I love those home magazines. Not magazines, really. Those “home showcase” catalogue like things you can pick up for free, and flip through, neighborhood by neighborhood, to see what’s for sale, what recently sold, and which real estate agents specialize in what level. (Talk about branding! These agents know how to showcase what it is that they bullseye, because they wouldn’t want to be known as folks who sell EVERYTHING. They’re specialists.) Next to office supply catalogues, those home magazines are the best kind of porn, for me! 🙂

Well, one of the things I thought about, as I flipped through the latest edition of “Homes & Land of Malibu,” was the difference between these elaborately showcased homes sold by high-end real estate agents and those “for owner” homes, just as beautiful, and sometimes, just as elaborately showcased.

When you’re an actor without an agent, you’re putting up your house “for sale by owner.” But if you’re smart, you’re watching dozens of hours of DIY shows on HGTV that teach you about proper pricing, landscaping, staging, lighting, and repairs that add value vs. those that can wait ’til closing, so that you can showcase your “by owner” sale to potential buyers with confidence.

Sure, it’d be great to have a high-end agent taking care of the burdens of pricing, landscaping, staging, lighting, repairs, pulling in traffic for the open house, handling all conversations about potential offers, warding off looky-loos who have no intention of buying, and negotiating with the serious buyers, but if you don’t have that, you can still make decisions that make your property hotter among the right buyers.

Without a doubt, in this analogy, you understand how a real estate agent earns a commission when you think about all the value they bring to the sale. But somehow, when I talk with actors who are drumming up their own work while repped, they will turn to the whole, “I got that gig myself. I don’t want to pay commission on that one.”

Wow.

If you ever find yourself in that scenario (first of all, YAY YOU for having rep *and* for hustling and getting yourself work. Awesome), I want you to think about all the work the real estate agent puts into the house that ends up being sold to someone who just happened to drive by and pop in. Just because the buyer didn’t come through the caravan the real estate agent arranged doesn’t mean he wasn’t influenced by that agent’s staging or lighting or pricing — or that the deal won’t end up getting closed in its best possible state by the agent’s involvement.

And that’s why commission is paid.

Unless you’re in a true “for sale by owner” situation, where you HAVE no agent involved, at all, you must look at the advantages the agent is providing, just by being on the team. And if you ARE in a “by owner” situation, watching all the HGTV shows is just like reading these columns, listening to these podcasts, running yourself through as much DIY action as you can, so that you can showcase yourself as the prime bit of property you truly are.

And then field all those delicious offers. Yay!

Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!

Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001648.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.