Of course we all want to get a great deal and try to save money where we can, especially in these tough times. So quite a few people try to sell their homes privately. For a few people it works out, for most it doesn’t. Some find out that the legal responsibility can backfire on them if information provided is incorrect. Some see as well the safety issue to their family, that strangers come to their home and family and that they never can be sure of their real intentions and if these strangers could do harm to them and their family. As we all have read in the news, every year quite a few realtors get attacked, some even murdered, while showing homes.
Since the exposure to the public through the private for sale companies is very limited, there still is this possibility to get your home onto the MLS while offering it privately. This is to go through a so called discount real estate brokerage in Ontario. With these companies you still save some money on the commission and get the exposure of the MLS system (realtor.ca). These companies list your property on the MLS for a relatively small fee (some for $199) additionally you still offer the buying agent a 2 or 2.5% commission. So you save almost ½ the commission. The discount broker takes some of the legal responsibility and the private seller has the exposure to the MLS. Everything seems great now, but is it really?
Well think about this. The MLS is really a tool used in most cases by private individuals to look for properties. Realtors belong to the local or regional real estate board and they usually don’t check the MLS. Realtors have a much more convenient to navigate local listing system. It allows them to see what listings come onto the market in their area on a daily basis and send these out to their clients, even before all this information is uploaded to the MLS. Of course as well all searches for properties on the market are performed through this system. The MLS however is not created to download the listings to the local realtor systems.
So the private for sale property is now on the MLS system, but the local realtor and their clients don’t know it is there, because the discount brokerage only posts the listing on their local board, like Ottawa, and the MLS. The result is that there will be very few showings from local agents, because once buyers have a realtor they rarely check the MLS anymore, since they get all the new listings automatically e-mailed from their realtor. The result: the property listed through the discount brokerage still has problems selling because it only can get the right exposure by being listed on the local real estate board.
The result for most of these private sale properties and these listed with a discount brokerage is, that this fee for signing up with the private for sale company and the discount brokerage just was a waste of money and a lot of time was wasted during which the property didn’t sell. After having spent all that money and time to try to sell the property (semi)privately they still have to list their property with a local realtor and spend the money for the full commission in order to get the property sold.
The moral of the story is, save yourself a lot of money, time, headache and peace of mind regarding safety for your family and go through a local realtor right away.
By: Thilo Biedermann, B.Sc.
Sales Representative
RE/MAX Twin City Realty Inc., Brokerage
Office: 519-579-4110
Direct: 519-240-0915
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