Selling Tip #6: Signing the Authority to Act

This week we’re talking about signing the authority for your agent to act on your behalf – your real estate agent agreement.

Let’s quickly recap. You have:

• Established who your agent’s going to be
• Discussed your fee for service (the percentage figure that comes out of the proceeds of the sale)
• Talked about how your home is going to be marketed (how much is going to be spent on the internet, signboard and newspaper etc)
• Discussed the sale price (last week’s video).

Now that is firmly established, you will need to sign a form. It’s called an ‘Authority to Act’ form and gives your agent permission to begin marketing your home once filled out by the agent and signed by yourself and them. Don’t worry too much about the details of this form for now; it’s on the internet and available at our office.

Among others, the Authority to Act form answers these questions:

• Who is the agent?
• Who are you?
• What is the service fee/marketing cost?

Quite literally then, once signed by both parties, the agent and yourself both keep a copy and you get to keep a copy for the purpose of records. That way, everything is transparent and we’re literally on the same page.

Once the form has been signed and given to the agent, he or she starts working on the following:

• Marketing
• Booking the photographer
• Ordering the Section 32 (the legal documents required for the sale of your home)
• Start preparing the ad copy
• Start looking at when we’re going to promote it
• Get the sign board company to put the sign board up.

There is no point in doing these things until the agent knows you’re going to go ahead with them, so you will need to sign this form.

As a side note, there is a company out there that says, ‘Don’t sign anything.’ While I understand that, the phrase implies that you don’t sign anything until you’ve spoken to them. By all means go and speak to them and have a look at how they operate. However, at the end of the day if you want to sell your home, you will need to sign something because it’s a legally working document that gives the agent permission to act on your behalf.

We hope that puts both of us on the same page. If you have any questions about this topic or want to take a look at the form, just give us a call or send us an email and we’ll give you a scanned copy for you to peruse. That’s it for now. I’ll talk to you again next time!