Selling on Your Own vs. Selling With an Agent

Selling your home with a professional agent means they can use all their skills to sell your home quicker and for more money than you could by selling it on your own.

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The primary distinction between FSBOs and professional real estate agents is that agents have a series of skills and talents they can apply to a home sale to enable that home to sell for substantially more money.

Specifically, there are seven skills a professional agent uses to help a home sale reach its full potential:

1. Pricing the property. This requires a high level of awareness of all the ever-shifting economic factors that make up the real estate industry.

2. Mobilizing other real estate agents to sell the property. An agent can broaden the scope of a sale by mobilizing agents within their company, agents beyond their company, and agents from outside of the area to help sell it.

3. Qualifying buyers. This isn’t as easy as just looking at a pre-qualification sheet that was produced online. Oftentimes, these pre-qualifications aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

Negotiating contracts is a skill that makes all the difference in the world when someone’s been practicing it for 10, 20, or 30 years.

4. Negotiating contracts. This is a skill that makes all the difference in the world when someone’s been practicing it for 10, 20, or 30 years.

5. Navigating home inspections. Home inspections can create a wide variety of scenarios within a home sale, and being able to negotiate the issues in each scenario is critically important.

6. Preparing for an appraisal and enabling the appraiser to optimize the property’s value. This skill requires being able to gather comparable sales and embellish the sale at the maximum opportunity to provide value.

7. Showing multiple homes. FSBOs won’t be able to show multiple homes in order to maximize the interest in their own property.

If you have any other questions or concerns about the differences between selling as FSBO and selling with a professional agent, don’t hesitate to give me a call or send me an email. I’d be happy to help you.

How to Merge Households in the Merrimack Valley

Looking to buy or sell a home in Merrimack Valley? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (978) 852-3001 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

When a family merges, spouses often consider whether to scale up into a new home. They might also think about remodeling a home they already own. If you’re facing a similar dilemma, ask yourself the following questions.

• Does it make sense to achieve a fresh start?
• Will the equity in the original home be a better fit for the home compared to a new one?
• Where will your family be the happiest?

A real estate professional can help you examine the local market and, of course, answer these questions. Remember – there’s no place like home. If you’re thinking about buying or selling a home, give me a call or send me an email today. I’d love to hear from you!

4 Ways to Prepare Your Home for a Showing

Looking to buy or sell a home in Merrimack Valley? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (978) 852-3001 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

Personal individuality is great, but not in the real estate market. Flashy furniture and gaudy decorations can definitely begin to impact the sale of your home. When people are touring your home they don't want to see your personality - they want to see your home. 

Here are four tips to rid your home of your character and get it sold more quickly.

1. Remove family photos, heirlooms, diplomas, trophies, or any other memorabilia or artwork that might take away from the experience of the potential buyer. They need to visualize themselves living in the home, and they can't do that if the home is filled with your belongings.
2. Repaint any rooms with too much personality. Hot pink or camouflage schemes may please you, but it will not help to sell your home. Try repainting with neutral earth tones to appeal to more buyers.
3. Show rooms as they are supposed to be used. Showcase your office as an office (not a storage area) and stage your garage as a place to park your vehicles (not a personal workshop). 
4. Detach yourself emotionally from your home. We tie in lots of feelings and emotions in our homes, but when you decide to sell your home, it's not really your home anymore. It's a huge investment, and you have to set aside your emotions to come to that realization. Emotions can eventually begin to impact your selling process, and that's a very hazardous situation. 

Hopefully these few tips will prevent your home from going stale as a result of clinging to your personality and investing too much emotion into your home. Letting go of the memories in your home isn't easy, but it's necessary for a great sale.

As always, please contact me with any questions about the Merrimack Valley real estate market. I would gladly set aside some of my time to speak with you.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Selling

Looking to buy or sell a home in Merrimack Valley? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (978) 852-3001 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions. 

