Thinking About Selling Your Home?

Whether you’ve sold homes in the past or this is your first home sale, you know that it’s probably not going to be a breeze! Selling can be a pretty overwhelming step! Occasionally, the sale of a home happens quickly and with very little preparation. But usually, there are many things that need to happen before you even list it.
Selling your home starts months before you actually list it. You have to fix major issues (or be ready to take a hit on your sale price), spruce the place up, and make sure your curb appeal is on point. Then get that sign in the front yard, ensure it’s marketed correctly, and be ready for people to walk around your most personal spaces trying to decide if they can see themselves there!
What

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In the family tree of real estate, the Brokerage is the top branch. As you move down the tree you find the brokers, the other real estate agents, and the support staff. Finally, the clients they serve are all standing beneath waiting to catch a piece of fruit.

Realtors must hang their license from a branch on a Brokerage’s tree, but the Realtor gets to choose the tree that feels best to them. They can choose a tree and later decide to choose another tree.

A majority of the incredible agents that join Round Table Realty come from other brokerages. Very rarely does a recent graduate of real estate school join us because we typically require a certain amount of experience so that our clients get to work with the best of the best. But when they come

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It's not easy to accurately price your home for sale.

Too high and it won't get offers. Too low and you leave money on the table. Having a Realtor who can expertly price your home for you can often get you far more than you would have if you tried to price and sell it yourself! At Round Table Realty, our goal is to price your home fairly, sell it quickly, and keep the transaction smooth. But the trouble starts when clients don't entirely understand the method of pricing a home, and this usually happens when an agent does not explain the process clearly, step-by-step.

The first step to pricing a home properly is to do a competitive market analysis. Your listing agent should have done this prior to even signing with you. Taking into consideration…

There are currently more than a million Realtors in the United States. That’s the same number of people living in Jacksonville and the beaches! It’s a huge number, and it leaves clients wondering how on Earth to choose one.

Most people know now that they can’t safely complete a transaction without a real estate professional because of the sheer number of tedious, legal hoops there are to jump through. But they don’t have any clue how to audit a Realtor, and so often they end up choosing a friend or family member so that they will “get the commission” (which might be the worst thing they could do!).

How does Round Table Realty choose agents?

Here at Round Table Realty, we’re obviously very picky. Our method for choosing our own agents always

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Buying or selling a home is one of the longest, most detailed transaction processes anyone will experience in a lifetime. And yet, one of the most common questions people ask is, “Do I really need a real estate agent?” 

Why you need a real estate agent

1. You can’t automate real estate.

   Many grocery stores have self-serve check-out lines. Most gas stations have credit card machines built into the pumps. Some restaurants even allow you to punch your own order into the computer. But a real estate transaction is far more complicated than buying milk and bread. Automating the process of buying and selling property leaves far too much room for mistakes like missing legal deadlines or failing to obtain the appropriate inspections, to name just

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Keith and Howard knew when they started Round Table Realty that they would never give their agents volume based awards. This decision was born directly from their own experiences. “We watched brokerages and companies awarding the same agents every month, and it was usually because they had the most experience, wanted to work that much, or landed a great community. Those of us who were green, or those who only worked part-time, just grew resentful and irritated with seeing those same names again and again,” Howard said.     

"Selling the most doesn’t mean you’re the best to us. At least not in the way we want to be the best." The way Keith and Howard set out to be the best was to earn a reputation of being a heart-first, relationship-based brokerage.

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Hundreds of thousands of people go to Zillow and similar websites every day to search for houses. Because Zillow gets all its information on homes for sale directly from the MLS (the same site used by Realtors), there’s no reason to think you need a Realtor to search for a home. Right?!

Partially right. 

"When Zillow rolled out the feature back in 2006, it had an error rate of 14%. When NerdWallet last reviewed Zestimates in 2015, they had a national median error rate of 8%
Recently, Zillow says the margin of error is 4.3% nationwide. That means half of Zestimates were within 4.3% of the final selling price, and half were off by more than 4.3%."
-NerdWallet

True, 4.3% doesn't seem like a lot. For a $180,000 house, the wrong values could be

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 You’re ready to buy a new home, sell your old one, or both. You know a Realtor. You think you know your way around a Real Estate Transaction. It’s go-time!!!

But like Mark Carroll from Round Table Realty said, “Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know.”

There isn’t a Realtor on Earth who hasn’t had an “oops” during a transaction. Every single sale is different in Real Estate and you can’t expect a human being to be perfect. But if you can avoid some of the more common pitfalls by knowing when it might be time to find another Realtor, you could save yourself a lot of headache.

It might be time to fire your Realtor if:

1. ...communication is lacking. If your phone calls and texts aren’t returned within the hour, it’s time to say

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A commercial for a popular iBuyer is making its rounds on television and radio.

“I was able to sell my home in less than 30 days with the help of <Company's Name>…”

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Do a little bit of digging and you will discover that homeowners lose untold amounts of equity in their homes thanks to these companies. 

What is an iBuyer?

An investing company offers to purchase your home, sight unseen, for cash. Instead of cleaning your home, fixing up the little issues like cleaning windows and replacing light bulbs, staging the home, and rearranging your schedule around showings and open houses, you simply list your home for sale and then watch the iBuyer offer roll in. No pesky negotiating. No long-term

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Traditionally speaking, a Real Estate team shares everything. That means two agents (or more) share the work and the profits of all transactions right down the middle. Often times one is in charge of buyers and the other sellers. The team set-up inspires many agents to do better and be better, but it can also create big-time resentment (if one perceives the other is doing less work or making more money). When Keith and Howard started Round Table Realty in 2010, they weren’t too keen on hiring Realtor teams.

“I know we’re a team, but we didn’t do things like the other teams we saw in the business. We didn’t keep score with each other,” Keith said. “We just decided that we would help each other be better because we wanted to do Real Estate that

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