When it comes time to sell your Little Rock, Arkansas house and move into your Puerto Vallarta, Mexico condo rentals, you'll probably want to hire a real estate agent to help your home sell faster. Your realtor will want you to sign a listing agreement, which is a sort of contract between you and the agent. Before you sign it, remember the cardinal rule of contracts: always read the fine print!
It's important to remember that the fine print is not always literal. The tricky sections of your contract aren't necessarily going to be concentrated at the bottom in tiny little type. People have long since learned to recognize this as a dodgy tactic and have grown to distrust contracts with a lot of asterisks and footnotes. Instead, Etobicoke real estate agents will tend to cloak the parts of the contract that are unfavorable to you in impenetrable legal language, so that the barrier is your understanding, not your eyesight.
One way to make sure that nothing slips by you is to study the law. This doesn't necessarily mean going to law school to become a lawyer. You wouldn't go to all that trouble just to hire a Leaside real estate agent. However auditing a course in contracts, taking a business/community course in contracts, and even reading a few articles on contract law or legalese on Wikipedia can all assist you in your understanding.
Of course, most of us don't have that kind of time. But that doesn't mean we should just sign a contract regarding the sale of our Toronto condos without understanding what's in it. It just means we have to look for a little help. If you see anything in your contract that you don't understand, ask your realtor about it. If she refuses to explain, gives a purposefully convoluted explanation that you don't understand, or gives an off-topic answer, these are indications that the agent may not be trustworthy.
Some things that a Mississauga real estate agent or a realtor here in Little Rock might put into the fine print include: an agreement that you can't remove your house from the market until the period of the contract is up without paying commission, and an agreement that you can't switch brokers unless you want to end up paying two commissions. You could also be forced by fine print clauses to pay commission if you reject an offer at or over the selling price, even though you didn't get the money from the house.
|