What Real Estate Agents Know (That You Don't)

(MoneyWatch)  Chances are you clicked "Ask the Agent" because you're in the real estate market (or plan to be soon) and you want information from someone in the trenches. Or you hate real estate brokers and this is your thinly disguised way to vent a little aggression before getting on with your day.

Either way, I'm here to help.

While I am a member of the still one-million-strong National Association of Realtors (can you keep the hissing down, please?), I'm also an experienced journalist and have written on real estate, personal finance and business for Fortune, Money, and The New York Times. I founded the real estate section of The New York Post, back when real estate gave people the highs of fantasy football, not the lows of following the New York Mets.

But having lived through a couple of business cycles (I'm 42, so I remember stagflation and gas lines as well as the horrific real estate crash in the early '90s), I'm sure we'll all be fine in the end.

In this column, I will answer your questions about how to buy, sell or finance a home, so please email me your questions. I'll try to get to as many of your questions as possible -- and if something really wacky crosses the radar, I will try to ask the questions a sane person would ask, were there one here.

Many, many of your questions have answers in my book, "Diary of a Real Estate Rookie," a memoir of my failed attempt at flipping homes, complete with real estate tips. Other than telling you it got good reviews from everyone from AOL to Newsweek, and that it's only ten bucks on Amazon, this is the last plug you'll read for it here.

Many more questions have answers in the hive mind of the crowd, so feel free to add your own answer or commentary in the TalkBack section at the end of every post. As long as it's not profane, sexist, or anti- my favorite soft drink, Fresca [disclosure, I own 200 shares of Coca-Cola stock, but it's just because I really, really do like Fresca], we tolerate lots of points of view here.