Home Selling – Fsbo – Are 6% Realtor Commissions Reasonable Given the Services They Provide Sellers?

People who do a FSBO home sale almost always do it to save money. And it seems to make sense to save a 6% commission, which is $30,000 on a $500,000 home.

Actually it only makes sense to save this commission expense if you can do better without hiring a Realtor. You must have a good understanding of the home sale process to decide what Realtor services you need or don’t need.

You also need to assess where hiring a specialist for certain home sale tasks (like staging, legal advice or marketing) my allow you to get better service at a lower price.

The challenge that I have in assessing this question is determining exactly what the Realtor will do for you. By this I mean, they may offer to serve as the quarterback to make sure all other tasks are completed by professionals who you pay in addition to the Realtor commission you pay.

When it comes to marketing, I find it hard to figure out what a Realtor will do for my home versus what they are doing to market and advertise their own services. For example, how prominent is your home in their newspaper or magazine ads? Are those ads to sell your homes or to get more listings for the realty company?

The same goes for the websites they have. They tell you that your home has a website, but all it is is a page in the realty company’s website. It doesn’t get any special attention and will not get any of the all-important free search engine traffic from Google.

In fact, almost every Realtor website puts in lots of adds, banners, and links on the same page that your home is listed. Sometimes your home information is completely overwhelmed by all of the other things that clutter the page. This is no way to sell a home.

These are the things you must consider when deciding if paying a Realtor commission is worthwhile or not.

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Leo Vidal is an internet marketing real estate expert, the President of For Sale Properties Online, LLC, and a former Realtor who assists buyers and sellers of real estate using the latest advanced internet marketing methods to bring a steady stream of interested prospects to visit the customized and optimized websites he creates for his clients.