Posted on Tuesday, 1st June 2010 by Anna Kulbinski

You may wonder why you need the services of a professional Realtor. There are many reasons, but one of them is that without a Realtor, your home sale might not happen. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. When you don’t have a Realtor to show the house, you’ll naturally have to be there when the buyers are looking – and that alone can prevent you from even  getting an offer.

Having the sellers present is so intimidating to some buyers that they’ll hurry through the house and leave without getting a good look and seeing all the home has to offer.

When you aren’t there, they’ll take their time and will do things like checking the depth of the closets, turning on faucets to check the water pressure, and looking inside kitchen cabinets. When you’re there, most won’t do those things.

2. Without the presence of agents as a buffer, sales that might have closed get no farther than an offer or a counter-offer.

Sellers are emotionally attached to their homes, and buyers naturally want to buy for the lowest possible price. Thus, a low offer that could have resulted in a sale with the aid of some skillful negotiations, ends in a rejection with no counter-offer.

Realtors are skillful in smoothing ruffled feathers and getting both buyers and sellers to set their emotions aside and continue with the negotiations.

3. When buyers and sellers are in direct contact, personality conflicts can end the negotiations.

Sometimes buyers and sellers simply rub each other the wrong way. The buyer criticizes something about the house or the way it has been maintained – or the seller criticizes the behavior of the buyers’ children. Or someone makes a political or religious remark that offends the other party.

The end result is that the transaction can fail over nothing more than a personality conflict.

When Phoenix Realtors are the go-betweens between buyers and sellers, these issues do not arise because the two parties don’t deal with each other directly.

4. Phoenix homeowners facing an impending foreclosure and trying to sell on a short sale are in even greater need of a Realtor at their side, because they don’t have much time.

Without assistance from a skilled negotiator who knows just how much to push the bank’s approval department, a short sale can be stalled so long that the buyer goes away in frustration and the house goes into foreclosure.

But losing the sale is not the worst that can happen. Unless the seller or the seller’s agent knows how to negotiate with the bank, the sale could close and leave the homeowner owing a huge sum for the portion of their mortgage loan not paid off by the sale.

5. Sometimes, after weeks of waiting, the buyer can’t get a mortgage loan. Realtors make sure their buyers are pre-approved for a loan before finding them a house, but buyers working without the aid of an agent often don’t know the difference between a pre-qualification and a pre-approval. And, unfortunately, neither do the sellers.

Realtors working with Phoenix home sellers advise them not to take the house off the market until they have 3rd party assurance that the buyer can complete the transaction.

When the buyer can’t get a loan, it leads to heartaches for both buyers and sellers. It’s especially frustrating for sellers who may have turned away other buyers, thinking that the sale was a sure thing.

And this is just the beginning…

These are all situations that can prevent the sale of your Phoenix home, but many more pitfalls lie in wait for buyers and sellers who are inexperienced in dealing with the legalities of buying or selling a home.

Professional Realtors make sure that their clients understand every section of the purchase and sale agreement and all the other forms, and they protect their clients by including contingencies, disclosures, dollar limits, and specific deadlines that must be met.

For instance, buyers and sellers who have not been involved in a Phoenix home purchase recently may not know that sellers are legally obligated to provide a property disclosure to the buyer.

When this is not provided, buyers can later find themselves faced with expensive repairs that they did not anticipate. And sellers can find themselves faced with a lawsuit for non-disclosure.

Without these safeguards, buyers and sellers can find themselves in legal entanglements, or sitting in limbo waiting – and legally unable to cancel the agreement and move on.



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Posted in Buyers, Phoenix Real Estate, Sellers | Comments (0)

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