make the premises look as cozy and comfortable as it can be in order to persuade the potential buyer that this is the perfect place for them. Anything beyond their expertise can be handled by one of the specialized professionals mentioned earlier—professionals with whom most agents maintain contacts, often allowing you to get a better deal on a reputable expert. Real estate agents also have full training on how to “seal the deal,” leveraging all that cleaning and staging and detail work to create the strongest possible negotiating stance from which to bargain. After all, no matter how much you spruce your home, there’s a limit to how much that alone can help you if you aren’t a skillful negotiator when the time comes. Professional agents can easily weed out the most promising leads among a crowd of potential buyers or a long list of visitors from a series of showings, and know how to coax them to the table and then to the contract.
MISTAKE #3—MARKETING IN THE WRONG PLACE: FAILING TO USE THE RIGHT CHANNELS
A Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is, simply put, the way to go. Many property owners who want to sell their home—be it a house, an apartment, a condo, anything—fail to market their property as well as they could because they don’t want to spend hundreds of “extra” dollars to list their property on the MLS. This is one of the greatest mistakes people can make when selling FSBO. An MLS is basically a huge, comprehensive database of homes for sale, connections to real estate agents and other buyers and sellers, and market information, which is routinely used by real estate brokers. It’s a very good way to attract the interest of many potential buyers, as well as their buying agents. Even if you decide to go FSBO, working with buying agents is the way to go in order to obtain a fast sale.
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