Expert: Karyn Foley - 9/9/2008

Question
http://raleighrealestatesite.com/pp_03.asp           Hi,how are you? The above is a link to a Real Estate Company in Wake County NC also known as www.waketradeup.com         They promise to market your home and then if it does not sell they also offer to buy it from you at a so called acceptable price to you. I was wondering if this is a common business practice and something to be trusted? Do you know what kind of terms/fees they might have? Thanks in advance!     Sincerely,Annette Libby.

Answer
Dear Annette:  There are a lot of companies everywhere that make this claim and do buy up homes.  However, not at the price you would want.  Keep in mind that once they purchase your home, they need to maintain it, keep up any mortgage payments they may have taken out to buy the home, pay gardening and pool services until sold, all maintenance, carrying costs, and more and more.  Just what you are doing now to keep up your home.  Then they must also take into account that the home may not sell fast, and to make it sell fast they have to offer it at a bargain price.  Therefore, you can see that in order for that company to make money they need to buy your home on the cheap.  Terms and so forth are up to each individual company.  You would be far better off just getting a reliable and reasonable real estate broker to do the marketing (it does cost money to do ads on a regular, sustaining basis) and get you through the process.  If things look too good to be true, they always are too good to be true:  especially in the real estate world.  If this type of service proved beneificial to anyone other than that company itself, your whole community would have been using them - and they probably aren't.  Karyn