Today we’re going to talk about a favorite broker harassment topic: you won’t have enough time to do it yourself. Brokers just love to tell you this. They present selling a home as if it were still the 1800s. They ignore the existence of the Internet and literally hundreds of consumer search web sites. They imagine selling a home as if you needed to personally call lots of buyers, post listings on newspapers, and somehow get the word out. I completely realize that real estate is much more illiquid than stocks, but it has gotten dramatically easier in the past 20 or 30 years. In NYC, This issue of time is only really relevant for executives or fulltime professionals who are just so busy during the day that they don’t even have time to answer a few personal emails. If you are a stock exchange floor trader Or the ceo of a large bank, And you also don’t have a wife Or husband or son who can do this for you, Then perhaps you need to hire an outside human being to do this for you. For most of us, we have a few minutes or our partner has a few minutes during the day to be able to answer emails, so we don’t need to hire a human being who is extremely expensive. The reality of the matter is it only takes a few minutes of your day to answer emails. If you’re smart, you don’t put a real phone number on your listing. Alternatively, there are multiple services that can give you a phone number that goes straight to voicemail. Or, you can get a Google Voice number of which is free, and just never pick up that phone. You can always let it ring and go straight to voicemail, this way you will never have to actually speak on the phone unless you want to. And you can also have an email address that is created solely for the purpose of the sale so you will never have your personal email spammed. This way, when you have 10 minutes during lunch or an hour after work, you can peruse your new email account and respond to all the buyers. Nothing is as urgent as it seems. You do not need to respond to brokers who need to see your apartment this second. They and their clients can wait. You can also set an open house for 2 hours on a Saturday or Sunday when you have time, and have everyone go there at the same time. That is an extremely easy and efficient use of your time. So as you can see, it’s really is not that time intensive to sell your home by yourself. In fact, Listing brokers take advantage of the Internet so much that their jobs are a joke these days that they even admit it. So think it over, and I don’t care if you are an extremely high paid executive or lawyer, Even if your hourly rate is $500 an hour, Think about how much your home is worth and times it by 6%. Then divide that figure which in Manhattan is on average over $100,000 by the few hours it would take for you to sell by owner and see if you really are worth that much per hour! Agents certainly claim to be!
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Ryan PowellNYC homeowner, jazz enthusiast and FSBO guide Archives
May 2016
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