Ever wondered what the agents know about a home that could potentially lead to a cheaper price? What about the home sellers current situation? These factors can contribute to the success of your home buying experience.
Agents Exploited- Incompetent agents are so obvious to spot, they are eager to give away personal details about the home owners and their situation. You may be thinking, so what? Well you can use this to your advantage and get yourself a cheaper price.
Ask your agent, “why are the home owners selling” a great agent should say something along the lines of “personal reasons but they would like to sell as soon as they can” This response gives no immediate answers to your questions and gives no personal details away about the home owner. A bad agent would say something along the lines of “They are in debt and need to sell to pay off their bills.” believe it or not agents do give away this information, and you can take this to your advantage. if they want to sell to get rid of their debt then they are very eager to sell. You do not need to offer asking price, in-fact most home owners who sell for paying off debt will accept offers around $50,000 less than what they initially ask for, because they NEED to sell. As much as this seems like your taking advantage of someone, your not. The agent is the one who took advantage of their client and therefore decreased their selling price and maximized your savings.
Try buying houses at auctions. You all know how bidding works, it takes two to start a bidding war and it only lasts as long as the other person is in with the funds to afford the house. If you happen to be the only one interested and it happens to just reach the reserve price (which always tends to be $80-150,000 less than what the owner wants) then you will "win" the house at a much lower price than what you expected. Don't listen to the agent when he tells you what rice the bidding will start at or what it will sell for. They lie. They will tell you a cheaper version of the price to get you into bidding, and we all know how we can act on impulse-and bid over our reserve in the heat of the moment. As a rule agents will use "dummy bidders" (people employed by the real estate agencies to pretend to be bidders to rise the price) until the reserve is met, this means when you start bidding, which should be as soon as there looks to be no more interest, you can easily take the bidding down.
Follow these few steps to save yourself more money than you could have ever anticipated. And always remember, the agent wants to sell-no matter how much less than the asking price, because the agent gets payed as soon as the house is sold.
