10 Lies Your Agent Tells You

Real estate advice can sound smart right up until it costs you money. In this episode, Tim counts down the 10 biggest lies homeowners hear when selling their house — from harmless-sounding myths that cost a few thousand dollars to the dangerous ones that can cost tens of thousands.

You’ll learn:

• Why “your home is special” is often just a tactic to overprice your listing
• The truth about paying thousands for professional staging
• Why keeping your home showing-ready 24/7 can actually weaken demand
• Which repairs to fix now — and which are a waste of money
• Why “commission is standard” is one of the most expensive myths in real estate
• The incentive problem behind “I’ll fight for every dollar”
• How buyer-agent commission decisions can affect buyer demand and affordability
• Why no one knows exactly what your home is worth — not agents, not Zillow, not neighbors
• The appraisal mistake that can blow up a deal after you go under contract
• The #1 lie: that you can’t sell your home yourself

Bottom line: many sellers lose money because they trust polished advice instead of understanding incentives, pricing, and negotiation. When you know how the game works, you keep more equity and make smarter decisions.

Intro

Outro

Transcript

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Real estate advice can sound a lot like good real estate advice, and you won't find out the difference until the money is already gone. The great agents will just kind of nod along with this video, and the not so great ones will definitely be in the comments getting defensive. Mark my words on this. So let's dig into the top 10 lies that you will hear when selling your home, starting with some that will cost you a few thousand dollars and the whoppers toward the end will cost you tens of thousands. Starting at number 10, this is somebody who's going to tell you that your home is special. You see, bad agents would rather comfort you with a lie than disappoint you with the truth. So they will tell you that your home is special and the comps don't really capture it. And because he's got 50,000 Instagram followers and a friend with a drone, his marketing is going to get you an extra 50 grand on top of what the market tells you you can get. No doubt. And see, that story sounds good. And so you want to believe it, and then you sign with them. But here's what the agents who actually care about your home will tell you instead. Homes sell the same way as coffee mugs do on Amazon. And that's how buyers have been trained to purchase, purely by comparison. If the three-bed, two-bath home down the street with the same pool is priced less than yours, buyers are going to go there first. Unless your home has something obviously special that justifies a premium, you always will become the backup option that buyers consider after the better deal is already under contract. So your home just sits. Meanwhile, you're eating the carrying cost and your listing is picking up a stigma as the days on market climbs, and buyers start wondering what in the heck is wrong with this house? Why won't it sell? Now, when the contract with that agent finally expires, you're going to relist a burned home against fresh inventory, and you're going to have to list at a lower price than you could have gotten on day one just to counteract that stigma. And sure, that Instagram famous agent who just shrugs and blames the market for your house not selling. Yeah, they didn't necessarily earn a commission on that particular sale that didn't happen. But it's important to remember that they still walk away with six months worth of buyer leads, courtesy of the free billboard they planted in your yard. Coming in at number nine, this is where they tell you, hey, you need to pay for my professional stager if you're serious about selling. Now, I am not going to sit here and try to tell you that staging never works because it absolutely can. But a$3,000 stager is almost never the reason why a home sells. What actually moves the needle is decluttering, good lighting, and having a deep clean gun and most importantly, professional listing photography. That's pretty much it. When an agent pushes you really hard on a stager, ask yourself why. Look, preferred vendor relationships exist in every industry and they are not automatically a bad thing. But I have seen instances where the agent is getting a kickback from the stager or owes a favor to someone, and that is when things tend to go sideways, because at that point, you're paying for a relationship that has nothing to do with selling your home. In reality, a pro photographer and a little bit of work ahead of time gets you 90% of the way there. Number eight, when an agent tells you you need to keep your home showing ready 24-7. Look, that's not only unrealistic if you are a human being like I am, it's also a terrible strategy. And here's why a wide open showing schedule tells everybody out there that you are desperate and that nobody else is interested. Don't believe me? All right, fine. Think about the velvet rope draped across the front of a bar. It creates a line because people see that rope and they think, wow, exclusivity. This is interesting. They want in. Now, picture the carbon copy bar right next door, same drinks, even maybe better service with the door propped open and a guy on the sidewalk waving people inside. Please, please come hang out at my bar. Yeah, it's probably a very similar atmosphere, but a completely different feeling because, well, there's just no line. So when selling a product or an experience or a home, factors like scarcity and social proof and competition are going to drive buyers to compete with each other to buy your home. So don't get talked into letting agents book showings whenever they want across a seven-day week. Instead, what you should do is compress every showing into a single one or two hour window, maybe on a Saturday. If you have kids and pets like I do, that means your home only has to be immaculate for a couple hours a week. And better yet, buyers overlap in your driveway. They see each other walking through. And any procrastinator who is thinking about sleeping on this home suddenly starts writing offers that afternoon. At number seven, when they tell you don't fix anything because the buyer is just going to ask for a credit. Well, look, this