Selling a House Without an Agent

Greg Healy

What about marketing? Clearly, an agent would help bring more exposure to a home.
Again, that comes back to the two points that we have raised already. The Internet allows you to get in front of people without an agent. Our site has nearly 2 million visitors on a monthly basis looking for homes, so that makes it easy to bypass an agent. In 1997, just 2 percent of buyers used the Internet to search for a home. Right now, it's more than 84 percent. Secondly, when it comes to marketing, agents have fliers. We offer fliers. Consumers can make their own fliers. Signs? We offer signs, or someone can buy one in the store. Agents leverage the multiple listing service (MLS) as their primary "marketing tool," and anybody can access that if they want to pay for it.

It sounds to me that you're saying a real estate agent's job is not all that difficult.
That's true, and remember that a real estate agent license takes under two weeks to get. So after those two weeks, that person can be in charge of the selling or buying of a person's home, which is one of the largest financial assets in a person's life.

Are there times when the interests of the agent and the seller are skewed?
Agents are willing to drop the price of the seller's home more and faster than perhaps a seller may want. That's where representing their interests may break apart. And second, they don't want to wait. They want to get the commission. Timing and interest: That's where you might have conflicts. The only other point I would put out there is that the person who owns the home is going to know the home the best. We hear it from customers all the time, "I stopped using an agent because they called me 30 times to ask me questions about my house." You know, "When was the last time you cut the grass?" The sellers are obviously going to be able to answer those questions and save time and hopefully sell your home quicker.

So what value do real estate agents bring to this process?
There was an independent study done last summer by two professors from Northwestern University. They compared the prices of homes sold "for sale by owner" versus homes sold by agents. And their two conclusions were, one, FSBO sellers can get the same price, if not slightly more, when they sell their homes. Their second conclusion is that you are essentially paying these agents for the convenience of having someone do the work for you. So for that 6 percent commission, they'll do the work—bring the real estate attorney, do the showings, field calls for you, be at your house if someone wants to see it.

But these are all services that homeowners could do for themselves?
Absolutely.