We are thrilled to have you join us today to talk about a topic that we hope will be very helpful to you. When should you list your home for sale? There are several questions you may want to explore to help you determine whether now is the right time. Let's get right to them:

1. Is now the time to find your ideal property once your home goes under contract?

 Find out from your Realtor whether or not interest rates and inventory are adequate. This should let you know if your ideal property is available and affordable.

2. Do you have a high level of motivation to move to a new home?

 If the answer is yes, it's time for you to start planning your home sale.

3. Have you identified the right people to assist you with the process?

When you hire the right agent, lender, and attorney, they will be able to answer all of your questions with professionalism and proficiency. 

4. Is your home prepared to yield you the highest sale price possible?

 Have you had the home cleaned, updated, staged, and inspected? Have you identified and corrected issues that will prevent your home sale from going through?

If you have any questions about deciding when to list your home, please feel free to give us a call or send us an email. We would be more than happy to help you out!

How to Avoid Falling Into an Expired Listing

Looking to buy or sell a home in Merrimack Valley? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price  Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (978) 852-3001 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.  

I have been getting a lot of inquiries about expired listings. Today I'm going to tell you a little about them because they are somewhat common in all markets, including here in the Merrimack Valley.

Expired Listings:

First off, let me explain what an expired listing actually is: An expired listing occurs when a property goes up for sale, but 6 or 9 months later it has not sold and the 'for sale' sign is removed from the yard. In the Northeast Association of Realtors there have been 22,262 expired listings in the past 6 months.

There are a few reasons why these properties do not sell:

1. Lack of Exposure: If the property is not marketed well, you will not find a buyer with a good fit. Properties need to be marketed locally, regionally, nationally, and even internationally.
2. Improper Pricing: Homes must be priced accurately and attractively so that buyers see good value in a property. Affective pricing requires lots of experience, so you need a capable agent such as myself to do this for you.
3. Failure to Negotiate: If the seller and the listing agent cannot bridge connections between buyer agents, attorneys, home inspectors, underwriters, etc, then there will be turbulence. Negotiating is an essential skill in real estate, so once again, you will need to find a capable agent to do this for you.
4. Poor Communication: If an agent and a client are not in sync, this can cause a cascade of problems to arise in the home selling process.
5. Lack of Experience on Behalf of Agents: Unfortunately, most homes that do not sell can trace their problems back to a poorly prepared agent who did not bring the seller to an awareness for a successful sale to occur. It takes knowledge and ability to sell a home, and some agents just don't possess the necessary skills.

If you have any questions or concerns about this issue, or would like help buying or selling in the Merrimack Valley, then please feel free to give me a call at (978) 256-3306 or email me at paul@paulbrouillette.com

When Should You Sell Your Property to Get the Most money in the Least Amount of Time

Looking to buy or sell a home in Merrimack Valley? Click here to perform a full home search, or if you're thinking of selling your home, click here for a FREE Home Price  Evaluation so you know what buyers will pay for your home in today's market. You may also call us at (978) 852-3001 for a FREE home buying or selling consultation to answer any of your real estate questions.

Many clients have been asking me recently whether they should wait until the spring to put their homes on the market. Here are a few considerations to make during this process:

1. What is your timetable for sale? If you have children and would like them to finish school before moving, perhaps waiting until the spring would be a good idea. In this case, allow yourself at least 4 months for this process (from listing to sale) to occur.
2. However, keep in mind that 60% of homes are listed in the spring and summer. Putting your home on the market earlier will give you a competitive advantage if you don't have any time constraints to deal with. Plus, putting your home on the market when inventory is low will result in multiple offers and possibly a higher selling price.
3. Consider interest rates. Right now rates are the lowest we've seen in 45 years, and the consensus is that they will probably rise by a point to somewhere around 5%. Because of this, if you have no reasons not to list your home for sale right now, then you should go ahead and put it on the market as soon as possible.
4. What are the advantages of setting a time-table on your home? If you want to avoid owning two homes simultaneously, you need to plan your move-in and prepare to sell your property ahead of time. Owning two homes at once is tricky financially as well as logistically!

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact me at (978) 256-3306 or email me at paul@paulbrouillette.com

Have a great week!