falls squarely into the comforting you with a lie category because if you show up to the market with a beat up home, yes, buyers are going to ask for a credit for sure. They're right about that, but it's going to be several orders of magnitude higher than what the repair would have cost you to handle in advance. A$200 plumbing fix becomes an$800 credit request at the closing table. Buyers' agents are great at inflating every number. And honestly, that's their job. Their job is to get the best deal possible for their client. Your job, on the other hand, is to put guardrails around that conversation before it ever happens. Now, there is wisdom in not fixing certain things. I will be the first to tell you that. Taste items, like I don't know, that pink bathroom tile or white laminate cabinets, those are best left alone because a contractor is going to cost you more than you will ever get back at an increased sale price. And Murphy's law says that whatever choice you make in design, the buyer is probably going to have picked something else anyway. But anything a handyman can knock out in an afternoon should be addressed before you hit the market. And obviously, any safety or code issue is a non-negotiable. Get those taken care of before the buyer's inspector even sets eyes on the place. A great tool here is to get a pre-listing inspection so that you have your own punch list to work off of. And that way you walk into the market with your best foot forward. But trying to hit prime time with a money pit home and then just hoping the buyer's inspector is gentle is sort of like trusting a goat to guard the gabbage patch. Number six, the commission is standard, it's six percent. There's no arguing here. Really? All right, look, the truth is there is no standard commission, and there never actually has been. Every home sale has different complexities. Look, some are owned free and clear, they're sitting on a pile of equity in a desirable neighborhood, but others, on the other hand, are maybe tangled up in legal battles like probate or being fought over in a contentious divorce. Those are not the same job and they should not carry the same price tag. So instead of fixating on how little or how much you are paying an agent, I want you to look at what you're actually going to net in your pocket bottom line at the end of the closing. Three different agents are going to get you three different offers on the same home. And this is because the skill gap between a great agent and a mediocre one is enormous. The best agents out there are going to be able to command higher commissions, precisely because they still net you more at the closing table, even after taking their big cut. Now, with all that said, you always have the right to negotiate. And it is absolutely worth doing. On a$500,000 home, going from 6% to 4% puts 10 grand back in your pocket for challenging just that one assumption. Now, real quick, before we get into the top five, if you are planning to sell your home in the near future, I offer a one-hour strategy call where we are going to pull up the real specific numbers for your home and map out exactly what it would take to sell it. If you'd like to grab a call with me, the link is in the description. Now, let's keep going. At number five, this is when they tell you I will fight for every dollar because the more you make, the more I make. Okay, so this one is sort of one of those technically true but practically false statements. And I'll explain why when we run the math. On a$10,000 swing in your home sale price, let's say hypothetically your agent is getting 3%. Well, their paycheck changes by about$300. So$10,000 to you could be a life-changing amount of money, but$300 to them might just be an expensive dinner. I guess the question is, do you really expect them to spend weeks going to war with a buyer over a swing of$300 in their pocket? Or do you think that they might simply encourage you to accept the deal so they can finally get paid and move on to the next closing? Now, in my experience, most agents will actually fight for every dollar, but that's just because they're good folks. If you strip the goodness away and you look only at the mathematical incentives, it gets very clear very fast that a lower price offer is a small loss to them, but a deal that never closes because they're holding out for every last penny never closes and then they never get paid. So when push comes to shove, whose money do you think they are really protecting? I guess I'll let you answer that one. Number four, this is if you hear somebody tell you you pay less in commissions with me because I don't force you to pay a buyer's agent a commission. All right, let me show you how this one actually plays out. Imagine a young couple shopping in your neighborhood. Your house is listed at$250,000 with no buyer's agent commission offered. Your neighbor's house, on the other hand, is also listed at$250,000, but they are offering a 3% buyer's commission. Now, which house do you honestly believe the buyer's agent is going to show first? I'm not saying they're going to ignore yours, but which one do you think is going to get the most attention? Now, here's the part that most sellers miss because it gets deeper. To buy your neighbor's house, the buyer needs to come up with$250,000. That's it. To buy your house at the same sticker price, they need$257,500 because that 3% commission has to come from somewhere. And here's the kicker buyer's agent commissions often cannot be rolled into a 30-year mortgage. So that extra$7,500 has to come out of pocket in cash on top of their down payment and closing costs. Now, your home has an identical sticker price as the one next door, but yours is dramatically harder and more expensive to actually buy. And that's the real math. So I'm not telling you to always offer a buyer's commission, and I'm not telling you not to. What I am saying is always look at the deal as a whole before you determine what you're going to offer. Number three, I know exactly what your home is worth. I'm probably going to hurt some feelings with this one, but here goes. No agent knows exactly what your home will sell for. And for that matter, neither do I, and neither does your neighbor, and neither does Zilla. Once again, the only person who decides what your home is worth is the buyer who's writing the check. Everything