Follow The Money
Did you catch this one in Saturday's Seattle Times? For sale by owner? It's no primrose path.
Sometimes selling your own home is easy, especially in a hot market like Seattle. Sometimes it's tough. Either way, it's work.So you have the Times propping up the notion that real estate in Seattle is hot, HOT, HOT, while simultaneously actively discouraging people from trying to sell homes without a real estate agent—which by the way should be much easier in a red hot market, right?
...
While FSBOs might look great on the surface, industry experts and those who sold their own homes agree that homeowners need to consider plenty of caveats and potential pitfalls when they think about selling without an agent.
"When people start to pull back the covers on everything involved in selling their own home, they may decide that hiring a professional real-estate agent is the best path after all," said Brett Clifton, co-owner of Personal Real Estate Support Services in Seattle, which provides consumer real-estate information and links buyers with agents.
Just how much advertising revenue does the Seattle Times receive from real estate interests, anyway?
(Terence Finan, Seattle Times, 05.06.2006)
4 comments:
I'm so cynical these days -- it's hard to find an SME that doesn't have a personal interest in fostering dependency and collecting a commission.
The easy way to sell the house within 5 days, from the book How to Sell Your Home in 5 Days by Bill Effros.
Spruce up the property for curb appeal and do the steps Effros counsels in the book. Advertise your home at a very low price or best offer. For this area, maybe a 3 bdr, 2 bth, 1230 sq. ft home in Seattle for $280,000 OR BEST OFFER.
Schedule an open house over the weekend and wait for the crowds to arrive. On Sunday night, hold a phone auction. The high bidder gets to buy the house, and, as the law of supply and demand says, the final price will be the fair market value -- well above the offering price, which will appear with the following three words in the classified ad: "or best offer."
The real estate agents report, and the Times types. They're all working on that novel they've been saving up, you know, the one where the intrepid reporter blows the cover off the Seattle Real Estate bubble, you know, FICTION.
(courtesy, Stephen Colbert)
Somebody mentioned that when you see cotradictory articles on the same page, that's when you know the tide has turned. (Like it's a red hot market= hard to sell your home by owner??!!)
And look at these headlines from the April 30th RE section of the Seattle Times (all on page 1):
Front center: "ACT FAST "("We are facing a remake of 2005, it's a quick-action market" quote by Lennox Scott chairman and CEO, John L Scott RE)
Right top: "Appreciate the Fact That Prices Don't Always Rise" (Home forum, a local column)
Bottom Left: "Owning Home Longer Increases Likelihood of Making a Profit" (Nation's Housing, a national column)
So there you have it: Hurry up and get out there to buy an asset that is, at best, going flat, at worst, depreciating.
Yup. Makes a lot of sense to me! think I'll sit back and watch where this is going. Not the best time to "Act Fast!"
Tim and everyone-
Check out this mortgage broker forum discussing ARM's, etc. I got it from the NNJ bubble blog.
http://tinyurl.com/ho4kp
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