Selling - Orientation

Expressing your Home

Once you make the decision to have us come by for an orientation, the main focus will be to discover where exactly your home fits in the current marketplace. So when we come over one of the first things you can expect us is that we’ll ask you to show off your home to us. Show us everything you like about it and even express the sentimental values it has to you so that we can get to know you and your home better. We need to get a good idea of what exactly the home has to offer to other potential home owners, which can eventually help us with pricing it correctly in the current market. So you might want to clean up a bit, point out any upgrades or renovations done to the property along with any special points of notice; act as if we are the buyers for your home.

Once we finish the walk through we would sit down at a table and start outlining our services and the listing process to you.

Realtor/Client Relationship

Once we’re at a table we will present papers that outline what exactly our responsibilities as agents are to you and how we form a realtor/client relationship. These responsibilities are actually outlined by the Real Estate and Business Broker’s Act (REBBA) as fiduciary duties and are composed of six duties, which can be remembered by the two words “OLD CAR”:

Obedience - The agent should follow the client’s lawful instructions even against their own reasonable judgement.

Loyalty - The agent must place the client’s interests above all else excluding the law. The agent is only allowed to act for more then one client in the transaction unless they are given permission to do so otherwise in writing. So in the case were the agent would represent both sides for the seller and the buyer the agent must have permission from both sides to do so on paper. In the case of multiple representation the seller and buyer should not disclose their final price so that the agent can pertain to his duties as best as they can.

Disclosure - The agent must disclose any information that is relevant to the transaction so that the client can utilize all of it fairly and make the best decisions.

Confidentiality - An agent must not use any information acquired from a client to cause them harm or interfere in their personal business.

Accounting - The agent must provide complete details of all funds held in trust.

Reasonable Care (Competence) - An agent should have sufficient knowledge and skill to carry out duties. The agent must show care and skill in their work and be able to carry out their duties professionally.

To receive all of these fiduciary duties from an agent a Listing Representation Agreement must be signed. The agreement can be limited to a certain time frame (a week, month or a few months), but it is a requirement when you choose to list your home with an agent through TREB. Once we both sign the agreement all of the duties above, bind us to you and we will be able to serve you most effectively, because you have shown a sign of commitment.

Comparables and Market Trends

After explaining the realtor/client relationship, we will go over comparables for your house. We will pull out the best from our system and we will use them to figure out where your house stands in comparison to them. Any differences can be added to or deducted from the price. For example adjustments will be made for differences in the numbers of rooms, upgrades, basements, lot size, room size, etc.

We will also outline the current market trends to you and explain which way the market has been heading for the past few months and were it will most likely be heading in the near future. With this information you can make calculations as to what differences you expect in current prices. If the average prices of homes have increased since the time one of the comparables have sold then you would increase the estimate price of your home respectively and vice versa if the average prices have decreased.

Closing Costs

The closing costs for a seller consist of commission, lawyer, and mortgage discharge.

The commission to the real estate agents is always paid by the seller in every transaction, unless the buyer would like to pay an additional commission for better service or to show their gratitude after the buying agent’s service has been produced. The reason the seller pays the commission for the buying agent as well as the selling agents is to attract them and their buyers to view their property. You can therefore use the commission as a marketing campaign to attract more buyers.

Lawyer fees on average range around $1000 and some also include title insurance, which covers any issues that may have slipped through the cracks in regards to the title (the papers holding all the information about the property being sold) after closing. The lawyer’s responsibility is to find any possible errors or areas that should be addressed on title that may defer from what the property initially seemed to imply. We include references to different lawyers in our Helpful Tools page.

When you have a mortgage on your home you have to pay a fee to have it discharged. Your lawyer will be the one who will take care of this for you. The fee is usually around $200.