Very often online there is talk about whether or not it is useful to use a real estate agent.
Most conversations end-unfortunately-with anecdotes of misadventures in which real estate agents certainly do not make a good impression.
Several portals/sites for real estate listings EXCLUSIVELY dedicated to individuals have also taken off in the past 2 years.
These sites base their marketing campaign on their strength of the system, which is the "saving" of the commission to be paid to the real estate agency...
For goodness sake, all legitimate. Commissions in our category are a hotly debated topic and a weakness that other players march on.
Ours is a service that a private individual can do without.
If you learn those essentials of law, a few tips on the web to present the house well, and zero in on the right price, you can sell the house yourself without much trouble-it's a reality.
Do-it-yourself has always been there and always will be, we real estate agents can say whatever we want, claim we are indispensable, call for a LAW that forces everyone to go through our work (!?!?) tear each other's clothes off in public and extol our qualities as salespeople.
but if 40/50% of transactions in italy are between individuals, without our intervention,
WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
1 - Call a surveyor to check your house papers.
2 - An interior photographer to take beautiful photos to post on the web
3 - Once you find the buyer before you collect the deposit money go to a lawyer or directly to the notary public to have the preliminary done,
And that's it.
That is, of course, if there are no unforeseen dynamics intervening to hinder it. Dynamics that an eye trained by dozens and dozens of sales, knows how to intuit, predict, DISINNECT.
But I'm not here to talk to you about that.
Today I want to tell you about a curious episode.
An episode that had never happened to me in my career. So curious was it that it made me realize what our real ROLE is in a trade, and prompted me to recount it in these lines.
PROLOGUE:
Property difficult to sell, priced above what the market can offer, low demand, and has been for sale for quite some time.
HISTORY:
After several visits a couple shows interest. They return to see him again. There may be hope....
This couple, however, does not behave like others:
Try contacting the sellers directly ( with the intent of bypassing the agency ) who refer it back to me.
Under the guise of inquiring about the neighborhood, they go ringing neighbors' houses, asking for information in an "ungentlemanly" manner .
They send one of their technicians to the site without notifying anyone, who-thanks to the salesmen's kindness and pure chance-also manages to do the internal inspection.
In addition to making numerous inspections ( agreed upon) improbable requests are made, without ever actually expressing interest.
My "empathy radar" begins to signal a change in the attitude of salespeople, which a few weeks later is openly manifested.
" We to those people there, we don't sell the house."
The owners of the property, unfazed by the couple's attitudes, got in the way of negotiations. Understanding this, I did everything to keep the parties from meeting ( physically ) by lending myself to a little game in which I acted as a representative of one of the counterparts when the other was absent.
So what is to be done?
If you recall in the prologue, I wrote that for this house there was not really a "line" of people rushing to buy it.
The only ones potentially interested were them. Do I blow it up?
eh, no. No way.
Pecunia non olet, said the Latins
The money of the buyer who is on your balls is worth as much as that of the sympathetic buyer.
And that is exactly what I told the sellers. When we got to the expression of interest and the price negotiation ( the buyers made an offer much lower than the request ) I tried to avoid talking about "emotions" but only about numbers and economic aspects.
I knew that only by splitting the emotional side from the purely economic aspect of the transaction would I be able to complete the sale.
I turned the " ... screw them!!!" into "... we need to look for common ground with the buyer..."
I turned into a shock absorber of emotions.
This in my opinion is the role of an intermediary...try to think about it!
If this had been a negotiation between private individuals, the parties would never have come to an agreement, solely and exclusively because of misunderstandings about certain attitudes!!!
It is precisely this characteristic, engraved in our DNA, that makes us unique and irreplaceable.
The ability to mediate
Of always finding a solution, an agreement a compromise!
There will never be, surveyor, lawyer, notary or architect who can do this onerous task better than we can. These professionals have other roles and are paid for their work regardless of whether the deal goes through or not.
In summary, you can sell your house yourself...but there are dynamics that no matter how good you are, no matter how much you study, no matter how much you find the information on the web... you will never and I repeat NEVER be able to handle on your own! 😉
