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.

Agents, as you know, work on a commission per sale or per listing base, so for this reason you must always be aware that they may have their own interests in play here.
Listings are when they successfully persuade someone to give them a property to sell. This is great for the agent as it means more people will come into their store to hopefully either buy the property or list another property with them. Listings are excuses for real estate companies to promote their own company.

There are a few things you should know when deciding on what real estate agent should sell your home.

Never ever pay for advertising costs. Most agents will make you sign a contract before anything happens, and on that contract will be costs associated with marketing, signboards, adverts, you name it! A commission is what you pay to fund their costs and also their effort and time in finding you a buyer (and hopefully for their great level of care) so make sure you don't pay "extras" for any services they offer you. Great real estate agents will not charge anything upfront and you may need to pay a small fee besides the commission only AFTER the property has sold at the price you wanted.

Don't let them over price your home to get you interested. If they value your home way above what you expected-don't be fooled! Get your own evaluation done so you can tell the agents what your house is valued at and what you want it to be listed at. The reason for this is simple; they will quote you a high price at the start and make you interested in them, so you will list with their company. Then when your house isn't selling they will drop the price right down and claim the market values changed. If you have a stable price the whole way through (a price that is reasonable) your house will sell and it won't be left sitting on the market for months.

Houses on the market for months at a time attract bad reputations, the reason is people think there's something wrong with the house, they wonder why the price is dropping and no one is buying, avoid this at all costs, even if it means taking your house of the market for a few months.
Don't be fooled by auctions! If you have ever used eBay to sell odd things around the house you will know all about bidding. It takes 2 people interested in something to make the price rise, so, if only one person is interested then naturally the price will be low when the item is sold.

This goes for your home as well. Someone may be interested in your home so much they are prepared to pay say $600,000 for it, the other person interested may only be prepared to pay $450,000. So when the bidding reaches one persons maximum the bidding will end and the house will be sold. That means you could have gotten another $150,000 for your house had you just sold it without an auction. Keep these things in mind when dealing with agents, don't pay anything up front, don't sign contracts until you know everything and don't be persuaded into auctions because the agent wants a quick sale-and more commission for him.