By Jim Hart
Are you planning on buying or selling a home? Maybe refinancing?
Perhaps you’d just like to pick up a few tips on home buying,
selling and mortgage borrowing-if so you may want keep track of Money
Matters in the months ahead as I will be giving out all kinds of tips
and insights as we approach the home buying-selling season. I will be
discussing a wide variety of real estate and mortgage financing issues
you should know (Things real estate agents don’t want you to know).
Well, good agents won’t have a problem with you knowing this
information but the part-timers and less ethical operators would
certainly prefer you not know what I am going to share with you!
You see, buying or selling a home is the largest investment of a
lifetime for most people and it is a BIG business deal…a transaction
composed people, emotions, contracts and cash…all the ingredients
for legal and financial pain if you don’t know what you are doing.
Real estate agents earn a commission when a home is sold whether they
are the listing agent, the selling agent or both. Real estate agents
typically (and legally) represent sellers in a real estate transaction
and not buyers. Yet, every day, homebuyers refer to the real estate
agent as “my real estate agent”…they are not your real estate
agent…they are the home seller’s agent and agents have a legal
duty to get the best selling price for the seller. Further, anything
you tell them can and probably will be used against you to extract a
higher selling price out of the deal. Sellers on the other hand are
often manipulated into signing long term listing contracts for up to a
year by an agent who will simply throw the listing into the multiple
listing service (MLS) and hope another agent sells the property for
them.
For agents, the name of the game is to get listing contracts…a
common slogan amongst real estate agents is: “if you don’t list,
you don’t last”. Once an agent gets a listing contract from a home
seller, they will get the bulk of the commission when the house is
sold whether they sell it or another agent sells the home. Not many
sellers know this fact and many are swooned into long term listing
agreements with hopeful promise of selling their homes at the highest
possible price only to find out they don’t. Agents will say and do
most anything to get a listing contract shy of breaking the law. And
the big question for home sellers is are you working with a part time
or full time agent? What is their background in marketing and sales?
Do you really want to sign a long term listing agreement with a part
timer that has one toe in the tub and no business background? Were
talking about a business deal right?
Make Money
with Squidoo
Whether you are buying a home or selling a home you should be clearly
aware that you will enter into legally binding contracts and relying
on mortgage lenders to provide financing for the project. The question
then becomes; how much do you know about contract law and mortgage
financing? What are the most important elements of a contract and how
does that impact you as a buyer or seller? This series of articles is
generally drawn from our E-Report (101 Real Estate Tips for home
buyers, sellers and money borrowers). The report is designed as a
crash course to provide you the information you need to know to
protect your legal and financial interests whether you are a home
buyer or seller. This series of articles will touch upon the
information you should know to keep from making blatantly stupid
mistakes that could hurt you legally and financially and we’ll try
to have some fun in the process…
If you would like to receive a FREE copy of our E-Report: 100 Tips For
Home buyers, Sellers And Money Borrowers, go to smart Books, FREEBIES
SECTION and download the report...Free!
Copyright © 2006 James W. Hart, IV All Rights reserved
