For Sale By Owner?

[JaneDoe]

Did any of you ever sell your home without using a realtor? If you did, please offer any words of wisdom. We could use it. We're going to try and sell our home by owner, and if we're not successful after a while we'll hire a realtor.

Please offer your thougts. Thanks.

I worked at a title company doing closings for about seven years, and yes it can be done! I would highly suggest you watch A&E's "Sell this House". It is quite informative about how little changes (ie: decluttering) can make a huge difference.

I would suggest putting up signs in the hospital/med school because many people are able to sell that way.

Best of luck to you! We may be in the same boat soon ourselves![/u]

[houseelf]

I'm fairly sure this question is in the archives.

I think that we will do this on our own through this company to have access to the MLS, some boilerplate legal forms, and resources available should we need them. It is kind of a halfway point between FSBO & using an agent:

http://www.sellershomenetwork.com/

Kelly

[Cumberland]

We just sold our home FSBO in October. While the guy we sold it to was a major putz, it ended up closing to the satisfaction of both parties. My DH and the buyer had to have several man to man talks on awkward stuff, like us coming down on the price after they found some extensive wood rot. I would definitely do it again, as we saved the 7% realtor fee which equated to a fair bit of dough.

Here was what we did:

As soon as we wanted to put it on the market, I completely dejunked the entire house- emptied closets of almost everything. DD got a few toys and a week's worth of clothes. Half of DH and I's clothes and shoes went in the attic as well. I did a market analysis on my own using http://www.moveup.com- mine turned out to be better than the two realtors that did one without my permission- they would have had us listing the house for way less than it sold for.
I took down alot of pictures of us. I cleaned from top to bottom. We pressured washed the outside of the house. We did touch up painting and minor repairs. I bought cheap but cute TJ Maxx matching towels and candles for the bathrooom and threatened anyone who actually tried to use them with severe punishment. We did not put an ad in the paper bc we read that it is too expensive for the few calls you get. We did put it in the cheap weekly advertiser. We put FSBO signs on the major streets plus one in front of our house with flyers in a box (which was mostly for all the nosey neighbors).

The biggest thing that brought us the buyers was having an open house. I had it on a day one of the other houses in the hood was having one as well, so people would already be coming for that. We had the house spick and span, put open house signs up with balloons, had a wine and cheese tray, major potpurri and soft music playing. Two days later we had a contract and three days later a backup offer-both of came to the open house by way of the other open house.

I got the contract from a realtor friend. DH and the buyer sat down over a beer and haggled out a sales price and voila, the house was sold!

Of course I am leaving out the horrible agony of waiting and worrying about it closing, the closing of our new house put off for a month and us being left homeless, the buyer calling my DH condescending and conceited after he accused him of lying to cover up the wood rot and the stress of trying to keep a house with a toddler and resident spouse spotlessly clean. Oh and one other thing, we had 5 calls per day minimum from realtors trying to list the house. They will lie like dogs to try to get in the door and do a hard sell. I would always tell them they were welcome to bring a buyer ( at 2.5%) but we were not interested in listing the house period. I also told them we had a realtor we were going to use in x amt of time which wasnt true. They usually knew our name and all our info when they called bc they looked us up on the tax records.

hope this helps if you actually go this far!!

I would highly suggest you watch A&E's "Sell this House". It is quite informative about how little changes (ie: decluttering) can make a huge difference.

No, no, no! Watch HGTV's "Design to Sell" -- my cousin is the supervising producer of it!

[JaneDoe]

Wow- what great advice! Thanks so much. I think for us the biggest task will be to declutter the house - ginormous project for us.

I will print this thread out and use it as sort of check list!