Toldeo Health Insurance

Realtors are almost extinct

Traditional realtors are almost dead.

You want to sell your Florida house fast. Who do you call?

For many, many years you made one of two calls. You called a Realtor or you called the local newspaper. The realtor wanted 6% of the sales price and the paper wanted $89 to publish for 3 days.

Now what are people doing?

They are calling an investor or using the internet.

I'll give the traditional realtor another 8 years before they are extinct. Goodbye. In Orlando, there are approximately 9,000 realtors and only 6,000 homes for sale. Do the math- most are starving. Our market is a little skewed because we have a great deal of timeshare (or vacation ownership as the liked to be called now) salespeople.

Right after I bought ibuyhomes.com four years ago, I took the real estate licensing class. It was amazing how absolutely stupid about 50% to 75% of the class was. They could not multiply or divide. They asked inane questions. They were generally not very bright. And yet, these are the same people many thousands of people each year entrust with the largest purchase of their lives.

I saw my teacher at a political function and she said, "I saw you made a 94 on your class test, that is unbelievable." I wanted to tell her I think I could have made a 70 without taking the class, but I didn't.

In the old days, information was only available to realtors or appraiser without a great deal of work. Now everything is at our fingertips.

My friend, Paul McConnon, tells a story about how he was talking to a motivated owner of a house in Texas. As they were talking Paul pulled up the house on Google and asked the owner, "is your house the one with the white roof or the brown house with the red roof next door?" He was sitting in his car in Orlando and looking at a house in Texas through satellite technology.

I make offers to buy houses twice a week without ever seeing the house. This was not as easy before the internet. You had to know every neighborhood in every city.

If you sell your house to an investor, you pick the closing date. You don't have to paint, clean or make repairs.

If you choose the realtor route, you have to clean before they will even list the house in some cases. You have to wait around 3 months on average to sell the home, and at the last minute the buyer can back out because of financing.

More and more people are also selling their homes on ebay, yahoo and other internet sites. Yes, ebay. I have a friend who sold over 150 vacant lots on ebay. If you live in Toledo and are moving to Florida do you need to get in a car and ride around with a realtor all day? No. It is easy now to find the best schools, shopping areas and sports facilities online.

Realtors are almost extinct. Information is king and realtors are no longer hold the information card. Investors and the internet have fundamentally changed how the American public chooses to sell a home fast.

So the next time you want to sell a home within 4 days, don't call a realtor. Check out the I Buy Homes guys in your local newspaper. Or type in "sell my Orlando home fast for cash" into Yahoo or Google and get an offer on your real estate today.

About the author: Todd Hutcheson is an active Florida real estate investor and speaker. He is the founder of http://www.ibuyhomes.com and http://www.ibuyland.com. The father of two boys and a huge Florida Gator Fan. He buys and sell about 2-3 homes in Central Florida per month and lives in Orlando