and anything else before that is an educated guess. Now, don't get me wrong, there are tools out there that every homeowner has access to, like Redfin's sold data, and that will let you build something called a comparative market analysis or a CMA. And that's where you look at what similar homes in your area have sold for recently, and it's a great place to start. But that's all it is, though. It's a start. I've done hundreds of CMAs, and they are only as good as the data that you put into them. I've seen plenty of agents cherry pick comps to pretend that they could sell a home for more than the market would bear just to get the seller excited enough to sign with them. And that's wrong. A real pricing exercise goes way deeper than that and compares actual closed sale prices, not just asking. And it also takes into consideration pending because that's kind of telling you the appetite for what's happening right now. It looks at the absorption rate, which is how fast the inventory is clearing from the market. It looks at market velocity, whether prices are trending up or down. And then it even adjusts for everything that you can only see by actually walking into the home. These are things like condition and layout and whether the previous owner left behind a pet smell that just punches you in the face the second you open the front door. So if your agent hands you a one-page report with three comps and circles the one in the middle with a suggested price, I'm sorry, that is not an analysis. That is a guest dressed up in a manila folder sold to you as science. Do not fall for it. Number two, don't worry about the appraisal. I priced it just right. Okay, first, the appraisal is not a formality. Appraisers are not your friend, but also they're not your enemy either. They work for the bank. And what they do is they make sure that the bank does not lend money on a bad investment. So when an appraiser walks into your home without any context, the safest path for them is to default to the middle of the comp range. And that middle is almost always below your sale price because if your agent did their job and created competition with multiple offers, you went under contract above the market average, not at it. And this is a really big deal I want to call out because and then you're left with really two bad options. One, you could cover the gap out of your pocket, or two, you could watch the deal implode and then try to go back on the market with that stigma of the home that couldn't close. Now, here's how I love to protect against this build what I call a price defense package. It's a folder with the comps that you guys pulled to get your ask in price, the improvement records, the upgrade receipts, and the pre-listing inspection report if you had one done. And when the appraiser arrives, just be friendly and hand them that package. Tell them that you know they're busy and that you thought a few notes on improvements that might not jump out at first might help make their day a little bit easier. Don't argue with them, don't try to tell them what the value is, do not lecture them. Simply offer the package, let them know you're available for any questions, and then just get out of their way. That one move is the reason that I have never had an appraisal gap on any of my sales. So I encourage all sellers to use it. And here we are with the number one biggest lie. It's when an agent will tell you you can't sell your home yourself. It's too complicated. Look, this is the lie that protects the$100 billion revenue stream that the real estate industry generates on commissions every single year. So it's no wonder that they're going to spend billions in marketing and education drives to convince homeowners that they cannot sell their own home. This is the lie that protects the$100 billion revenue stream that the real estate industry generates on commissions every single year. So it's no wonder that they spend billions in marketing every year to convince homeowners that they cannot sell their own home. They'll try to tell you it's too complex or too risky, too legally dangerous, and that only a licensed professional can pull this off. Well, I am here to tell you that that is complete and total nonsense. Now, I'm not trying to tell you that selling a home is the easiest thing ever. It's not. But I am saying it's a lot simpler than it sounds. Now, if that sounds a little confusing, I want you to think about running a marathon. There's nothing easy about running a marathon, but it is rather simple. You put one foot in front of the other for 26.2 miles and you don't stop until you cross the finish line. Selling a home is pricing and paperwork, photos, and showings of every single one of those things any homeowner can learn. The legal heavy lifting is handled by your title company or a real estate attorney at closing. And the professional photos, well, you have access to those very same photographers that professional agents like me hire. You have the exact the entire industry, so this entire industry basically thrives on you believing the lie. Because the moment you realize that you can do this yourself, they lose their cut of your equity. Billions of dollars a year rest on keeping you convinced that you cannot do this. And here's the truth you've lived in this home, you know every square inch of it, you know its history, you care about the outcome far more than any agent ever will. And I believe in you. With a clear system, professional photos, and a great legal team at the closing table, you are more than capable of doing this job yourself. Keeping the equity that you earn and walking away with the money that belongs in your pocket, not theirs. Now, with a clear system, professional photos, and a great legal team in your corner, you are more than capable of doing this job yourself. And that means you get to keep the equity that you earned and you walk away with the money that belongs in your pocket, not theirs. So now that you know the 10 lies, there's one we barely scratch the surface on, and that's a CMA. And this is because when your agent hands you that one page report with those three comps, there's a lot more going on than most sellers realize. And that's why I made this video right here, because it's probably costing you thousands. So I want you to click in there, look into it, and I will see you there.