Have you ever stopped to consider the type of listing agreement your agent is asking you to sign?

Odds are you have not. In fact, odds are nobody has explained the various types of listing agreements to you. That's because when most agents hand a seller a listing agreement to sign, it is an exclusive right-to-sell agreement. But there are other kinds of agreements you could sign, which carry varying degrees of complexity.

A seller in Sacramento signed an Exclusive Right-to-Sell listing agreement with his agent. After a few months on the market, a neighbor who wanted to buy the home emerged. Turned out this neighbor had been engaged for years in on-again-off-again negotiations with the seller. But the neighbor was not excluded from the listing agreement.

Arguments could be made that if the neighbor was serious, the neighbor could have made an offer to purchase the home long before it was listed. But the fact remained, the seller owed a commission to the listing agent when the neighbor finally made an offer during the listing agreement term . . . read more about listing agreements.

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• 10 Reasons to Hire an Agent
  
• How to Choose a Listing Agent
  
• Full-Service Agents

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

Purchase offers gain strength, in part, from your type of financing, which means your type of mortgage can be an advantage in an offer or a disadvantage.

Whether perceptions are true about certain types of loans doesn't come into play. The problem is often perceptions govern the hierachy of loan types in a purchase offer. Some types of mortgage loans are far more desirable to a seller than others. This means an offer presented with certain types of mortgages has an edge in offer negotiations and, if more than one offer is being considered, the type of mortgage could be the reason why one offer would beat out another.

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• How to Get a Condo Loan
  
• Top 3 Loan Approval Mistakes
  
• Is it OK to Make Multiple Purchase Offers?

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

Sometimes, trying to avoid the worst day to buy a home is simply impossible.

Home buyers don't set out, as an ordinary rule, to buy a home on the worst day. Much of the time it's bad luck that lands them in that predicament. If buyers could pick the best day, it would be when nobody else is closing on a home, and that's not the worst day, by any stretch.

For some reason, and maybe it's just my bad timing, I manage to buy homes in the fall, either when it's snowing or raining cats and dogs. This means when I'm moving, I'm typically soaked to the bone by the elements. As I slosh through rain puddles, you might hear me mutter that this is the worst day to buy a home, but that's just me grumbling.

What would be worse is if I never closed at all . . . read more about Worst Day to Buy a Home.

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• Before Buying Your First Home
  
• The Best Day to Buy a Home
  
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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}

It won't go away. Jingle mail is a lingering phenomena in the United States, which is a direct result of the foreclosure crisis.

Some home owners, terrified of pending foreclosure, decide to mail their house keys to the lender and move out. They call it "jingle mail" because the keys make a jingle-bell sound when picking up the key-stuffed envelope. The term has become a euphemism for walking away from your home. I imagine most buyers would tape the keys to a card -- providing they possess a bit of common sense -- so the keys don't really jingle.

Here are a few questions you might want to ask yourself. How do you know that the lender will actually receive the keys or even wants the keys? And why would an owner move out while the home is in foreclosure? Typically, owners can stay in the home, payment free, until the lender evicts them. Eviction happens after the foreclosure is final and could take anywhere from three months to a year, depending on the way foreclosures are handled in your state . . . read more about Jingle Mail.

More Articles by Elizabeth Weintraub, click below:

• How Foreclosures Work
  
• Three Stages of Foreclosure
  
• Ways to Stop Foreclosure

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_{At the time of writing, Elizabeth Weintraub, DRE # 00697006, is a Broker-Associate at Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento, California.}