Your Money: September

Community Comments

Sellers: Choose the Sales Path Right For You

By Patricia Kutza

According to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the value of California property appreciated at close to 2 percent per month in 2004. That’s a whopping annual average gain of 25.4 percent. No wonder some property owners, when faced with having to fork over a standard 6 percent sales commission to a broker, opt to handle the sale themselves.
    However, navigating through the thicket of regulations and disclosures, as well as a mountain of documentation, is not the only daunting task; failing to dot the i’s and cross the t’s also can have dire legal consequences. 
    Fortunately sellers have a variety of options for managing the sales process, as shown in the chart below.

Choosing the Right Path
Given these options, how does a seller decide which approach is best? The menu-driven brokerages point out that sellers, rather than agents, are in the best position to show their property, typically their homes: They are intimately knowledgeable about all the benefits that a buyer might appreciate and savvy enough to downplay any disadvantages. Detractors say that many sellers have neither the time nor the patience to show their homes themselves. 
Continued...

• Share
  • Digg This
  • del.icio.us
  • Newsvine
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Furl It
  • !Y My Web
  • Google
• Email
• Print

Recommend This

Community Comments