Two Birds, One Stone

I’ve finally sold my condo! In a down market, less than a month before Christmas, and without a real estate agent. What are my secrets to success? I’ve blogged about selling my condo once before, and most everyone who know me knows the crazy story of my building catching on fire the day I moved all my stuff out. Bad luck and crazy good luck all in one neat little water damaged package. Since I’ve just finished everything and my condo is now sold and money is in the bank (granted I took a bit of a hit since the last time I sold the thing, but all-in-all I’m still happy). So now I can reflect on the process with out worry that I will jinx it and the building will catch fire again. I didn’t like it, but I had the unique opportunity of selling my condo twice! I’ve learned a great deal about the process and I can tell you that I will almost certainly never use a real estate agent again. I’ve said this before, but as far as I’m concerned for a person like myself a realtor ads no value other than the MLS listing. And this is not worth the $15,000-$20,000 in commissions I would have had to pay. Local classifieds, Kijiji, frequent open houses, and proper staging helped me sell my condo is less than 2 months in a down market. I now believe that the real estate profession will begin dying and is in serious need of a change now that their monopoly over MLS has ended. You can now get your property listed on MLS for flat rates through places like PropertyGuys.com and SnapListings.ca. I’m seeing more and more PropertyGuys lawn signs these days and with their new MLS listing feature, I expect to see their numbers start to take off. Agents need to move to a flat rate structure and start adding value to differentiate themselves somehow. How can they do this? Get out of those national companies and start up a smaller company, get some value add services (decorators/stagers, photographers), figure out how to automate as much as you can, understand online metrics, and ultimately evolve quickly. My apologies to any real estate agents who take offence, but I think your industry is a bit like the newspaper industry now. Evolve or die.