wants, giving them more wiggle room to reduce the price and negotiate.
Actually, I did wonder as I read through the thread if some of the first posters still feel this way, if they got their price, still live there, foreclosure...etc.
I also wonder if they ever figured out that Realtors do not control prices like some want to believe.
At least the OP sold their house, and seemed to be happy with the end result. Not sure if they got their original number or adjusted their expectations, but it's a happy ending in either case...
In our area (Tampa) the market is very slow and as in the rest of the Country the gas prices are rising almost by the minute. I see people selling mow equipment next to the road, probable because they people who use to work in construction and couldn't get a job anymore, went to work as lawn companies and since there are too many, they haven't got much work anymore and with the fuel prices rising there is less money to make.
Yesterday there was an article that 27.000 jobs were lost because of the housing crisis in the Tampa Bay area.
So IMO we can expect many more houses to come on the market to be sold, because ARM are still going to be reset in the near future, people maximized their credit cards to the limit and have no money left.
I wonder how many reators are still making any money and probable the once who still make money are the once who are giving good service to their cleints and have the experience. Everyday the prices in the grocery store are going up, etc. and people aren't making more money than the day before, but everything is getting more expensive so it is easy to know that the housing crisis will be bigger and things are going to be worse. I want to stay positive but seeing all this and folowing the gas prices, doesn't make any one happy. So I understand if people try to save on commisions or on other things they can save on. I see homes for sale for over a year and the yards are looking worse and worse and I don't understand why a realtor wants to keep the sign in a yard like that. To me that is bad advertisement. If it is bank owned I can understand but if people are asking prices that are not short sale prices, I would have my sign removed a.s.a.p. or the home owners need to help out to make at least the property presentable. To me many realtors never even look at properties they have listed, because the listing pictures are so old, from the time the property was still looking good.
Realtors pay, bla, bla, bla....how do you pay your accountant, your lawyer, your financial planner and oh by the way, does it matter what the car salesman makes when you buy that automobile?
This thread is old, but its crazy that some sellers still feel this way !
What is happening is that prices are returning to the sane levels they were before the craziness began. It cannot feel good when homes are listed so high and then two weeks later there are price drops of $20,000 or more. The realtors are either of two kinds: those who list way too high and those who are listing realistically. The prices are stabilizing once again.
I was watching a house on the MLS listing site and just before we were going to see it, it disappeared from the market. It had been listed at $229,900. Suddenly it re-appeared on another realty site, with a new real estate agency and an asking price of $265,000! What is wrong with them? If they couldn't sell at the lower price why do they expect they will do so with one so much higher? Somebody must have talked them into doing this. Was it their new agency, promising them higher gains?
A house one street over from me is listed at $500,000. They cannot seriously think they will get anywhere near that amount. The house is lovely-a 4 bedroom, 2 bath, plus a lot of goodies inside, great neighborhood and about 1 acre of lawn. But still, nobody is going to dish out that kind of money today. Plus the rest of the homes on the street are worth at most $350,000, with many quite a bit below that.
With all the news and media coverage you'd think people understand that it's a buyers market right now and even with that, we are going through a financial setback in the US. Well, believe it or not, there are people out there that refuse to believe it.
There are people out there saying that the media is blowing this all out of proporation.
I wonder sometimes what planet these people live on.
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Real Estate is local
