Real Estate Mistakes :
Neil Jenman

Excellent book that I have referred to many others before. And not only me those whom I referred it to liked this as well. The book is fairly anti real estate agents and well as it should be, Real estate agents and lawyers are very few of those universally hated professions where mistrust and acrimony runs deep till the bone. And the author takes a good stab at both.

He describes the malpractices used by real estate agents in fairly good detail and suggests steps and ways for house sellers and buyers to avoid these mistakes that agents do. He has compiled an amazing list of statistics in which he convincingly argues his case against the agents, and of course the agents hate his book. For example one of the statistic he gives is that more than 80% of the people are so stressed out and disappointed by selling a house through their agents that they say they would never use the same agent again to sell a house.

For example according to the book, one of the biggest malpractices that agents use is selling houses by Auctions! Here again contrary to popular belief he argues that auctions are a harrowing experience for the buyer and seller alike. The only person who gains in these is the Agent. Which if you think of it is reasonably true. Also have a read through his very informative website and see a snippet of what he has to say.

A typical scenario described in the book goes like this, lets say you put up your house for sale and there are 2 buyers, Your agent's job should be to get you the maximum price that the buyers are willing to pay, but this is not actually what happens at the auctions. Lets say you decide to go for an auction and on auction day in the final moments you have 2 possible serious buyers who are bidding against each other.

Now consider this for a moment, every buyer when he has inspected the house has a certain set price in mind that is the maximum he might be willing to pay for the house. Lets say for the sake of the argument that the the two buyers have their maximum price 50,000 $ apart, meaning for your house the Buyer 1 is willing to pay 300,000 whereas buyer 2 is willing to pay 350,000.

This is what will happen on the Auction day, when the Bid reaches 300,000 , Buyer 1 will stop bidding and Buyer 2 will bid for 301,000 $ and buy the house. So that is effectively a waste of 49,000 $ for the seller. This he says is the biggest problem with the auctions. Now instead of an Auction , if the agent had negotiated individually and got their maximum buyer's price without revealing what other parties are willing to offer. The seller would not have lost such a big sum. Have a read in the author's own words here.

There is a caveat in this that the author comfortably ignores that at many times in Auctions , the heat of the competition encourages people to bid against each other and over shoot their budgets, and they end up paying more than what they would if they had thought with cool heads in the comforts of a negotiating table or on telephone.

The book is also gives some good tips on selection of good agents, tips on how not to advertise your house and stuff like that. He tells you the questions a buyer should ask, some basic checks to be performed, why not to do open inspections and stuff like that. In all I would say its a very good book and a must read for people planning to buy / sell their home. The book is definitely worth its ~ 20 $ price and if applied correctly can end up saving hundreds of dollars. If nothing else I am wiser for having read it , and perhaps better prepared for when I have to buy a house.

This is what a friend (who is about to buy a house) had to say after I had recommended this book " I just started reading it this morning and am already impressed. Its the sort of book I need to read at this point. Cheers for the recommendation."
You can perhaps guess how good the book is if some one is impressed in less than 1 or 2 hours.