It’s only natural when you are selling your home that the first thing you think of is your bottom line. It is a sale after all, and you want to maximise your returns. An expense when selling is your real estate agent, who charges varying degrees of commission for the opportunity to sell and market your property.
When choosing who you want to work with, it’s tempting to go with the one that charges the least commission. Today we want to talk about commission rates and why going the cheaper route may end up costing you more in the long run.
How Does a Low Commission Agent Make Money?
It’s simple, they go for volume. They are operating on very tight margins, so they have to sell a large number of houses in order to get by. This in itself is troubling for a number of reasons. Remember that old adage, ‘you get what you pay for’? You don’t want that to ring true for you when selling your home.
Here are some of the risks of the ‘high volume, low cost’ approach:
A Less Personalised Service
Selling more properties for less means low-commission agents are juggling plenty of listings. They don’t have the financial bandwidth to build up a team to assist them with this, so they’re doing everything on their own. They’re time-poor and can’t give you the personalised service you deserve when selling your home. This is very frustrating when you’re chasing progress updates or regular, transparent communications about where the sale process is at.
It could also mean that less buyers will see your home, because an agent only has so many hours in a day. They may not have any time available that aligns with a set of buyers, who may drift away as a result.
A Smaller Network
A cheaper real estate agent will generally be a local agent who only focuses on the local area. They don’t have a large network to leverage to sell your property, because they don’t have the capacity to pursue building up this network.
Successful agents have a large network to lean on. They don’t just put a listing up on the main real estate portals and wait for it to sell. They actively engage with their network to give a listing the maximum traction possible.
Their network isn’t limited to the local region either – they will have contacts all around Australia and overseas too. To successfully market a property to international contacts, you’ll notice they focus heavily on marketing the suburb or area as well as the property itself. Local agents won’t focus on this because they’re only catering to local buyers.
Ineffective Professional Network
A cheaper agent is going to look to cut costs wherever they can. So can you expect high-quality photography, videos, 3-D tours or copywriting to market your home? No, you can’t. They won’t go that extra mile because they don’t see it as necessary. It may be considered an extra that you’ll have to organise and pay for yourself.
Similar to other services you’ll need to prepare your home for sale. Lower commission agents will have an ineffective professional network because they will have aligned themselves with low-cost services. Do you really want the cheapest gardening service taking care of your yard? Are you sure they’ll do a good job?
Your Home Won’t be a Priority
When your home is one of many, it won’t be a priority. The focus is to get it sold, not to get it sold at the highest price possible! Not as much time and effort is put into negotiating because they don’t want to scare off the buyers. They’ll just settle with what they offer.
You’ll save money on the commission, but you could end up losing money overall when you go with a low-commission real estate agent. Let’s look at what you can expect when you entrust the sale of your home with an established, elite agent like The Henry Wong Team®.
What to Expect from an Elite Agent
Amongst many other benefits, your elite agent will:
- Have an established, far-reaching network (national and international) willing to help them with the sale of your home.
- Have a large database of contacts they notify upon listing a property, providing early traction to a listing.
- Be constantly available to you and to potential buyers, always exhibiting exceptional communication skills and transparency.
- Have a large social media network.
- Not be reliant on the main real estate portals to market a home.
- Have a strong network of professionals to refer you to for various services.
- Exhibit strong negotiation skills when a buyer is found.
Sell With The Henry Wong Team®
If you want a real estate transaction that offers peace of mind and certainty in the outcome, Henry and his team are here to help. They’ve achieved an unconditional contract on over 90% of properties they’ve sold, all within a 20-day marketing period.
If you’re looking for a similar result, chat to Henry today!
